Top Quotes: “How We Live Now: Redefining Home & Family in the 21st Century” — Bella DePaulo

Intro

“There’s a nationwide registry, called CoAbode, of tens of thousands of single moms looking to live with other single moms and their kids. Even more radical are the parenting partnership registries for single people who want to have kids without raising them singlehandedly. People who sign up are looking for a lifelong commitment to parent together; romance and marriage are not part of the package.”

“Everyone is seeking just the right mix of sociability and solitude [in their home].”

“Maria Hall, who lives in a home of her own, is happy to cede some control over the access that people have to her and her house. ‘I don’t have a ‘you have to call me before you come over’ policy,’ she tells me. ‘If the truck is in the back, just come on in. If there’s something on the floor, step over it.”

“Over the course of the interviews, I’d sometimes get a sense that I was talking to people who have found their place, their space, and their people. Then I knew just how that person would answer three of the last questions I asked:

• When you’ve been away for a while, how does it feel to come home? I love it.
• What has been the most contented time in your life? Right now.
• How long will you stay here? They’ll carry me out of here.”

“A 20-year-old in 2000 was more likely to have a living grandmother than a 20-year-old in 1900 was to have a living mother. That makes it increasingly possible for 3+ generations to live under the same roof. In the past decade or so, people have been doing just that.

The first decade of the 21st century was also a time of increasing home-sharing by other combos of family members. They included pairs of siblings, skipped generations like grandparents and their grandchildren, and various assortments of cousins, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, and others.”

“Some who live alone are connected to another person in a more surprising way — they are in long-term, coupled relationships. Some are married; some are even married with kids. These are not (just) the couples constrained to live apart because of job demands; such commuter marriages have been part of our lexicon for some time. They are the couples who could live together but choose not to. They prefer to have their own places and spaces. In the U.S., about 7% of women and 6% of men do so.

Some dual-dwelling duos live very near each other. Laura Ann Jacobs and Robert Pardo, for example, each live in a tiny bungalow, one behind the other, in Lake Worth, Florida. In SF, Juliana Grenzback and Joshua Brody live across the street from each other — one in a house, the other in an apartment. In White Pines, CA, Dave Wallace lives in the home that he owns an hour down the mountain from the home Donna Guadagni owns.”

“There was a time when professionals thought deeply and creatively about how to seamlessly integrate places for living with ways of making a living, especially for single parents and working wives.

One model was a city built around a shipyard. Both housing and childcare were affordable, public transport was convenient, and on-the-job training was readily available. The childcare centers were open 24/7 (just like the shipyards), complete with infirmaries for sick children, child-sized bathtubs so that mothers [did] not need to bathe children at home, cooked food services so that mothers [could] pick up hot casseroles along with their children, and…large windows with view of the river, sot hat children [could] watch the launchings at the yards.

The place was Vanport City, Oregon, the real location of women represented by the celebrated icon Rosie the Riveter. Vanport City was designed to support the wartime productivity of adults who were not at war, including single people, single moms, and wives whose husbands were overseas. When WWII was over, however, so was Vanport City.”

“Experiments in living are not a new thing in the U.S. The Shakers, for example, came to America in 1774, bringing with them the belief that all of the adults in their community were brothers and sisters. In the early years of the following century, one of the newly established comunes was the Oneida Community in New Harmony, Indiana. Their ideology discouraged any special attachments between particular men and women because all of the adults were considered to be married to one another.”

“Already, the millennials are making choices that were predicted by almost no one. That exuberant anticipation of becoming old enough to drive has morphed, for some, into a shrug. The proportion of teens with a driver’s license dropped 28% between 1998 and 2008. Adults under 35 own fewer cars and drive fewer miles.”

Multi-Generational Homes

“Combine the short life spans with the parents who had lots of children but could only live with one of them, and you end up with startlingly low numbers of households that included people 65+. As a slice of all households, that number never topped 12%.

Indications are that most older people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not ‘taken in’ by their adult children. Instead, they stayed in their own homes. One by one, their children may have married and left to set up households of their own, but usually one grown child stayed right there with them. The offspring who stayed in the family home even after marrying had incentives beyond filial devotion — they often stood to inherit the family farm or business.

Before the days of wage labor drew young men out from under the control of their fathers in their family homes and into the towns and cities, the older generations held all the economic cards. They owned the farm, the business, the home. Until the middle of the 20th century, it was the better-off elders who were more likely to live with kin. The poorer old people often lived as boarders or servants or, literally, in the poor house. Not until 1960 did the financial equation reverse, with the less well-off coming together to live with their older or younger kin in greater numbers that the more economically secure.

The racial equation has flipped too. Until at least 1940, the percent of households that included a relative 65+ was greater among whites than nonwhites. Since then, whites have been the least likely to live with several generations of kin. In 2008, for example, compared to only 13% of whites, 25% of Asian adults, 23% of blacks, and 22% percent of Latinx people, lived in multigenerational households.

The middle of the 20th century marked the beginning of the end of the popularity of multigenerational living. Before then, living with relatives was normative; it was the default choice. You needed a reason not to do it. The suburbanization of America, though, was on the horizon. Adults increasingly preferred to live with just their own nuclear families. With the advent of Social Security, more older people had the financial wherewithal to live on their own if they so desired, and improvements in health made it possible for them to take care of themselves for longer periods of their lives.

