Finding a Valentine won’t be the biggest challenge you’ll face this month: It’s lease-signing time.

This is the time when you finally have to tell your non-clothes-washing, non-pants-wearing, questionable-judgement-on-sexual-partners roommate that there is no way in hell their name will be on a lease next to yours again.

They’ll look up at you with pitiful eyes from their sheets coated with crumbs that date back to late August. Why? Where did we go wrong? In that moment they’ll look like the friend you knew before becoming roommates – the person whose hygiene you never had to question and whose significant other’s underwear you had yet to stumble upon.

You can’t be distracted by this. You must recall the laundry list of reasons that this person sitting in front of you should never again have the chance to steal the bag of pita chips off your desk.

Don’t you see, detestable roommate? You slam the door every single time you go into the bathroom – no matter what the hour. Then you slam it again on the way out, just loud enough to wake me. But you have the audacity the next morning to tell me that my “tossing and turning” has really been disturbing your sleep lately – even though your snoring is the 2 a.m. alarm clock I never set.

You don’t snore, you tell me, just like you didn’t puke in the toilet bowl and seat, and let it sit there and dry up for days after. You promised to clean it when the hangover subsided. Conveniently, it never did.

I’ll have to point out the time that your significant other drank two Whale Pails and peed all over the ground of our bathroom. I should also mention that it probably has a lot to do with the questionable things you do in our shower.

After saying all of this I’ll concede that it’s not actually you, it’s me. But know when this is said, roommate, it’s a lie.

It has everything to do with you spilling beers on the carpet and waiting for the stains to ‘evaporate.’ It’s about letting drunk people sleep in my clean sheets. It’s about the Pizza Movers you order at 3 a.m., before falling asleep and letting me wake up to an angry delivery man banging down the door.

Maybe it’s not only us, roommate. Maybe my detest for you has everything to do with the progression of time. The air of mystery has been wiped out. The allure of living with someone new has diminished. Maybe it’s about the time that all roommates take a step back and reassess their living situations.

I will leave you with this ounce of hope though, roommate. I’ll invite you over to my new place, with its clean kitchen and bed sheets, if you promise not throw up in my toilet, pee with the door open or even attempt to touch my shower.

Then we’ll sit around reminiscing about that wonderful (painful), relationship-strengthening (ending) year. The renewed pre-roommate boundaries of our relationship will make all of the horrible, disgusting things about you start to disappear from my mind.

It’s still going to take me a long time to forget about you, those nail clippings and the couch.

But I’ll try.