NYT Magazine’s Ethicist columnist examines what you owe the person living with you.
Illustration by Tomi Um
I’d been living in my apartment for a year when my current roommate moved in. We didn’t know each other beforehand, but she turned out to be a nice person with a similar lifestyle to mine. She’s a good roommate, and I have no complaints. But I just found out that one of my best friends is moving to my city in a few months (around when the lease expires), and she and I would like to live together in this apartment. The problem is that I don’t think my current roommate has any desire to leave.
In many ways, this apartment is mine. I was here first, the apartment is stocked and furnished with things I bought and my name is the only one on the lease. My roommate wanted to sign a lease, but because my landlord already knew me, he preferred to keep our current arrangement. We ended up just signing a sublease agreement between us. Of course, none of that is my roommate’s fault; after living in the space for a year, she must feel a certain claim to it. Is it wrong of me to tell her she needs to leave at the end of our lease? And if not, how do I broach that conversation? Name Withheld
Local statutes will determine your roommate’s legal rights
— so let’s leave that to the lawyers. But the ordinances of morality have a wider bailiwick. So does your roommate have a moral claim to stay on?
As you say, you were there first; you selected her as a roommate and offered her a place; you have a relationship with the landlord. To speak formally, you’re the primary, or “master,” tenant; she is the subtenant. Your sublease agreement comes with a fixed term, an expiration date. This is morally, not just legally, significant, because it sets reasonable expectations, with mutual obligations. And it isn’t as if you’re proposing to break the sublease early.
“You can regret certain consequences of a decision you’ve made without regretting the decision.
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Suppose that you, as the primary tenant, were to marry or have a child. Nobody would think you owed more than fair notice to a roommate who had been around for a year. Simply having held a fixed-term sublease doesn’t create a substantial moral expectation for renewal. If you had both been there for many years, a presumption might develop that both of you had some kind of claim on the place. But she has not been there long, and you have a reason (a bestie, not a baby, but still) for asking her to leave. When it came to formalizing your relationship, you did so in a way that permits you to ask her to move on: She has a sublease that she can’t unilaterally renew.
Given that she has been a good roommate, you owe her as much notice as you can manage, giving her ample time to find a new place. You also owe her courtesy in explaining the situation. You’ll be better placed than I am to decide how to broach the conversation; it depends on the relationship you have and what sort of person she is. But let me mention a general point: You can regret certain consequences of a decision you’ve made without regretting the decision (“I’m truly sorry I missed your wedding, but my wife went into labor”). In this case, you can sincerely express regret — you feel bad about inconveniencing her — without saying or thinking you are at fault. You’re not wronging her; you are acting without malice and for an intelligible reason.