The forces that lured the younger generation out of the family home continued apace. For example, the number of family farms continued to decrease, and jobs continued to be available that were not tied to family economies. The rise in educational opportunities, especially after the passage of the GI Bill, probably contributed to the demise of multigenerational living in several ways. Many young people left home to pursue degrees, and once they got to college, they may have been exposed to ways of thinking that encouraged individualism more than traditionalism.

All of these factors contributed to the downslide in multigenerational living that eventually thudded to an all-time low in 1980. Once again, however, the tides have turned. A 2011 Pew Report opened: ‘Without public debate or fanfare, large numbers of Americans enacted their own anti-poverty program in the depths of the Great Recession: they moved in with relatives. This helped fuel the largest increase in the number of Americans living in multigenerational households in modern history. From 2007 to 2009, the total spiked from 47 million to 51 million.’

Many Americans have been battered by job losses, underemployment, growing housing costs and foreclosures, and surging healthcare costs. Living with relatives helps. Household income (adjusting for number of people) is lower in multigenerational households than in other household types, but rates of poverty are lower too. In a 2011 national survey of Americans, more than half of those living in a multigenerational household said that their living arrangement had made it possible for at least one family member to continue their schooling or enroll in job training. More than 70% said that it had improved the financial well-being of one or more people in the household.

Economic factors, though, aren’t the entire story. The reemergence of multigenerational living started long before the recession of 2007–2009. Ever since 1980, the numbers have been ticking up.

Fortunately, the 2011 survey didn’t stop at the questions about finances. The researchers also asked about interpersonal dynamics. Most people living in multigenerational households said that their living arrangement made it easier to provide care to the people who needed it, whether they were aging relatives or little kids.”

“By 2012, more than one out of every three Americans aged 18–31 were living with their parents. The numbers were high even for the upper end of the young adult age range. Among the 25–34-year-olds, 24% were living with their parents in 2012, more than double the percentage who were doing so in 1980, when that living arrangement was as uncommon as it has ever been before or since.

The most popular answers to why this is happening involved economics, education, and singlehood. Millennials have gotten the short end of the economic stick. Their wages are low, and their rates of unemployment are high. Those without jobs are especially likely to be living with their parents. In a 2006 survey, more than half of the young adults who moved back into their parents’ homes said that they did so because they couldn’t support themselves (57%) or they wanted to save money (69%). More than 90% of the young adults who had never left home said that they were saying money by living with their parents. (That didn’t mean they were contributing nothing, though. Nearly 50% paid rent and nearly 90% helped with household expenses.)

Contemporary young Americans are also more likely to be single than same-aged peers in decades past. In 1980, the median first marriage age was 22 for women and 25 for men. By 2013, marrying in your early twenties was unusual. First-time newlywed women were 27, and men were 29. The numbers who stayed single were growing too. Young Americans who are not married are much more likely than their married peers to be living with their parents.

Millennials also differ from the young adults of the past in their dedication to higher education. In 1980, 17% of adults 25+ had completed four years of college. By 2013, 32% had. Young people still pursuing their education are more likely to be living with their parents (and they’re classified as living with their parents even when they’re in the dorms).

As important as the economy, education, and single life are, they don’t tell the whole story of the rise of young adults living with their parents. The trend was gaining strength long before the Great Recession. Plus, even within the three categories — the unemployed, the students, and the single — the number living with their parents has been increasing over time.”

“In a 2013 poll of parents of 18–29-year-olds, about 3/4s said their relationship with their adult children was mostly positive, and only 2% said it was mostly negative. Even more strikingly, when asked about the sources of enjoyment in their lives, more of the parents mentioned their relationships with their grown children (86%) than their relationship with their spouses (75%).

The positive feelings between the generations seems to be grounded in the intimacy that comes with frequent interactions and knowledge of the little ups and downs of everyday life. More than half of 18–29-year-olds and more than half of the parents of grown kids that age have contact with each other every day or almost every day.

Scholars underscore how different today’s rate of connecting is from the past: In 1986, about half of parents reported that they’d spoken with a grown child in the past week. In 2008, 87% said they had. In 1988, less than half of parents gave advice to a grown child in the past month, and fewer than one in three had provided any hands-on help. Recent data show that nearly 90% of parents give advice and 70% provide some type of practical assistance.

The new closeness is not just a side effect of a bad economy, and it’s not even something that can be pinned solely on the relatively recent ubiquity of cell phones.

We first observed a shift in this relationship in 1999, when the economy was booming. Even before the cellphone era, many 20-something women talked with their mothers several times a week.”

“Between a fifth and a quarter of middle-aged American adults provide intense support to an aging parent.”

“Both the young adults who had received intense support and the parents who had given it thought that the amount of support was excessive. (The others in the study, who were not helped so much, thought that the amount of support they received was about right.) But here’s the wow point: the grown kids who received intense support were more satisfied with their lives and more likely to have a strong and secure sense of what is important to them than those who were not helped intensively. We can’t know from this study alone whether the young adults were more satisfied and focused on goals because they were helped so much; the study is only suggestive. But what it suggests bucks our intuitions about meddling adults creating infantilized adults. The problem ‘isn’t with the help, per se, but with viewing that support as abnormal and worrying that it could cause harm.’”

