One thing leads to another.

We all know how this will end. A Korean woman who lives with her Caucasian fiancé needs to borrow an apartment with female roommates to trick her visiting brother, who's been sent by the family back home to make sure little sis is doing okay in the big city. And not, you know, living in sin with a white guy whom she plans to marry. And definitely not dreaming up intricate ruses to deceive her overprotective family about the fact that she is living with a white guy whom she plans to marry.

The woman posted her quandary on Reddit "Offering $100 (or more) for help with a weird request," where it was thankfully spotted by Gothamist. Apparently this woman has never seen The Wedding Banquet. But, as anyone who has ever created a multifaceted lie to cover up the most basic realities of his or her life (or anyone who has ever watched a romantic comedy) knows, these things have a way of spiraling out of control.

"I'm a Asian foreign student who is now engaged to my lovely boyfriend - who is white. My loving and protective Korean mother does not know any of this, and I have (unfortunately) been lying to her for nearly a year now. Amongst a slew of other issues/lies involved here regarding faking my activities in New York (this story only goes deeper), she is now sending my brother to NYC for the first time to visit me, and check up on me. He is arriving in the next few days to stay until the end of October."

But don't worry, this woman has already taken care of the complicated footwork that this kind of deception requires!

I have convinced my mother and my brother that my boyfriend's friend left town for work for a few weeks, and just so happens to be the same time my brother is coming, and is able to hook us up with his apartment to stay at.

Big sigh of relief, right? Everything's going to be fine? Nope! Perhaps sensing that something fishy is going on, her family is demanding to see her apartment.

Unfortunately, my mother and brother both want to see my 'apartment' that I live in, in which I have told her I have female roommates in a 2/3 bedroom apartment. I will have to take my brother to this mysterious apartment in the next few weeks, albeit for just an hour to look around to make sure I'm doing good in the big city.

So here's what she's proposing:

I'm offering $100 to anyone, preferably female in a 2/3 bedroom apt with other female roommates, to let me use their room for an hour to pretend it's mine. It has to be furnished but doesn't need anything special since he doesn't know what furniture I have, would just bring along a school textbook, picture and what not. Extra cash for pretending to be my roommate!

Naturally, this plan can only go wrong in an infinite number of terrible ways. The brother sees something in the bedroom that's even worse than living with one's fiancé! One of her friends accidentally betrays the fact that she's engaged! The brother falls in love with one of the fake roommates and insists on going back to the pseudo-apartment all the time! Hilarity, and of course heartbreak, ensues.

kvelsey@observer.com

Ms. Wilson, who stars in the forthcoming Bachelorette, told Conan O'Brien that she and her on-and-offscreen roommate Mr. Lucas had received complaints from neighbors for their loud showtune singing and all-night hot tub splashing. Per Ms. Wilson, the note read: "I can hear everything you say--even the British accents. If you continue to make noise past 10 p.m., I will call the cops. We have rules here in West Hollywood. Seriously."

What else about the characters played by the cast of Bridesmaids could be surprisingly on-point? Are we soon to hear that Rose Byrne is cold and controlling in real life, or that Maya Rudolph is weirdly silent and doesn't do as much as her talent would imply?

(Getty Images)

When Michelle, a writer working on a first novel, tells people her husband, Daniel, is a hedge fund manager, they often remark, “Oh, honey, you did well.” And she did. The recently married pair live in a large dazzling loft in Dumbo. They currently rent, though they’ve started looking at places to buy and are getting serious about a second home upstate.

But Michelle and Daniel’s living situation was dealt a serious blow by the economy when Hannah, Michelle’s friend from Columbia, found herself without a job or home. The couple gave her a place to crash, and Daniel found he had to navigate a new morning routine. He was careful to get dressed in the bedroom before venturing out to make coffee, and he learned to keep especially quiet as he pored over the Wall Street Journal and the Times before work, so as not to wake Hannah, dozing on the guest bed in the corner.

Thanks to stagnant employment rates and rising rent prices, such situations appear to be increasingly common. Browsing Craigslist for single-room listings that include the phrase “we are a couple” brings up 131 posts from the week of April 30–May 7 alone. Stephanie Diamond, founder of The Listings Project, an email resource for renters in New York City, says she’s also seen a rise in couples seeking roommates. So has Jonathan Miller, the president and CEO of Miller Samuel Inc., a real estate consulting firm. “More people are sharing rents—doubling up—whether with family or roommates,” he said.

Remember the new book Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by NYU sociology professor Eric Klinenberg? Forget it. Mr. Miller calls the whole idea “bizarre,” pointing out that housing formation has lately fallen—which means that more people are actually living together.

