This happened a long while ago but I’ve never been able to work out if it was me being out of order or not, so would love some opinions.

At the time myself and two friends (A and P) were living in a shared house. About 2-3 months after we all moved in P began a LDR with a uni student (H) who lived about 2 hours drive away; P didn’t have a car so A or myself would often drive them up to see H on the weekends. About a month into the relationship, H announced that they were dropping out of university and moving to our town. P asked if it was okay if they stayed with us temporarily while they looked for a job here and both A and I said that was fine. Over the next 3 months H was offered a couple of different jobs in the area but kept turning them down for various reasons; pay wasn’t good enough, job was boring, job involved travelling by bus or train to one of the surrounding towns, etc. Eventually they stopped applying for jobs altogether and started living off of money given to them by P or sent to them by their parents. They never contributed any of this money towards rent/bills, and P had started working extra hours at their job so they had enough money to support both of them. This meant that P was out of the house for 12-14 hours 5/6 days per week; during this time, H would stay in the house watching TV or listening to music alone.

When it got to the point that they had been staying with us for about 6 months, I initiated a conversation with P about it, basically saying “so what’s happening with H, are they looking for a place to live or work?” P kept brushing it off saying that “yeah, they are, it’s just taking a bit of time” and avoiding the conversation. Around this same time, P started complaining a lot about mess around the house; nothing major, just dishes being left in the sink occasionally, communal floors not being hoovered regularly, etc - I got the impression that it was actually H that was complaining about this since P was never a particularly tidy person and both A and I were generally quite neat, and none of us had ever had any problems with each other’s cleanliness before. A’s response to this was to just stay out of the house even more, basically only coming home to shower and sleep between work, staying with family and friends every weekend, etc. I didn’t have that option as my own family/SO all lived much further away and I worked more random hours, so I just started keeping to my room more often, making a point of never leaving anything out in communal areas, etc.

After another few months, I was starting to get really pissed off about it. Our electric/heating bills had gone up a lot (probably because there was a 4th person staying in the house literally 24/7) and the general vibe in the house was getting really uncomfortable. H never really spoke to any of us, P was constantly stressed about money and was spending all their time either working, hanging out with H, or complaining at A and me that the house was messy - even though at this point H was the only one spending any substantial time in the house. Additionally, things were getting awkward with our landlord because he had been very firm that any extra people moving in had to be cleared with him, but H was always in the house whenever he came by to check things.

I ended up losing my temper when P tried to talk about the mess, and basically said “you asked us if H could stay temporarily while they found a job, they’ve been here for 9 months now and still haven’t done that, when are they gonna go?” I did say that I wouldn’t mind it as much if they contributed to rent/bills but I didn’t want to push that too much as I knew it would just end up being P who had to pay that, and even though it was because of them that H was here I knew they would really mess themselves up financially trying to pay two people’s share. That conversation basically ended the friendship between P and me; they were furious that I was apparently being unsupportive of their relationship, and I was furious that they had effectively moved in their partner permanently without actually discussing it with us or our landlord. It also made things tense between A and I; they made a big deal of staying out of this argument and there ended up being a bit of resentment from me that they didn’t back me up (I know that they were also frustrated with the H situation) and resentment from them that my outburst had made the living situation even more uncomfortable than it already was.

The impression I got was that H was a waste of space and was somewhat using P; they could have gotten a job like they’d originally planned, but since P was so eager to provide for them they just didn’t bother, and they didn’t really care about the fact that two other human beings were also stuck paying for their share of electricity/heating. I think I might have been an asshole causing a fight about it but by that point I was so sick of feeling like I was walking on eggshells in my own house, especially when I was being made to feel that way by someone who was staying rent-free over a period of time that none of us agreed to, and putting us in danger of getting in trouble with our landlord because of it.