“A recent report found that more than half of American adults (57%) had never lived outside the state where they were born. Nearly 40% had never left their hometown.”

“Compared to the children of married parents in nuclear family homes, teens raised in multigenerational households were less likely to drink or smoke, more likely to graduate from high school, and more likely to enroll in college.”

“Other countries — Asia, for example, which is totally a country LOL — have stronger traditions of valuing extended family members. There are also some hints that such practices may be of special significance to children of single parents. In a cross-cultural study, the reading skills of 15-year-olds in five Asian nations and the U.S. were assessed. The key question was whether the children of single parents differed from the children of married parents. In the U.S. and Japan, the children of married parents did better. In Hong Kong and Japan, the differences were negligible. In Thailand and Indonesia, the children of single parents were better readers than the children of married parents. The author suggested that in many Asian countries, extended family members step in to help when needed, providing money and time, as well as social and emotional support.”

Shared Housing

“In the 19th century, house sharing was commonplace, but it had an entirely different sensibility. Boardinghouses were not places where people came together as friends to share their lives. Instead, the houses were run by a landlady, often with the help of servants, who provided laundry service and three meals a day to people who rented rooms. Boardinghouses were usually in urban areas. Historians estimate that up to half of 19th century city residents were either boarding or maintaining a boardinghouse.

Single men who had come to the city to find work, single women with teaching jobs, and young married couples not yet ready to live on their own all found their way to boardinghouses. A boarder slept in a small room — sometimes private and sometimes shared with strangers — and joined the landlady, her family, and the other boarders for meals in the dining room.

Among the reform movements that marked the turn of the 20th century was a protest against overcrowding. House sharing became stigmatized, and new zoning regulations added teeth to the bite of moral approbation.

By the middle of the 20th century, suburban life had become fashionable, and few cared to share their homes with anyone other than nuclear family members and perhaps some extended family. In 1950, only 1% of all households comprised 2+ unrelated people. For nearly two decades, this remained the status quo. But then house-sharing numbers started to tick up.”

“Sharing a home was Maggie Kuhn’s answer to the retirement communities that she dismissed as ‘glorified playpens where wrinkled babies can be safe and out of the way.’ At Kuhn’s place, the couple and each of the single people had a private apartment that included a kitchen. Solitude was theirs when they wanted it, but they also shared meals frequently, sometimes celebrated holidays together, and cared for each other during illnesses.

‘We’ve grown to have very close and loving friendships that endure,’ Kuhn offered, ‘We depend on each other, without being sentimental about it.’

In front of a fireplace in Kuhn’s home, the couple got married. At the ceremony, Kuhn gave voice to her philosophy of living: ‘I said families and couples could not live unto themselves alone, and that two people being just internally involved are not going to make it.’ Maggie Kuhn never did marry and had an answer for anyone who asked why: ‘sheer luck.’”

“In 1980, the year before Maggie Kuhn created the Sharing Housing Resource Center, the Census Bureau still counted only three million households of unrelated people; that was 4%. By the turn of the 21st century, the numbers had nearly doubled to seven million or 6%. Today, all across the nation, Americans are living the new happily ever after.”

“More women than men stay single, and women live longer than men; so in the later years of life, there are more women than men. Of course, many men as well as women face widowhood and divorce in later life. In fact, people 65+ are the one group for whom the divorce rate is still increasing. There’s a big sex difference, though, in reactions to the end of a marriage. Men are much more likely than women to marry again.

Women who have spent much of their adult lives living with other people, such as those who were previously married, are especially intrigued by the possibility of living with their female friends. (Women who have lived alone are less enthusiastic.)”

“When new people move in to the house, Maria encourages them to make it their home. Food, drinks, art supplies — all are there for the taking. For the teens and young adults, there are a few rules: no drinking, smoking, or sex in the house.

Regardless of how many people are living with her at the moment, Maria hosts supper on Thursdays and lunch on Sundays, to which those not living in the house are invited too. Typically, 2–15 show up. Sometimes Maria does all of the cooking; other times different people bring or prepare different dishes. Afterward, each person scrapes their own plate.

The night before my visit, a Saturday, Maria hosted eight people. She had studying to do, so she went upstairs after she finished her dinner. Hours later, she came back downstairs and found all eight of them still there, enjoying each other’s company and the welcome feeling of being in Maria’s home.

In between all of the scheduled events are plenty of informal visits. Maria has an open-door policy — her friends are welcome to show up without calling in advance. That’s something she especially appreciates about her life as a single person: she doesn’t have to apologize for having friends stop by, as she did when she was partnered.”

“For the next 60 years, Americans made their way to the suburbs, pushing farther and farther from the city. They got their single-family homes, their attached garages, and their big yards set back from the streets in neighborhoods with nothing else but similar houses. Work was elsewhere; so was shopping; so was entertainment. To get to any of those places, suburbanites needed to hop in their cars and drive. By 1960, 31% of the population lived in suburbs. By 2010, more than half did.”