Amy and Liz, a couple who live on the upper floor of a Park Slope brownstone, met on a yoga retreat, and they enjoy therapy and cooking (Amy is a former macrobiotic chef). They have been using Craigslist to find roommates, seeking applicants who favor their lefty politics and crunchy lifestyle. But first impressions can be so deceiving. Their last roommate seemed cool, but stocked their fridge with flavored Miracle Whip and prepackaged vegetables. (In general, they avoid anything with more than 20 ingredients, especially “natural flavoring”).

This time around, the search hasn’t been easy. One woman they recently showed the place to just came in and wandered around the apartment wordlessly. “We couldn’t hear what she was saying. Her mouth was moving but nothing was coming out,” Liz recalled. Another woman, upon hearing that Liz was a musician and Amy a dancer, opined, “I don’t understand music. I mean, what is the point?”

Diana and Pete both work from home, an airy loft in the Bowery. She is an acclaimed fashion and art photographer from Germany, and he is a musician from England. But those gigs don’t always cover the rent, so they’ve converted the loft into several rooms.

Pete and Diana’s one rule is, “don’t bring the party back.” Ben, their last renter, was in his 20s. He was very charming in the interview, assuring them he was not the partying type. “On the first night he was so drunk he could barely climb up the stairs,” Diana recalled. Another night she heard a clattering and found Ben at the bottom of the stairwell, black-out drunk, trousers crumpled at his feet. She helped him to the lofted bed but a few moments later heard a crash. “He was on the floor, wailing ‘Mommy! Mommy!’” Diana said, rolling her eyes. “We’re child-free for a reason,” Pete noted meaningfully.

Pete might have been more comfortable in northern Brooklyn, where group housing is increasingly common. Ereka and Dirby, a couple in their early 20s, live in an artsy loft in Bushwick with five roommates. “We have seven people to one bathroom,” Ereka said, noting that that means sometimes peeing on the roof and occasionally streaking in her own home. “I sleep naked so if I wake up in the middle of the night, sometimes I just go for it and run to the bathroom,” she said. “But I’ve been caught by roommates. I’m just like, acchhh!” She let out a squeal, covering herself with her hands.

Pete and Diana recalled a previous living situation with a female friend who partied heavily and occasionally hosted “all-lesbian orgies,” as Diana put it. “We would wake up in the morning and there would be 10 women sprawled on the floor,” she recalled. “Once, in the middle of the night one of them jumped into our bed.”

Despite the occasional awkwardness, several couples noted that there were positive aspects to having a roommate. A few of Diana and Pete’s boarders helped Pete practice his German or French over breakfast. Other roommates became interns. “Having other people around, there are new ideas all the time,” Pete said. “It helps creatively.”

According to Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History, such arrangements might actually enhance a couple’s relationship. “One of the two major sources of happiness people report is socializing with other people for dinner,” she said.

For Michelle and Daniel, nightly dinners with Hannah shook up their routine. “It is like being at a cocktail party—you see your partner through someone else’s eyes,” Michelle said. While she and Daniel spend a lot of time together, they rarely spoke deeply about life. “We are more cynical, you know, typical New Yorkers,” she said. “But Hannah is earnest. She is a classic artist in the sense that she is always asking these big questions, like ‘What is happiness?’” As a result, Michelle ended up having existential debates with Daniel that she would have felt silly initiating herself.

“It was really fun,” he agreed. “It sort of made us feel more established as a couple too, giving her advice.”

Ereka, who grew up in a large family—raised by aunts and a grandmother while her mother was on the road as a singer for KC and the Sunshine Band—thought having roommates could be beneficial in other ways. “The communal space gets treated differently,” she noted. “It makes you more polite and empathetic.”

Or not. Christine, a school teacher who lives in the Bronx, said that her and her husband’s roommate has ruined the “whole feeling of family.” The couple took a housemate to help with the expenses of a baby. “We have a newborn, and this roommate is always getting the baby sick,” she said. “She constantly takes up space in the living room and kitchen. She doesn’t understand social cues or privacy issues. It’s very straining on our marriage.”

The couples say that having roommates has made them more conscious about sex, locking doors and timing the action for when the third party is out. But fighting can tend to become more exhibitionistic. “Sometimes when we have an argument and a roommate is there, each of us subconsciously tries to make our point stronger so if the roommate listens they would be on our side,” Diana noted.

Pete recalled going and sitting in the park with a roommate after a fight with Diana; the two smoked cigarettes and talked about how terrible love can be. And it really helped! Michelle said she found it valuable to have someone around who could see her situation up close and offer their take. One night when she couldn’t sleep, she and Hannah stayed up for hours talking about what was bothering her. “To only have your spouse to go to with all your problems creates so much pressure,” she said.

