Brothel, Where Art Thou

My male roommate began having women over for one-night stands almost daily, even meeting one for the first time at our apartment with no heads-up for me. I'm a woman and very careful about whom I have over: usually only friends I've known for a while. I'm uncomfortable having my space constantly intruded on by strangers, but he seems surprisingly unaware of this.

--Unsettled

You need a needlepoint for the kitchen wall: "Home sweet sex den." People who live with roommates tend to make allowances for the occasional drunken hookup -- even those that end with some stranger in their kitchen drinking their OJ out of the carton. However, when there's a new hookuperella every few mornings, it crosses a line. It's a shared space. You agreed to share it with your roommate, not your roommate and half of local female Tinder. His behavior calls to mind "the tragedy of the commons," ecologist Garrett Hardin's term for individuals with access to a shared space trashing it or taking more than their fair share of resources, ruining it for everyone. Hardin was referring to public land and, say, one farmer letting his sheep eat all the communal grass, leaving only dirt for the other farmers' hungry sheep, but it seems to apply to your situation. Granted, the resources being depleted here are not tangible (grabbable, like grass). However, they're highly valuable and are generally understood to be benefits of renting an apartment -- including a level of privacy and the sanctity (aka safety) of "home" and the peace of mind that comes with each of these. Now, it could be argued that no guest policy was spelled out. However, most people know roommates won't be happy with a revolving cast of sex-providing strangers marching through their home. Chances are your roommate is counting on your being too uncomfortable to speak up -- which means there's no reason for him to stop. Explain how unsettling it is for you to constantly have these strangers in your place -- people he barely knows -- and ask him to think on it and propose a solution. Should he suggest, "You just hafta suck it up" or close, tell him straight up what you need (which might ultimately be "a new living situation"). If you wanted to encounter strangers in your kitchen at 6 a.m., you'd live in a bad neighborhood on the first floor and leave a window wide open. ... For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.