Co-Housing

“27 families near Copenhagen were pining for a way of living that would offer them a real sense of community without giving up the privacy of their own homes. They found a site where they could design and build the neighborhood of their dreams. They arranged their homes around a shared space in the center. Cars were kept out of the way. They also built a home they all owned — the common house with its own kitchen and dining room, where they would meet periodically to prep and share meals. There were lots of kids in the community, so the common area also included playrooms. Laundry facilities were there, too, along with workshops and a few guest rooms. By design, the spatial arrangements encouraged neighborliness. The residents wanted to see each other over the course of their everyday lives, and be there for each other in ways large and small. They succeeded.

That was in the early 70s. By 2010, there were more than 700 of these living communities in Denmark alone. The idea caught on, making its way to countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands; Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland; Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.”

“The first American cohousing community, Muir Commons, was built in Davis, CA, in 1991.”

“When Lynne first moved into Temescal Commons, she was raising her youngest son, then in middle school, on her own. Twins his age were already living in the community, and he saw them occasionally, but he was most smitten by the six other kids who were younger than him. He had never spent much time around little kids before, and he found that he loved them. They, in turn, looked up to him and adored him. Seven children all had each other as playmates and a whole big grassy area to play in, without ever crossing a street.

A group of young adults became very fond of Lynne’s son and made him a part of their group. Through his middle school and teenage years, they included him in game nights and outings to concerts. Sometimes he went to church with them too.”

“One of the things I love about Karen is her open-armed embrace of all of the people who matter to her. She does not limit herself to celebrating only those people our culture conventionally acknowledges, such as romantic couples. At a time when one friend after another was celebrating how long they had been coupled, Karen decided to celebrate something else — her 25th year of living in California. (She grew up in Lubbock.) She reserved the historic West Point Inn at Mt. Tamalpais and invited her sister, her nephew, and about 20 of her closest friends. ‘We don’t really have rituals for celebrating these long-term friendships…or just about who I am.’ As it happens, two of the couples whose anniversary celebrations motivated Karen to celebrate the important people and milestones in her own life have since broken up. Karen’s friendships endure.”

“LA has a courtyard tradition. In the opening decades of the 20th century, LA had an image of itself to project to the rest of the nation — it was the ‘city of homes,’ meaning the detached, single-family variety we have come to associate with the suburbs. One ad proclaimed, ‘LA is the home of the bungalow…surrounded by palms, lawns, and flowers throughout the year.’

People of modest means were unlikely to achieve that version of home. As more people poured into the area and land became more scarce, the opportunities diminished even more. LA, though, was not about to go the way of the tenements that marred NYC. An alternative that became popular was the bungalow court, comprising individual cottages, usually rentals, arranged around a shared space. The best-known bungalow courts were upscale versions with houses built in the American Craftsman architectural tradition. Those neighborhoods boasted ‘individually-designed, well-appointed, and beautifully-crafted houses sharing a spacious, lushly landscaped lot.’ Residents didn’t have lots of their own, but they did get to enjoy the privacy of their individual homes in a setting of natural beauty.

Far more numerous than the Craftsman bungalow courts were the collections of smaller, simpler structures that became home to people of more than 30 nationalities. By 1924, more than 7% of all LA dwellings were located in a house court.”

“People who live on cul-de-sacs are likely to say that their friendships with their immediate neighbors mean a lot to them. About 1/4 of the residents of bulb cul-de-sacs said that ‘a feeling of friendship runs deep’ between them and their nearest neighbors. None of the people living on through streets agreed with that sentiment.

Writing for Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger explained why cul-de-sacs are so good for community building: ‘If you want to throw a block party on a through street, you need a permit. If you want to do the same on a cul-de-sac, the street is already effectively blocked off…Cul-de-sacs create a kind of natural panopticon around children at play.’ They also poses problems amenable to group solving, such as ‘fallen trees or unplowed snow blocking every family’s exit.”

“If you drive two hours south of Chicago and visit a five-block stretch that used to be part of an air force base in Rantoul, you might not think you were anyplace special. The streets are lined with late 50s-style split-level brick duplexes with lawns and driveways. Standard middle class, maybe blue collar.

If you try to pigeonhole further, though, you might become flummoxed. There are lots of older people, but it’s clearly not a retirement community. Kids are everywhere. Young and middle-aged adults are around too. Many of the kids are black, yet no one raises an eyebrow when they rush to greet one of the older white people in the community with a big hug and a ‘Hi, Grandma!’ — well, at least no one within that neighborhood known as Hope Meadows.

The place was designed to seem ordinary. In fact, though, it’s perhaps one of the most magnificent innovations in living and caring ever imagined.

The children you may see joyfully running around were once among the most wounded in the nation. Earlier in their young lives, before their Hope Meadows days, more than 1/4 were sexually abused. The same high number were exposed to cocaine in utero, a third have medical problems (including, for example, cerebral palsy and fetal alcohol syndrome), and nearly 2/3 have behavioral and emotional problems.