It all sounds very intimate, chatting about love in a park, but everyone The Observer spoke with swore up and down that sexual attraction to their roommates was not a problem. “We just couldn’t live with someone we found attractive,” Amy said. Liz agreed. Then again, Pete noted that the roommate who smoked cigarettes with him in the park also liked to ask for advice on which lingerie her boyfriend might like. “I enjoyed that,” he said as Diana rolled her eyes.

Despite such benefits, Mr. Miller, of Miller Samuel, sees the roommate boom as temporary. “This is a reaction to our crazy credit situation,” he said. “Right now we are correcting what happened in the past couple years. And so this phenomenon of doubling up is likely to continue for the next few years—but it’s not a long-term trend.”

All of the couples agreed that if it weren’t for the economy, they wouldn’t have roommates. Pete and Diana noted that as they get older—and the roommate pool tends to stay the same age—it’s beginning to feel a little awkward. “I think a 10-15 year gap between us and the roommates is fine, but a 20-25 year gap really starts to show,” Pete said, wincing.

Amy and Liz also looked forward to having their apartment to themselves, like they did before Amy’s business began failing in 2008. A lot of things were different then. “I had an office on 23rd Street,” Amy recalled. “I had a membership at Equinox gym. I stomped around the office in heels. Then that winter, everything suddenly dried up.”

Now in her 30s, she added, “I really thought by this point I would be done with this phase of life.”

About three months into Hannah’s stay, Michelle and Daniel decided they were through. Their dinner conversations had moved from philosophical exercise to political debate. Hannah, out of work and depressed, found a calling among the Occupy Wall Street protesters. She would come home to the loft, refreshed with all of the ideas floating around Zuccotti, which she would rant about as Michelle cooked dinner and the two waited on Daniel to get home from his Wall Street job. Over dinner, debates about the financial sector continued, but Michelle no longer found the conversation so much fun. “I would argue that not everything is bad about Wall Street, and obviously I was defending Daniel because it felt very personal to me,” she said. But it felt personal for Hannah, too. “She saw the fact that she couldn’t get a job as the fault of the recession and the recession is the fault of Wall Street,” Michelle explained.

They agreed to disagree, but it wasn’t the same. Soon, Hannah departed. “She moved in with another married couple,” Daniel said.

“He is a college professor and she is a midwife,” Michelle noted. “She went more hippie than us.”

The good: Clinton Hill. (Kim Velsey)

When it comes to real estate, I have been lucky, much luckier than a 20-something journalist renting shared spaces with roommates has any right to be.

It began when I arrived as a freshman at the University of Chicago and discovered that my dorm was not the depressing low-rise tower with cinderblock walls and shared bathrooms in the hall that I had braced myself for, something designed by an architect who did dorms when he wasn't designing prisons. Instead, I was greeted by an historic, if down-at-the-heels, former luxury hotel overlooking Lake Michigan. It had a ballroom, a storied history of mobsters and celebrities, and enormous suites that boasted not only living rooms but also full baths, kitchens and dining rooms. All that was missing was a bellhop.

As first loves often do, the dorm/hotel became the archetype of all that I wanted and expected in a home—beautiful and rambling, abundant in history and friends. It was unreasonable to want it, even more so to expect it, but then, I kept on getting what I wanted. Even more perplexing, it was often through Craiglist.

Over the past 10 years, in Chicago and San Francisco, New York and New Haven, I've lived in houses and apartments that featured 12-foot ceilings, bay windows, working fireplaces, closets the size of small rooms, wood paneling, spacious backyards, spiral staircases and in one case, the ridiculously low rent of $250 a month. It was a gracious Chicago coach house behind a decaying mansion, located, by odd coincidence, roughly a five-minute walk from the homes of both Louis Farrakahn and then-Senator Barack Obama.

Not to play Pollyanna, but with the exception of a few hiccups—mice that traveled in packs, bedbugs, some bad roommates and becoming deeply involved in one landlord's bankruptcy proceedings—I've loved almost every place I've lived, and nearly all of the people I've lived with during the first decade of my adult life. Given that I've lived in 10 different places with a total of 66 people, not counting 4 cats and 4 dogs, that's not a cheap sentiment. (A disclaimer: I have a high tolerance for leaking ceilings, broken boilers and other people's messes.)

So I approached my most recent apartment hunt, a return to New York after two years in New Haven, with a ridiculous amount of optimism. But this brightness of spirit was tinged with considerable anxiety. I knew that the streak had gone on for too long—luck is nothing if not fickle. I was definitely due for something overpriced and nondescript.

