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'' A roommate is a person who shares a living facility such as an apartment or dormitory. Similar terms include suitemate, housemate, flatmate ("flat": the usual term in British English for an apartment - in New Zealand, "flatmate" is solely used, regardless of whether the dwelling is an apartment or a detached house), or sharemate (shared living spaces are often called ''sharehomes'' in Australia and other Commonwealth countries). A sharehome is a model of household in which a group of usually unrelated people reside together. The term generally applies to people living together in rental properties rather than in properties in which any resident is an owner occupier. In the UK, the term "roommate" means a person living in the same ''bedroom'', whereas in the United States and Canada, "roommate" and "housemate" are used interchangeably regardless whether a bedroom is shared, although it is common in US universities that having a roommate implies sharing a room together. This article uses the term "roommate" in the US sense of a person one shares a ''residence'' with who is not a relative or significant other. The informal term for roommate is roomie,〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Roomie definition )〕 which is commonly used by university students. The most common reason for sharing housing is to reduce the cost of housing. In many rental markets, the monthly rent for a two- or three-bedroom apartment is proportionately less per bedroom than the rent for a one-bedroom apartment (in other words, a three-bedroom flat costs more than a one-bedroom, but not three times as much). By pooling their monthly housing money, a group of people can achieve a lower housing expense at the cost of less privacy. Other motivations are to gain better amenities than those available in single-person housing, to share the work of maintaining a household, and to have the companionship of other people. People become room-mates when they move into a rental property, with one or more of them having applied to rent the property through a real estate agent, being accepted and having signed a lease. ==Who lives with roommates?== Housemates and roommates are typically unmarried young adults, including workers and students. It is not rare for middle-aged and elderly adults who are single, divorced, or widowed to have housemates. Married couples, however, typically discontinue living with roommates, especially when they have children. Mostly people in developed and developing countries live as room-mates. A lot of people moving to a big city or to another country may decide to look for a shared house or apartment to avoid loneliness. Many social changes such as the declining affordability of home ownership and delayed and decreasing marriage rates are a reason why people live with room-mates.〔Some common social and behavioral changes can be further understood in the challenges section. (Impact of Share Housing )〕 Despite this rise, share housing is little researched.〔(Research about Share Housing )〕 Roommates are a fairly common point of reference in Western culture. In the United States, most young adults spend at least a short part of their lives living with roommates after they leave their family's home. Very often this involves move out of the home and to college, where the primary option for living is with a roommate. Therefore, many novels, movies, plays, and television programs employ roommates as a basic principle or a plot device (such as the popular series Friends or The Big Bang Theory). Sharing a house or a flat is also very common in European countries such as France (French ''colocation'', corenting) or Germany (German ''WG'' for ''Wohngemeinschaft'', living () community). Many websites are specialized in finding a flatmate. On the other hand, it is less common for people of any age to live with roommates in some countries, such as Japan, where single-person one-room apartments are plentiful. There are many different forms of flat shares also, from the more established flat shares where the flatmate will get their own room that is furnished to "couch surfing" where people lend their sofa for a short period. Sharehome residents are typically unrelated to each other in that they generally come from different families, although they may be composed of some siblings and sometimes single parents and their children. Perhaps because of the social cohesion required for their formation, sharehomes will often be composed of members of the same peer group. For example, university students who have relocated to a new area to commence a course of study often need to form a sharehome. Share housing often occurs in the 18-35 age bracket - during a life stage between leaving home and having children. Sharehome residents may have pre-existing friendships or other interpersonal relationships or they may form new relationships whilst living together. Many universities in the United States require first-year students to live in on-campus residence halls, sharing a dormitory room with a same-sex roommate. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「roommate」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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