Among the Hope Meadows children are those who had been locked in a room by themselves for days, burned with cigarettes, and neglected by parents who may have been abused themselves. All had been referred into the child welfare system, and some had been in 4–5 foster homes before they arrived at Hope Meadows. They were considered the ‘unadoptables.’ Their problems were often severe; many were not the little babies who can be so appealing to foster and adoptive parents, but were children or even teens; and some had a set of siblings, meaning that a potential parent would be asked to take all of them. At Hope Meadows, all of the parents take in 3+ children with the goal of adopting them and giving them a permanent home; some have biological children as well.

The older people in the community don’t all come from places of great emotional fulfillment either. For some, their lives before they moved to Hope Meadows seemed dreary. They had reached retirement, and were feeling bored and lonely. Irene Bohn used to leave her tiny apartment to walk the mall — back and forth, back and forth; she didn’t want to believe that was all that was left of her life. David Netterfield looked ahead to his remaining years and figured he’d just sit in front of the TV until he died.

Brenda Krause Eheart had seen quite a lot of the usual foster care system, and she was appalled. A scholar with a PhD in child development, Eheart knew that all children need stable, safe, predictable, and nurturing environments — loving adults who are responsive to their needs and a consistent presence in their lives. Yet, too many children who enter the system get shuffled from one placement to another, where they’re sometimes neglected and abused all over again. Sure, there are plenty of foster parents who are loving, but even they are often overwhelmed. Left to care for wary and traumatized children with little support, too many just can’t do it.

Eheart knew these children needed something much better, but what? First, she wanted to give them families and a neighborhood. She envisioned about a dozen families, all of whom would adopt kids from foster care and live next to each other. That way, all the children would have parents and siblings under the same roof; and up and down the block, they’d have playmates and grown-ups who cared about them. The adoptive parents would have other parents living right next to them — a real support system of people who truly understood their challenges and joys.

While Eheart was still imagining the ideal community for healing children who’d been abandoned and hurt, she went to a talk by Maggie Kuhn, the founder of the Gray Panthers. Kuhn described an innovative solution for keeping seniors out of nursing homes: they could invite young adults, perhaps college students, to live in their homes in return for providing the help seniors needed. Eheart’s flash of brilliance was the realization that Kuhn’s script could be flipped — the seniors could be invited into the community to provide help rather than receive it. They could be surrogate grandparents to the children, and sources of support and guidance to the parents.

What she hadn’t fully anticipated until Hope Meadows became a reality is that by providing help, the seniors are themselves healed. Irene Bohn, the once-bored mall walker, told the New York Times years later that her time at Hope Meadows has been the happiest and most meaningful of her life. Before moving to Hope Meadows, George King had a collapsed lung and heart disease, and so little interest in helping himself that he had a home health nurse visiting him regularly. A few months into his Hope Meadows experience, he loved waking up every day and going out to spend time with the kids. He volunteered as a crossing guard and playground supervisor. He also relished the time he got to spend with the other seniors. He didn’t need his nurse anymore.

Hope Meadows is part of the foster care and adoption system of Illinois, but it’s the least institutional iteration imaginable. There are staff members such as social workers, therapists, and community facilitators, but they’re members of the community, not outsiders who just show up for appointments. There are all sorts of programs designed to help the foster and adoptive children, but they’re open to the families’ biological children as well. The emphasis is on what all of the members of the community share, not what sets them apart.

Eheart and her colleagues were explicit about the philosophical principles upon which Hope Meadows would be founded: it is fundamental to the spirit of the community and to the model of helping that the children are viewed ‘not as problems to be managed but as ordinary people requiring the same embeddedness in family and community that we would want for ourselves.’ They aren’t ‘cases’; they are ‘family members, friends, and neighbors.’

The founders of Hope Meadows share with the cohousing innovators a sensitivity to the power of spatial design in creating community. The Rantoul neighborhood includes an accessible intergenerational center (similar to the common houses of cohousing communities), houses that are close together, open green spaces, footpaths, and bicycle paths. Shared spaces include play areas for the little kids and hanging-out places for the teens. Every design decision was guided by the goals of increasing ‘the odds of residents encountering one another’ and making relationships ‘easy to form and maintain.’

When Hope Meadows opened in 1994, 15 of the duplexes had been converted into six-bedroom homes for the families. The adults who raise the children don’t get paid according to the number of children in their care, as is typical of foster care arrangements. Instead, one person, the family manager, spends a lot of time at home with the kids and gets a stipend plus health insurance for the family. Rent is free.

The number of parents and seniors has varied over the years, but a ratio of about 3.5 senior households to each family household is considered ideal. Seniors live in the duplexes at a greatly reduced rent and are expected to devote about six hours a week to the children. Most of them end up giving more than that, as they read to the children, tutor them, coach them, play with them, and give them rides. Much of the time is unscheduled. The kids show up at their ‘grandparents’’ doorsteps, and the seniors let them into their homes and their lives.”

Co-Parenting

“She had no idea that within a year — in 2000 — she would launch CoAbode, an online matching service for single mothers looking to share a home with other single mothers. By 2013, 70,000 single moms from every state in the nation (and from Canada too), had profiles, and big-time media, from NPR to Time and USA Today, all did stories on it. Up to six million people visit the site each year. At that moment, in 1999, she didn’t even have a computer.”