I had expected cramped and dumpy when I first moved to New York in 2009, but my confidence this time around was bolstered by the fact that I found bright, airy and relatively inexpensive in West Harlem. Complicating matters, I was moving back to New York to work as a real estate reporter for The Observer, so for shame’s sake, I had to find an apartment that was, if not ideal, at least not obviously terrible. Would luck be a lady this time around, or a bitch?

To kick off the hunt, I turned to my old friend Craig.

The bad: Park Slope. (Kim Velsey)

A successful Craigslist hunt must be conducted with zeal bordering on obsession (fortunately I'm naturally obsessive), and for nearly a month there was scarcely a time when Craigslist was not open on my computer, hardly an hour when I was not responding swiftly to every post I deemed promising, vaguely promising or, in moments of desperation, potentially promising. I did my best to avoid the deeply depressing.

These included a shared apartment on the Upper West Side with the proviso, dropped like an afterthought at the bottom of a paragraph, “Note: room does not have an outdoor-facing window.” (Later, after viewing several other essentially windowless rooms—and no, a transom is not a window—I would admire the honesty of that particular post).

I also avoided rooms that were described as “on the smaller side,” and/or “good for someone who doesn't have much stuff,” and any listing that described the size of a room, or rather, avoided describing the size of a room by listing the furniture that could fit inside of it. These posts brightly noted that the room was capable of holding a full bed and a small nightstand, possibly even a bureau. I have seen many small rooms, but none so miniscule that they could not accommodate a full bed and a nightstand. One of the downsides to living in, and growing accustomed to, large spaces is that one becomes a bit of a hoarder. Moving to a bad apartment would be bad enough, having to give up my worldly possessions would be even worse.

FINALLY, I AVOIDED ANY LISTING WRITTEN ALL IN CAPS. This was a much larger number than I would have expected.

This left many posts for eminently livable, definitely worth a look, possibly even undiscovered gems of apartments. Because non-smoking, pet-free professional women in their mid-20s—bland though they may sound—are a very popular bunch among the room-4-share crowd, I was invited to see many of the apartments I inquired about.

My optimism was, almost immediately, dislodged. Over three weekends, I saw 24 different apartments, all of them shared. I saw many rooms without windows—prevalent, but a housing code violation—a few rooms that involved walking through other people's rooms to get to the rest of the apartment‚—which sounds almost charming when it's called a “shotgun share”—and one bedroom—basement, airshaft window, Williamsburg, $925—that required taking the leaseholder's growling pooch to doggy daycare in the mornings. It's not that these were impossible situations, really, but what irked me is that there was no acknowledgement of their inferiority. In fact, most were among the more expensive places I saw.

The ugly: Chinatown. (Kim Velsey)

The search started well. As I stood outside the door of the first of six apartments I had scheduled to visit one unseasonably warm day in late February, the sun broke through the clouds in an encouraging way. The apartment—a 4-bedroom on the Upper East Side—was promising, if not a perfect match. The roommates seemed genuinely nice and the space was pleasant: good light, a full-size kitchen, maybe not the trendiest location, but a very, very nice one. The room was small, but it had a large window and an actual closet. I would soon understand the rarity of such amenities, but at the time, I simply wrote down the room's measurements and snapped a few pictures. As it was the first place I saw, I had no reason to assume that there would not be other, possibly better, apartments out there. I rather smugly filed it in the “maybe” pile.

By the second stop—a significantly more expensive apartment in Williamsburg—this bit of beginner's luck was already slipping away.

I arrived a little before noon to find an apartment thick with pot smoke. The roommates, who appeared to wholeheartedly embrace the Williamsburg lifestyle, extending to the inelegantly and cheaply executed loft conversion where they lived, said they worked in finance. One hazily narrated a tour of the apartment, starting with a partially furnished living room (it came as a surprise to learn that the apartment had been occupied for the past four years) and ending with the medium-sized bedroom available for rent. The “great light,” mentioned in the Craigslist description of the room had apparently referred to the light situation elsewhere in the apartment, as the room did not have a window. Or perhaps it referred to the fact that the room did, in fact, have a light fixture.

The next few weeks could be described as a downward slide, with my expectations crashing like a foot through a rotted floorboard—an indignity I was spared, though it would not have surprised me at this point, at an asking rent of $1,200-a-month, no less. I met a lot of very pleasant people with terrible apartments, or terrible rooms for rent, or at least terribly overpriced ones. I thought longingly and often of that West Harlem apartment. I even went to look at another unit in the same building, but like so many others, it didn't work out.

