The good life of the accidental single

When you're little, you have a sibling, and they sleep in your room. And it's cute. You get along really well. You play with the plastic cows in the Day-Glo red barn. You pour Juicy Juice on your sibling's copy of "The Phantom Tollbooth."

It's great.

Then you get older, and siblings aren't nearly as fun because they still share your bedroom, but they're always in there listening to the A*Teens while you're trying to read comic books and they hog the Ouija board during your sleepovers.

Wouldn't it be great if you could just make that sibling vanish? You come home one day and there's just a smoking pair of sneakers and a little notecard that says "geez!" What a life, huh?

College could be like that. What if your roommate just vanished? Your roommate takes up a lot of space, you know. Wouldn't it be nice if they just got so furious with you that they left school - forever? Or if they flunked out? Or if they had to leave the country after a bizarre bathroom mishap?

These things do happen - some UConn students just get free, super-sized singles. But how nice is the "accidental single" anyway?

"Well, it was pretty nice," said Liz Hocking, a 6th-semester allied health major, whose roommate decided to pack her bags and hit the road midway through her first semester. "See, my roommate was kind of a [jerk] in the first place, so it ended up being an unexpected convenience. I could walk around without pants on - all the time."

Public nudity is generally frowned upon, and private nudity feels cramped; the obvious solution, hit upon by Hocking, is to expand the size of one's private space. The accidental single is a pain-free, effortless way of getting this done.

Eliza Caldwell, a 6th-semester pre-education major, echoes the sentiment. "It was good, because I've had annoying roommates in the past. It was nice to not have one for a semester. I covered the walls with cats, and I got to have my boyfriend sleep over whenever I wanted."

The problem with your regular double is that "personal" space isn't, exactly; your more embarrassing decorations might draw a quizzical eye from the living partner. With them out of the picture, you're free to put up as many "National Geographic African Elephant Love Fest '09" calendars as you want. I know, you've been itching to let those elephants out all semester - the loving can now begin.

Maybe the best part of the accidental single has nothing to do with what you can't do - it's what you no longer have to do. Having a real single is well and good, but you can't really appreciate the solitude until you've known the truth of the maxim "hell is other people."

"It was a very pleasant surprise," said Sean Carey, 6th-semseter philosophy and English major, who had two roommates in different semesters vanish without warning. "Because, see, the first one? First day I moved in, before I even met the guy, I found that my fridge was full of s***ty beer. And he played terrible music at pretty much all hours of the night. The man had an alarm clock I'll never forgive."

Even worse? "The second one - I'll just say it."The second one masturbated all the time."

Hopefully your siblings were never that bad.