For Emily Savage, living with strangers after college turned out to be more rewarding than sharing a home with established friends, and nearly two years into the arrangement, she has no plans to change course.
Savage graduated in 2023 and returned to Northern California, where she had grown up. After six months living with her parents in the Bay Area suburbs, she accepted a job in San Francisco and needed to move closer to the city. The problem was simple but pressing: she did not know a single person there. Friends from her earlier years had scattered across the country, and attempts to connect with distant friends-of-friends never came to anything, with preferences never aligning.
Rather than live alone, Savage turned to Facebook groups dedicated to roommate-matching in San Francisco. After hours of scrolling, vetting candidates through Instagram and FaceTime calls, she settled on three women, all strangers, to share a lease with.
A New City, Found Through Living with Strangers After College
What made the arrangement work from the start, Savage writes, was a shared condition: all three of her roommates had also moved to San Francisco from out of state and knew nobody there. That mutual unfamiliarity created a collective motivation to get out, explore, and say yes. The early weekends involved bar-hopping around their neighbourhood, an experience she describes as feeling like a first year of university all over again, except the campus was an entire city.
The bonds formed quickly. The four women attended a running club together, bought tickets to the Outside Lands music festival on impulse, and, within just a month of moving in, all three of Savage’s roommates showed up to cheer her through the San Francisco Marathon, her first-ever half-marathon. These were not the kinds of gestures she had expected from people she barely knew.
Savage is clear that her motivation for wanting roommates at all was partly social. As someone who describes herself as a natural homebody, she wanted people around her who would push her outside her comfort zone. She also acknowledges the practical dimension: splitting bills helped. But the social payoff turned out to be the larger part of the story.
The Boundary Problem That Living with Friends Creates
The contrast with previous experiences of living with strangers after college, or rather of living with friends, is where Savage’s account becomes most considered. When she had shared a home with people she already knew well, unspoken tensions accumulated. Chores went unfinished. Some friends left the kitchen and living room in a mess for days at a time, and Savage never felt able to raise it directly for fear of being seen as the ‘nitpicky one’ or of damaging a long-standing friendship.
That dynamic, she argues, dissolves when the relationship starts as a purely practical one. ‘I always feel like I can be upfront and ask them to pitch in,’ she writes of her current setup, whether the issue is cleaning, locking the door, or taking out the rubbish. The roommate-first relationship carries no history to protect and therefore no social debt to manage around.
Savage is careful not to overstate the case. She acknowledges the initial awkwardness of getting to know strangers and the real risk of incompatible living styles. She credits the time she spent vetting potential roommates via video calls and messages before signing any lease with reducing both. She also notes that the search process itself yielded something unexpected: she remains in contact with several people she met through those Facebook groups, even those she never ended up living with.
The caveat she offers is genuine: she knows she got lucky. Not every combination of strangers produces the dynamic she describes, and she does not pretend otherwise. But her conclusion is firm enough that she states, should she ever relocate to another city, she would return immediately to scrolling through roommate groups rather than seeking out friends to live with.
The full account was published by Business Insider, where Savage describes the household as having no plans to move any time soon.