There were several strong contenders with equally strong downsides: the owner planned to put the house on the market in August. The roommates were only renting the large, lovely room on the first floor in combination with a small, windowless room in the basement. A communal loft in Williamsburg had glimpses of such brilliant whimsy, even to my hipster-hardened heart—a bathroom with walls housing hundreds of cassette tapes and a built in radio nook, for musical showers!—that I spent the rest of the day trying to talk myself into the unfinished walls, ceilings, stacks of construction materials, and the high price I would pay to live amid such precious detritus.

I also saw places that I could live in, or could convince myself to live in if I reached the level of exhaustion and desperation necessary for such personal persuasion. But like a brat with indulgent parents, I'd always been rewarded for holding out before. I was determined to keep looking. At least until the middle of March, when the real desperation began to set in.

I knew I was being unreasonable, but because so many of my best friendships and experiences and most everything that has mattered since I went to college has been so deeply entangled with the places I've lived, it's hard for me to look at an apartment and just see an apartment.

After one particularly bad day of viewings, I got back to my house in New Haven (sprawling, bedroom the size of a studio apartment, though, yes, it is in New Haven). It was a little after midnight, I was exhausted and so despondent that my roommates, who are generally not prone to physical displays of affection, offered hugs.

“It's only a few days until March,” one murmured comfortingly. “You're getting the month's dregs.”

Home. (Kim Velsey)

The explanation was reasonable and surprisingly comforting. But unable to sleep, I spent the next few hours combing Craigslist, reading housing ads that I'd already read a half-dozen times before and chastising myself for the slow, non-committal follow-ups I had sent to the handful of decent places I'd seen in the past few weeks (probably how I'd lost apartment No. 1).

None had won me over, but really, they'd been good enough. They were the kinds of places that I would have lived if I hadn't been so spoiled by my previous good fortune, if I didn't feel that taking an apartment that was “good enough” would constitute a defeat. If, when it came to real estate, I didn't secretly believe in, and hold out for that sentimental old saw—love at first sight—that I did not believe of romance, or really, anything else.

The end of March brought with it a tide of cheaper, better, more attractive postings, including a light-saturated bedroom in Bed-Stuy, close to the border of Clinton Hill. It was located in a large shared house, the kind I'd been looking for, with a huge backyard and a pressed-tin ceiling in the kitchen. Moreover, there was something happy about the tone of the post that buoyed my spirits.

Walking to the open house that weekend, the building caught me by surprise—a free-standing wood frame beauty with a mansard roof and a porch swing lodged in a block of brownstones. Behind an iron gate, chickens roamed in the front yard (I immediately coveted the absurdity that 4 chickens would lend to my ongoing roommate count, even as I worried that Brooklyn chickens, and even moving to Brooklyn at all, were too au courant).

There will be eggs. (Kim Velsey)

It felt like providence, but I was not the only crusader. The place was packed with other eager would-be boarders. As I walked around the house, I felt a crush taking hold. But besting the other suitors posed its own challenges—how to write a follow-up email that was earnest and persuasive without being overly ardent or creepy?

The owner, who documented the house's history in a 2009 New York Times article, told me that the house had hosted lavish parties written up in the society pages during its early years, later becoming an underground R&B bar, then the center of a sizable crack dealing operation whose end was precipitated by a series of murders, and finally, a house that now holds 13 people. Also, it sat over a mysterious hidden tunnel the provenance of which remains unknown.

As she spoke, I felt woozy and excited and, all-at-once, very lucky. Maybe even the first stirrings of love. I moved in last week.

kvelsey@observer.com

It’s an impressive space they live in, and one that is decidedly “grown-up” for a neighborhood teeming with party-loving youths who share messy apartments four or five to a lease. They have two floors. High ceilings. Terrace off the master bedroom. Brand-new everything, including granite countertops in the kitchen. By any measure, their domestic life is one that any young couple living in New York City would envy, with the exception, perhaps, of one small detail: They have a roommate.

His name is Juan Carlos “J. C.” Villars, and he was sitting on an adjacent couch with his legs kicked up on an oak-colored coffee table, a stubbly faced fellow in a dark blue dress shirt and jeans fiddling alternately with a set of hex head wrenches and a controller for the Nintendo Wii.

Mr. Bronstein, 31, a marketing consultant in dark-rimmed glasses (you might also remember him as a former editor-at-large at FHM magazine, or from Road Rules season four), and Ms. Hoge, 27, a pretty event manager for Lincoln Center who wore her brown hair clipped up, said that they couldn’t imagine ever not living with Mr. Villars, 32, an engineering project manager—even if, one day in the not-so-immediate future, marriage and kids entered the picture.

