I lived in co-ed by room in large dorm my freshman year (1974) There were separate bathrooms - one at each end of long hallway but everyone just went to the bathroom closest to their room. It was no big deal.
@emeraldkity4 Harvard has suites for freshman. Many were designed in the days when a guy would have a servant take a smaller bedroom so there’s often either kids sharing bedrooms or sleeping in the living rooms. Suites vary as to whether the bathrooms are within the suites or in the halls. No freshmen suites are coed. (I think Yale’s arrangements are similar.) Harvard seems to be in a state of transition as far as gender neutral housing is concerned. They have long had gender neutral blocking groups for upper classmen which means students can be near each other in the upperclassmen dorms (aka Houses), but there have been various rules about limiting whether the suites themselves could be gender neutral. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/11/21/gender-neutral-housing/
I wouldn’t care as long as my DS wasn’t dating one of the roommates. I think that could end up being a disaster if they had a messy breakup during the year…
When we talk about the bathroom sharing issue, there are 2 kinds of bathroom sharing and people often talk past the other, assuming a different type.
One is the hall bathroom that has, oh maybe a dozen showers, toilets, sinks and people wander in and out all the time - found with “traditional” dorms.
The other is a small suite type that maybe only has one toilet and one shower and people are generally in there by themselves.
I always personally envision the first since I never lived in a suite. But my personal comfort level with opposite gender is very different with the first than with the second.
The first is more akin to a locker room and I do t share a locker room with men. The second is more akin to sharing a bathroom with my (hypothetical) brother, or sharing a hotel bathroom with a friend. The set-up make a huge diff to me.
Re: co-ed locker rooms. Here in Britain, they are not uncommon. I went to a spa/pool recently with a co-ed locker room. I had to quickly stop my friend from stripping down in front of everyone. There were little cubicles for changing and showering.
@romanigypsyeyes, D2 was a major tomboy as a child and usually preferred to hang out with the boys at school. She and another girlfriend of hers usually played basketball or football with the boys during recess or PE rather than playing with the other girls. Now she looks very “girly”, loves fashion, etc. and lost the tomboy strut she used to have. She is in a sorority and has some close girlfriends she sees a lot, but she prefers to live alone. However, the majority of the time, she hangs with guys. Her major is in a male dominated field, and there are only 10 girls in the program. She loves having dinner parties where she mans the grill, and often there might only be one or two girls there at most. She can hunt, shoot skeet, drive a ski boat, talk sports, etc. She doesn’t dislike women, but seems to feel so much more comfortable with her guy friends.
Over Christmas, she was hanging out a bit with some of the young men from her elementary school days. I overheard one of the boys say “Yeah, my Mom asked me 'what is little Janie like now? And I said, well, she’s really pretty now, but she still likes to hang out with the guys.” I just had to laugh.
I’m 24 and still waiting to grow out of that “tomboy” phase lol.
I also do not dislike women. I just am more comfortable around guys (in general). It’s probably because I had FAR more guy friends than female friends growing up.
The coed hall bathrooms I was familiar with had changing rooms attached to individual tubs or showers and toilet areas, so they were reasonably private. They didn’t have urinals.
My son’s apartment mates included a female. THough there was not supposed to be a "relationship"between roommates, there was, and yes, it caused tension because they broke up during the school year. She swapped room with someone from another college apartment, because it was too much for her. However, the way it worked with all of those apartment mates was that one person “won” the lottery, got the the apartment and pulled in whoever wanted to join him, so the rooms were not randomly assigned by the college. That’s the way it has worked at other schools, from my experience too. If a room cannot get filled by a student, it becomes an open available room for anyone who is looking for an room and is allowed to pick. All four of the apartment mates were in the lottery, and as soon as one’s number came up, that person pulled the rest of them in.
So there is a lot of choice in that sort of a situation since most singletons do not tend to pick a room open in a four bedroom apartment even if that happens, and there is time for the apt mates to come up with someone they know before that happens.
The colleges had coed dorms for freshmen anyways, so the transition was not that momentuous that a woman could be an apartment mate. The relationship part between any two people can be an issue, especially if it goes south.
My son who has been out of college for a while now shares an apartment with two women and a man. This is not uncommon around here. Not always single sex when it comes to apartment or house mates, and I’ve seen this since I was in college, off campus and out. Son lives with a former highschool class mate and former college classmate, and someone he met after school that he pulled in as sharer in the place.