“To a lot of single moms living together, pitching in and helping each other seems to come naturally. When one person is overburdened, ‘the other one just jumps in and starts doing whatever needs to be done.’ If you’re a single mother living alone:

You’re the chauffeur and doing the laundry and the homework; and there’s shopping; and then all of that and the house cleaning. That all gets cut in half when you have another single mother there. This does not happen when you have a husband.”

“Many white families in the early 20th century sent their young pregnant daughters to homes for unwed mothers, an option available since the late 1800s in countries like the U.S., Canada, and those in the British Isles. Most maternity homes were run by religious orgs like the Salvation Army, and they were on a mission. To the religious matrons in charge, ‘the pregnancy was more than a mistake, it was a demonstration of the state of a woman’s soul.’ In the Misericordia Home in Montreal, the women were forbidden from using their real names and were called ‘penitents.’

The women had usually traveled a distance, so their residency at the home would not be discovered by anyone they knew. In theory, these women — who were coping with the meanings, stresses, and symptoms of their pregnancy; were separated from family and friends; and were seen as ruined and disgraced — could have drawn comfort from bonding with the other women in the home. Instead, in the Misericordia Home, they were all discouraged from sharing anything about their past lives, or even talking at all to one another.

The women were typically pressured to give their babies for adoption if they hadn’t already decided to do so. Some had to commit to never trying to find their children in the future.

In the thinking at the time, the women could walk out of the homes, having excised that whole slice of their lives, and pick up where they left off before they became pregnant.

Once the pill was approved in 1960 and abortion was legalized in 1973, women in America had more control over their reproductive experiences. Attitudes were changing, too, and more women were opting to raise their children as single parents. The number of maternity homes dropped precipitously from about 200 in 1965 to 99 in 1980. There was a jump in that number for a while, while antiabortion forces looked for ways to persuade women that there were resources available to them if they were to have their children.

A few such homes still remain. Although most are still administered by religious orgs, they’re quite different from the 19th and 20th century varieties in other ways. The homes are run more like social service agencies that offer counseling about nutrition, pregnancy, and sometimes careers; and provide food, clothes, shelter, healthcare, and recreational opportunities. Many support the women who don’t want to place their babies for adoption; and they encourage the residents to get to know, trust, and help one another.”

“In 1970, only 11% of all births were to single women. By the turn of the century, it was 33%; and by 2008, it surpassed 40% and hasn’t dipped below that 40% marker since.”

“Pryor Hale was 49 years old in 1992. She knew she was ‘just way too old and too single’ for what she wanted to do, but she was determined. She really wanted to adopt a child. It was a struggle to make it happen, but on a momentous day, she got that magical call letting her know that her daughter Lucy had just been born in Paraguay.

The adoption agency faxed a photo, but she wasn’t allowed to go to Paraguay to get her for four months. It was excruciating to have to wait, but during that time, Pryor would execute the plan she had been pondering for quite some time: she would build Lucy’s village.

She thought about what Lucy would need in her life. She wanted to find people who had strengths that she didn’t have. Pryor had never raised a child before, so she wanted people in Lucy’s village who had. She also wanted Lucy to have male role models, so her brother and several more of her dearest friends would be among the chosen ones. People who’d been there for her during some of the most painful times in her life and friends she’d cherished since childhood were included, and all would be named godparents. When she asked the last two people, a couple who really knew and cared about Pryor, the woman cried. She told Pryor that she’d been afraid that they wouldn’t be asked.

A month after Pryor brought Lucy home from Paraguay, there they all were — all 12 godparents and Pryor — gathered around Lucy for her christening in St. Paul’s Church. There they would stay, at Lucy’s side — and Pryor’s — for birthdays, holidays, and the personal milestones of a young life. One of the godmothers realized that the children of single moms need special help buying presents for mom; so every Christmas season, she took Lucy shopping and then sat on the floor with her, the wrapping paper, and the ribbons. Some of the godparents were better at the baby years, and others were more attuned to the childhood or teen years, but all of them loved her. One even talked about setting up a college fund for her but died before writing a will.”

“Proposed solutions in the early 1900s were radical. Proponents of the industrial strategy wanted to remove kitchens from apartments entirely. Meals prepared on an assembly line would be served to masses of people in huge dining halls. Daycare and other services would be institutionalized, and women would then be free to dedicate themselves to paid work. It was a strategy that aimed to maximize efficiency while neglecting people’s cravings for meaningful human connections. The Soviet Union flirted with those ideas under Lenin, but Americans preferred to continue viewing their homes as warm and nurturing havens.”

“What Americans call the Vietnam War is called something else in Vietnam — the American War. So many men perished that by the time of reunification in 1979, for every 100 women aged 20–44, there were only 88 men. Some married men who survived the war abandoned their wives, and many single soldiers preferred younger women, leaving many unmarried Vietnamese women who wanted to marry — included some who had themselves served in the war — but felt that their only option was ‘a bad, older man.’