“We talk about not moving, and we talk about not imagining J. C. leaving,” said Mr. Bronstein, who’s been close friends with Mr. Villars for more than three years, longer than he and Ms. Hoge have been dating. “So I think, by transitive property, that all adds up to getting married and still staying with J. C.”

“We’ve joked about it, and none of those things seem like a reason why we’d wanna get rid of him,” Ms. Hoge said with a laugh.

“I can’t even imagine how I’ll ever get there, quite honestly,” Mr. Bronstein said. “How I’ll ever get beyond … this.”

Mr. Bronstein and Ms. Hoge said they wouldn’t be able to afford as nice a place without Mr. Villars, and he—call him an Artful Lodger—agreed that he wouldn’t be able to do so without them, either.

Brooke Craft, 25, who’s currently studying massage therapy at the Swedish Institute in Manhattan, has found herself in a similar situation.

After graduating from SUNY Oswego in 2005, Ms. Craft and a friend moved into an “uncomfortably small” Upper East Side apartment—both bedrooms of which, she said, could barely accommodate a full-size mattress and a dresser.

So this past spring, when Ms. Craft and her boyfriend, Izzy, 27, who works for a financial firm in midtown, signed a lease on a spacious two-bedroom in Long Island City, she had no problem with his best friend, Dre, moving in to help split the roughly $2,400 rent. Likewise, Dre, a 27-year-old grad student, jumped at the chance to get out of his cramped quarters in Stuy Town, where, Ms. Craft said, he’d been sharing a single bedroom apartment with not one but two other people.

“It’s kind of like a little family situation,” Ms. Craft said. “It’s not like I’m married or have kids. We’re just having fun being in New York and having a great time living with each other.”

Then there’s Dan Lopez, 26, a production coordinator for Time Out New York who spent three years sharing a two-bedroom in a Crown Heights elevator building with his friend Evan and Evan’s girlfriend, Amy, who both work with him at the magazine. 

“It was kind of a prolonged college thing, but it felt more like living with family,” Mr. Lopez said.

Evan, 30, and Amy, 25, ended up getting married a little more than two years into living with Mr. Lopez, but they enjoyed his company so much that they didn’t mind sharing their first 10 months of marital bliss with him. Likewise, Mr. Lopez wasn’t fazed by the awkwardness one might expect would come with having married roommates: the uncomfortable feeling of being the third wheel; witnessing the inevitable bickering; and the awkward reality of having to hear your housemates, well, doing it.

In the fall of 2008, Mr. Lopez parted ways with Evan and Amy, sensing it was “just the right time to move on,” and got an apartment in Williamsburg with some people he knew through work. But when his boyfriend moved into town last month, they wanted to live together, so they found a place back in Crown Heights, which the two of them are now sharing with another couple for the summer. It’s downright sitcom-worthy!

“We’re a close group of friends, so you can always make light of it,” Mr. Lopez said of the current arrangement. “I think it works well having two couples. You can relate to each other.”

THE JAPANESE SCREEN

But surely there are downsides to living with someone in addition to the person you are sleeping with?

“I can only think of the downsides,” said a Harlem-based writer The Observer agreed not to name so he wouldn’t have to diss his former roommates on the record. “They do indeed gang up on you. They got a dog; what could we say? They shared a room, the largest, but seemed to think of each other as one person and not two people who should split things equally.

“Not a good idea to live with a couple,” he concluded.

Another Artful Lodger survivor told her tale: One day on the Upper West Side, she and three college classmates set up house in a three-bedroom that had been converted to a four-bedroom with a cheap Japanese folding screen, purchased at Better Your Home (“Better your home than mine,” remarked one inhabitant’s father tartly), that was set up across the vestibule of the open living room.

Soon after the lease was signed, the inhabitant of that room, whom we’ll call Rebecca, announced to her roommates that her German boyfriend, a documentary filmmaker whom we’ll call Werner, would be staying with them for a while.

Werner seemed nice enough at first. But then came the arguments, the uncomfortable references to neighborhood “schvartzes” and the loud sounds of international lovemaking (at the crucial moment, apparently, a booming “Ja ... Ja!” would resound over the screen—shades of Brüno!). One night, at a bar, Rebecca proudly announced that she and Werner had married that afternoon at City Hall, flashing a ring. Suddenly he had a legal claim to the apartment, recollected our narrator with a palpable shudder (the entire ménage has since dispersed).

