Call it stinginess, I don't care

Greetings!

Talking about rifts, conflicts, and misunderstandings between friends on the subject of being a minimalist, I experienced a lot of them during my school days. I lived with people who had well-to-do parents and guardians who provided them with weekly financial support. Interestingly, these people would even query their parents if they didn't receive what they were supposed to get for the week.

I had a roommate named Kenneth, and one of the main reasons he chose to live in a shared room was to save some of the full rent amount he was given. He also noticed that I wasn't wasteful and believed we could live well together because he genuinely wanted to save money.

Everything was going well until after we finished one semester. When we returned from break, Kenneth changed a lot. He started to live extravagantly, buying unnecessary things, and we were still sharing all the bills equally.

One particular day, we already had food at home before we left for school, but when I returned, I smelled freshly cooked food in the house. I rushed to the kitchen and found two large pots of rice and beans, as if meant for everyone in our lounge. I immediately asked him if he was celebrating something or hosting guests, but he said no—he just felt like eating to his heart's content and thought we shouldn’t be economizing as if we were the poorest in school. I knew he was subtly trying to imply that I was stingy, but he didn’t say it outright.

I had to tell him that the way he had been spending lately was not sitting well with me. After he was done buying all sorts of things and cooking in large amounts, we would still end up sharing the expenses. The food he made that day wouldn’t even last beyond one day because he had cooked it in a way that it would spoil if it went uneaten.

His lavish spending at home didn’t stop. He took charge of the kitchen and began preparing meals that were way out of our budget, like cooking with turkey and chicken for soups—something uncommon in typical school life because those ingredients were very expensive.

The worst situation occurred on a Saturday when he bought an expensive set of curtains to replace the ones we already had, and after putting up the new ones, he burned the old ones. That day, my frustration reached another level. I couldn't believe he would go as far as buying costly curtains when the ones we had were still perfectly functional. Besides, our schooling was just for two years, and by then, we’d already spent one year.

When I confronted him directly about his extravagant lifestyle, he called me stingy. From that point, we started living separately in the same house because I couldn’t keep spending my limited money on unnecessary things.

The good thing about guys, though, is that malice doesn’t last long. Towards the end of our time in school, we made peace, reconciled, cooked and ate together like the way we earlier did at the first of our living together.

Thanks for reading.

This is my response to #Kiss Prompt of the week

Photos used are mine