One of those women was Nguyen Thi Luu. She decided that she could forgo marriage, but she wasn’t about to give up on motherhood. So she did something that shocked her family and left her marginalized, stigmatized, and poor: She asked a man to help her conceive and then walked away. She would raise the baby herself.

Luu moved to the edge of a sparsely populated town in Northern Vietnam where the land was inexpensive and the distance offered some protection from harsh judgments. Already, there were a few other women there who’d done the same thing. Eventually, 17 single mothers settled in the village of Lang Loi (now called Do Cung). ‘It was comforting to be in a group of other women in a similar situation,’ Luu said.

Across the country, other single women were also engaging in the practice that was recognized by the name xin con: ‘asking for a child.’ In Vietnam, the desire for a child is about more than motherly love; it’s also about security in later life. There are few special housing facilities for the elderly. Instead, old people count on their children to continue the long tradition of caring for their parents. The fear of dying alone takes on a special urgency among women with no children, and fuels their commitment to have children any way they can — even if it means flouting conventions and risking stigma, poverty, and shame.

Over time, attitudes toward the single moms softened. Nearby villagers sometimes offered food to the women of Lang Loi. Activists recognized that these women who had given — and given up — so much during the war were now being treated badly, and organized to change that. Credit programs that assisted the women economically were instituted, and laws were passed that recognized their children as officially legitimate. The moms also helped one another, sometimes in big ways. For example, when the son of one of the mothers died, the community built her a new house.”

“There was something Darren did not want to do: settle. It was a temptation, he knew, for plenty of single men and women who so passionately wanted to be parents (and not single parents), yet were inching their way toward 40 and still hadn’t met a person they truly loved.

His friends knew how he felt; and two of them, independently, told him about single women they knew who also wanted to be parents but not single parents. Darren made plans to meet each of them for drinks.

Here’s the part that’s revolutionary: he wasn’t looking for that romantic spark that would light up a life of coupledom and kids. He was willing to skip past the quest for conjugal love and focus on a different kind of love — the love of parenting — with another person for the long haul. He wanted what he would come to call a parenting partnership. (He prefers that term to coparenting, which others sometimes favor, because coparenting is sometimes used to describe other arrangements, such as the practices of divorced parents.)

The two women understood what Darren wanted. In fact, they wanted the same thing. If Darren and one of these women — or a different woman — decided to pursue the parenting partnership, they would be committing to being there for the child for the rest of the child’s life. They would also be there for each other — as parents — but each would also be free to pursue romantic interests.

Darren realized that what he was seeking was unconventional. He even knew that, for many, it was unfathomable. But he has faith that what seems kooky now could seem ordinary in just a generation or two.”

“Neither of the two women seemed to be the perfect person with whom to partner and raise children. But the experience, he said, ‘really got me thinking: I have to read the book on how you do this whole parenting partnership thing. And then I realized there wasn’t a book!’

Darren wanted to write that book. First, though, he created a site, which would serve as an online meeting place and resource for people from just about anywhere looking to find a person with whom they could have and raise children.

The site, Family By Design, launched in 2012. By 2013, the New York Times was writing about it, as well as other sites with similar missions, such as Co-Parents.net, CoParents.com, Co-ParentMatch.com, PollenTree.com, MyAlternativeFamily.com, and Modamily.com.

Among the people interviewed by the Times were two who had met through Co-Parents.net in 2011. At the time, Dawn Pieke was a 41-year-old in Omaha who had just ended a decade-long relationship. She wanted a baby, and she wanted that baby to have a father who’d be involved in the baby’s life. Fabian Blue was a gay man living in Melbourne who had wanted to be a father for years. He had met some women from parenting sites, but none seemed right.

With Dawn, it was different. They communicated intensively, on Facebook and then on Skype. They probably discussed a greater variety of matters, both trivial and profound, than most dating couples ever do. Parenting philosophies, family backgrounds, religious beliefs, and much more were all on the table. They even did background checks on each other and went through medical screenings.

After about five months, Fabian moved into a separate room in Dawn’s Omaha home. A month later, Dawn said, ‘He handed me a semen sample, we hugged, and I went into my bedroom and inseminated myself.’ Their daughter was born in 2012. Dawn now introduces Fabian to others as her coparent.”

“By the summer of 2013, when the Family by Design site had been live for less than a year and little marketing had been done, several thousand members had already created profiles. Modamily had launched a few months before Family by Design, and by mid-2013 boasted 4,000 members. The UK is yeras ahead. Co-Parent Match launched in 2007. By 2013, it had attracted 30,000 members from around the world. The site, though, isn’t exclusively for people who want to find parenting partners. Those who want to be sperm donors or who are looking for sperm donors also have a place there.

Having a child together (naturally, or by IVF) is not the only option for parenting partnerships, however. Some partners adopt together. In other instances, one parent already had children and the other agrees to be a coparent.”

“Darren believes that prospective partners should spend six months, if not longer, getting to know each other. They should, he thinks, meet each other’s friends and family. They should see how the other person interacts with kids. Maybe they should take trips together. By the time they’re feeling sufficiently confident to commit to the parenting partnership, they should know a great deal about each other, and especially about their perspectives on parenting.