Melissa, a 29-year-old bartender, and her husband have likewise been unlucky in their search for a roommate. They’ve been having trouble covering the full $2,400 rent of their East Village apartment ever since Melissa, who asked that we use only her first name since the roommate search is ongoing, was laid off from a full-time job and had to downgrade to a less lucrative two-nights-per-week gig. (They’re asking $1,100 a month for their “sunny” spare bedroom.)

The first guy they found was a recent divorcé who ended up bailing after two months because of a custody battle. Then they got a female roommate who neither unpacked nor spent a single night in the apartment during the five months that she “lived” there.

They still haven’t found the right match. But though a fair share of “drunk party kids” have answered their most recent Craigslist ad, Melissa said there’s no shame in being a married woman looking for a random housemate on the Internet.

“Most of my friends are in the same economic situation as I am,” she said. “I think enough people are having this struggle right now that it’s not a stigma at all. It’s almost expected.”

Indeed, despite the obvious difficulties, the Artful Lodger continues to poke his head into the New York domicile; and the New York domicile continues to welcome him.

Troll Craigslist (carefully), and you’ll find no shortage of couples soliciting strangers to split the rent with them. Like the “married couple (early 30s) with two cats looking to share our home” in Clinton Hill. Bonus for the potential roommate: “We both enjoy cooking, do so fairly regularly and don’t mind sharing.” Over in Park Slope, there’s a “professional couple and small, sweet dog” looking to rent out a “spacious and bright” bedroom on the ground floor of their duplex with a large patio and backyard. Why not?

And sometimes it all works out just beautifully.

Zahid Zaman, a 24-year-old software engineer, has already forged a friendship with the 28-year-old newlyweds whose Williamsburg apartment he moved into back in June for $1,050 a month, an enviable amount in that neighborhood, he said, given the location, the size of the apartment and the amenities, which include a large backyard.

Mr. Zaman’s room and board does come with rules: having to be quiet at night; not being able to bring guests over whenever he pleases. But, “the overall situation outweighs the downsides,” he said.

“We live in a time when patterns of behavior are much more up in the air, and therefore people fall into different communal ways of living,” said Ethan Watters, the author of Urban Tribes, a sociological account of the growing population of 25-to-39-year-olds who substitute close-knit social networks for family life. This usually involves having roommates until an embarrassing age. (Mr. Watters lived happily in “a house full of roommates” until just before getting married at 38, he said. He’s now 45 with two kids.)

When it comes to couples, married or otherwise, who live with roommates, Mr. Watters argued that for those who will likely spend a “huge portion” of their lives outside the traditional family structure, there’s something comforting about cohabiting with a third person.

“It reflects a fundamental desire for family,” he said.

And that can be powerful, especially considering how many young New Yorkers are far from their kin.

Allison Hemler, a 25-year-old Pratt grad student and intern at WNYC, had been living with her close friend, Emily, 28, a West Village–based HR consultant, and Emily’s boyfriend, Rory, 26, who works in N.Y.U.’s IT department, for about two years when they, and she, both started looking around for sweeter, albeit separate, apartment deals.

“But then I realized how much I loved my living situation, and I just asked them, ‘Hey, would you guys have any interest in moving somewhere else all together?’ And they were like, ‘We’ve been talking about it, and we want to keep living with you, too!’” said Ms. Hemler, in between sips of a Blue Moon at a bar a few blocks from the trio’s new two-bedroom duplex just across the river in downtown Jersey City. “Sometimes it almost feels like I’m in a relationship with their relationship.”

Meanwhile, back at the Bronstein-Hoge-Villars household, it seemed like things couldn’t get any more perfect.

The three cohabitants sat around speaking fondly of recent good times, like their weekly Saturday morning brunch ritual, and an impromptu gathering the previous weekend that got a little crazy when some tops came off in the 16-foot inflatable swimming pool they added to their backyard last month. Mr. Villars even talked about how much he enjoys spending time with Mr. Bronstein’s and Ms. Hoge’s parents whenever they come to town. (Awww!)

“We’ve spent a lot of quality time together,” he said, adding, with a touch of emotion, “I feel like I’m just very lucky to have them.”

jpompeo@observer.com

Until he found out that his roommate was scamming him.

"When I heard that, I was pissed," Mr. Noia said. "I was absolutely angered by it. I'm paying more money for a smaller room?"

In September, Mr. Noia overheard his roommate chatting about their rent with one of the building's other tenants. He confided that it cost $750 per month, meaning that Mr. Noia's share was more than two-thirds of the total.

It's a given in New York real estate that apartment dwellers stretch the truth to attract renters. But, with the economy tanking and more New Yorkers turning to roommates to help pay the mortgage or to offset the rent, these tiny lies are multiplying.

