Roommates are an inescapable part of college and sometimes post-college life. If you’re lucky, your roommate can become one of your best friends. She’s your go-to girl for a night out on the town with bright lights and tequila, and especially the right girl for a night in with pizza and wine. She also can be the source of an entirely new social circuit, filled with a possible new dating circle. While this might sound amazing, be sure to tread lightly. There are a few different ways hooking up with your roomie’s friends can pan out, and unless you’re dating and marrying him, most of them don’t exactly end well.

1. You Try and Fail

It’s entirely possible that no matter how attractive, funny, and sweet you are – you just aren’t someone’s type. It happens. But how do you rebound from that when you have to face them the following weekend at your apartment for yet another party? And the weekend after that? And so on.

If this were to happen with a random person at the bar, your ego could be bruised (as would anyone else’s). There is a good chance you may never run into that same person again, depending on how small your college or town is. When this happens with a friend of your roommate, there’s a good possibility she’s going to invite them back to the next party. Dealing with your rejection isn’t an easy thing to deal with, trust me. Even if you want to be over it, there’s that little voice that tells you every time you talk to them they’re going to assume you’re persistent and trying for them again.

2. You Take Them to Bed

Maybe you didn’t fail. In fact, you passed with flying colors. There they are asleep like an angel in your bed the next morning. Where do you go from here? Let’s say you’re a one-night stand kind of girl, for argument’s sake. You hit it and quit it and move on the next weekend. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.

Until your roomie’s friend is at your apartment party the next weekend where you invited your next potential one-nighter. Or worse, you singled out another friend of hers to go after this time around. How do you deal? The sex wasn’t good enough to pass up this new person, yet they don’t get the hint and won’t get off your ass the entire night. And when they finally do get the hint, they’re hurt and somehow it looks like you did something wrong when you were just doing you.

3. One and Done

Plot twist: you get them into bed thinking that they might be a recurring person in your life or your bed, but they don’t feel that way at all. You don’t talk about it, thinking it’s too soon to have that kind of conversation. Until the following weekend when they show up with another beauty on their arm or worse, goes after one of your friends you invited to the party. Now what? You now have to act like you aren’t hurt because you two only slept together one time, but that one time could’ve meant something to you and now you know it didn’t mean anything to them. Talk about awkward.

4. They’re “The One”

There’s always a possibility that you end up falling in love with your roomie’s friend and you two live happily ever after. This is the scenario we are told more often than not: your friend, sister, mother, grandmother, whoever met their significant other through a mutual friend and they couldn’t have been more perfect for each other, and they owe it all to that one friend who introduced them. Blah blah blah. Of course, this happens, but more often than not you end up with one of the other scenarios at least once before you find your prince.

If you do take your roomie’s friend to bed, be aware that your normal girl talk with your roommate over the pros and cons might not work out so well. Even if she isn’t uncomfortable with the conversation in general, she may feel some way about you telling her how terrible her childhood friend is in the sack or the details of your hookup in general. So, it’s usually a good idea to run the idea past her before the situation arises.

At the end of the day, you can do whatever you decide to do with the friend your roommate decided to invite to the party. Be aware of what you might be getting yourself into, and have escape plans to get yourself out of it and to keep the party rolling for many weekends to come.