The short answer: It depends. But otherwise there’s a lot of ground to cover.
Roommates should either be just like you or totally the opposite, as it needs to be clear where they’ll fit in your life (also in your nap, shower and angry ranting schedule). If they’re you, you’ll get along great. You’ll pick up each other’s mannerisms (like thumb-twiddling or laugh-suffocating), your cycles will sync (you’ll need two toilets) and your lives will merge into one undifferentiated mass.
But if you have too much in common it’ll be obnoxious, for the obvious reasons, but also because you’ll have doubles of every new Killers album (and if you’re me, you don’t need to be reminded that they’re way past their prime).
Also it’ll piss you off and ruin your life forever when you find the one thing you differ on so radically (for me it’s usually drone warfare, photojournalism or cashews).
You avoid that inevitability if you pick someone entirely different, but this can go wrong, too. It helps to have at least enough in common to fill one good lunch with conversation every couple of months on a random hungover Saturday of your choice.
Without any common ground, your relationship will be stuck at “friends-by-association.” (The association here being that you sleep within at most 20 feet of each other and thus are exceedingly vulnerable to sneak attack.)
Not being close is easy because your lives are separate, like aloof and uncommunicative parallel lines. But one of you is going to be hilariously useless if you ever find the other crying on the kitchen floor some afternoon.
You might not think it’ll ever happen to you, but you’re probably delusional, which, incidentally, is another common type of stress-burnout — we don’t all break down the same way, but boy do we break down. (I’m a reclusive, break-off-from-reality-and-paint-inkblots type, but I think crying would be healthier.)
Anyway, it helps if your roommate knows you well enough to at least know whom to call for you during the periodic meltdowns in the productive but poorly designed nuclear reactors that are your life.