They cut both ways, with prospective tenants fibbing to lease-holders and smaller landlords, and lease-holders and smaller landlords laying it on thick to anyone who might save them hundreds a month.

In August, the Associated Press reported that roommate tensions were rising nationally, as people paired up to save cash. Craigslist ads like this are increasingly common: "We are looking to convert our dining room into a bedroom for a while, to save some $." The advertiser in Harlem wants $600 monthly. These ads, for roommates and rooms for rent in New York, almost doubled between September 2007 and September 2008, from 23,400 to 44,599, according to a Craigslist spokesperson.

"The more expensive the city (and maybe the worse the financial times are)," wrote Laura Diewald, founder of the Bad Roommate Project 'zine and blog, in an e-mail, "the more likely people are to lie or cheat potential roommates."

HAVING SPENT SIX MONTHS on the Upper West Side, Virginia Lee began her search for a place closer to her friends in the "gentrified, yupster neighborhoods" of Brooklyn. She hoped to spend less than $1,000 a month.

"I'm sure everybody [lies] a little bit here and there, although you do have to live with these people," she said. "I think in all situations you stretch the truth a little bit."

Although Ms. Lee would not confess to outright deception in her application process, she admitted to finessing her image to "make myself sound really cool and easy to get along with." She introduced herself as a "28-year-old Korean girl because I thought, 'O.K., a nice Asian girl.' But I made sure to write in parentheses, 'not a religious freak.'" She began leaving her business card at showings, even though she deemed it a "douche-y" tactic.

At one appointment in downtown Brooklyn, Ms. Lee's prospective roommate grilled her for a half-hour on her movie tastes and footwear preferences. But he was brutally honest:

"He asked me, 'When you go out to drink or dance, do you wear stilettos?' So I told him, 'I haven't worn heels since I moved to New York,' and he said, 'Well, we'll have to work on that. Beauty is pain, that's how you have to be when you roll with me.'"

Another advertised his New Jersey apartment as being in Manhattan.

"When I told him, 'No thanks,'" Ms. Lee said, "he was trying to convince me that it was great, like, 'You can have a washer and dryer! There's lots of space!'"

CHEATING AND LYING COMES in many forms, but perhaps the most disgusting looks like a tick and feeds on human blood: bedbugs.

"There were a couple cases where roommates would lie to newcomers," said Maciej Ceglowski, the founder of the Bedbug Registry. "They just wouldn't mention it to newcomers, which I thought was kind of shocking and really unethical."

Mr. Ceglowski, a 33-year-old computer programmer, created the Registry in 2006 as a forum for tenants to warn potential renters of infestations. (Although Mr. Ceglowski does not verify the site's information, he forbids anonymity for posters who refer to landlords by name.) Judging from the 20-odd posts he receives every day, mostly from New Yorkers, he says landlords frequently withhold information about bedbugs.

It's less common for roommates to lie about pests--"because the roommate's going to find out eventually, and that can't be a happy conversation," he said--but it does happen.

"I started showing bites the second or third day," wrote one poster in September, referring to an apartment in Bushwick. "[The primary tenant, Larry] claimed no knowledge of the bugs, then acknowledged that there was a problem a year ago but it had been cleared away. ... I left at the end of the month. On the way out I noticed the other roommate was covered in bites as well. I left a note for the next roommate and a jar of dead bugs so that he would understand. He moved out the next day but I think Larry is looking for a new roommate."

Mr. Ceglowski's girlfriend had a similar experience: After moving to her Park Slope apartment, she learned that another unit in the building had an infestation. All she could do was wait--until the bugs came through the walls and crawled into her mattress. She has since moved.

WHAT MOTIVATES THESE LIARS-BY-OMISSION? Money.

Apartment rents citywide during the recently passed economic boom only increased, often to records, spurred by job growth, which, in turn, spurred demand for housing. Some higher-end apartments can now command rents of over $90 a square foot annually (that’s $750 monthly for a 100-square-foot room), though the citywide average annual per-foot rent is probably closer to $25. Strapped lease-holders and small-time landlords see the dollar signs and can be forgiven for a financially motivated fib.

Or can they?

Since moving out on Oct. 2, Mr. Noia has been sleeping on a friend's couch, living off unemployment insurance (he lost his job in medical billings and collections), and apartment hunting. He left a note with his former landlord to warn him about the basement tenant, his old roommate, and posted a reply to the roommate's ad on Craigslist, which now advertises the room at $140 per week.

"I put that posting up to warn people before they call this guy," Mr. Noia said. "I want them to know that they're in for a pretty big shock."