The deep knowing begins with the first step of creating a profile. Prospective parents describe their approaches to discipline, education, food, religion, and many other parenting issues. They reveal the financial contributions they are willing to make and their vision of how parenting responsibilities would be shared. They indicate their preferred living arrangements, and other lifestyle preferences and habits. An algorithm compares each person’s profile with others and generates compatibility scores.”

“When I first started reading the original research reports on single parenting, I was shocked to discover that the actual findings of the studies rarely matched the ominous reports in the media. Ways in which the children of single parents were purportedly disadvantaged were often exaggerated or misrepresented. Studies documenting advantages enjoyed by children of single parents rarely made it into the headlines or our cultural conversations.

So far, there’s no substantial body of research on the actual experiences of the children of parenting partnerships. I’m optimistic, though, about what future studies are likely to show. These children have at least two parents who were so committed to parenting that they were willing to endure the possible skepticism and stigmatizing from others. If the partners followed the advice of the parenting partnership sites, they probably had deeper — more thorough, extensive, and thoughtful — discussions of parenting and of life before conceiving than most conventional dating couples ever do. These are not the 40-something adults who panicked at their advancing age and lunged into a marriage they knew would be risky just so they could have children in the socially approved fashion. Those children born of panic are probably most at risk of ending up in a hostile or tumultuous household.

Rachel’s observation that her children were spared ‘all the weather patterns of sexual-romantic destabilization’ is telling. Her bold suggestion is that the children of parents who are friends rather than lovers may actually experience a calmer and more stable family life. Is that so? We just don’t know.”

“The attitudes of the millennials are already in line with the values of those who pursue parenting partnerships. A Pew Report found that 52% of them said that being a good parent was one of the most important things in their life, but only 30% said the same about having a successful marriage. Meanwhile, the law is making room for nontraditional family forms. In 2013, Governor Brown signed legislation allowing children to have more than two legal parents.”

Couples Living Apart, Together

“They are not living together and never have been. They don’t face any insurmountable obstacles to sharing a home. Neither has a job in a far-flung location. Neither is pursuing an education in a faraway place. Brian does help care for his aging parents; he shares a duplex with them, where he lives in the three upstairs rooms. But he doesn’t need to live with them in order to provide the assistance they need. There’s room for him in Andrew’s place, and there would be no financial costs to either of the men if they shared Andrew’s space. They are also not trying to figure out whether they are truly committed to each other; they decided that long ago. They aren’t using their separate residences as secret sanctuaries from which to launch clandestine affairs. They aren’t avoiding each other. They love spending time together, and do so for a few hours most evenings; they live just ten miles apart.

Andrew and Brian are staying together as a couple but staying apart in their own separate places, because that is how they want to live. They are a serious, long-term, committed couple, so they could have what so many people covet about traditional coupled living — the day-to-day intimacy of living under the same roof, sharing a home and a life. Instead, by staying together but living in homes of their won, they chose to have a measure of both intimacy and independence.”

“When social scientists first started studying the rules of attraction, they produced stacks of studies on competing cliches. In the end, the weight of the evidence favored the cliche about similarity (‘birds of a feather flock together’) over the one about complementarity (‘opposites attract’). In research with humans, though, hardly any rule is unbreakable.”

“Although Brian and Andrew spend most evenings together — almost always at Andrew’s suburban place — Brian only stays over once every week or two. The two of them do spend time traveling together, and when they’re in the Florida home (often for a week at a time), Andrew has no separate space to himself. They used to get on each other’s nerves, but they have figured out how to let the small stuff go and use humor to dispense with the rest. Sometimes Andrew hops on his bike and takes off. ‘I need my alone time, no question.’”

“Today, if you wanted to count on your fingers all of the ordinary Americans in committed relationships but living apart from your partners, you would need several million fingers. The practice — called ‘living apart together’ (LAT), or more felicitously, dual-dwelling duos — is no longer a quirk of the rich or famous, if it ever was. Studies from the 90s found that 6–9% of all adults in the U.S., France, Germany, and Australia were in LAT relationships. In California in 2004 and 2005, about 12% of heterosexuals were in LAT relationships. Among gay men and lesbians, so often ahead of the curve in reimagining marriage and family and friendship, about 16% were part of a dual-dwelling duo.”

“He wasn’t much help with chores, such as making the king-size bed. He tried once but screwed it up, ‘so I said forget it.’ What seemed to annoy Dorothy the most was Simon’s obliviousness to her high standards of cleanliness.

He’ll always say, ‘I never use the front door.’ I said, ‘Do you wipe your feet?’ He said, ‘Oh, I didn’t walk on the grass.’ I said, ‘But you walked on the concrete and it has dirt on it.’ He said, ‘Oh!’ I said, ‘Listen up. You stay where you are. I’ll stay where I am.

Simon did go back to living in his own place. It’s close to Dorothy’s, but she hasn’t been there in seven years: ‘The less I know, the better my heart beats.’”

“Ask young adults aged 25–34 who are living apart whether they plan to move in together during the next three years and nearly 80% will say yes. Ask seniors, and only about three in ten will say the same. They know of what they speak. Young couples are actually likely to move in together within a few years. Seniors, in contrast, have remarkably enduring living-apart relationships. In one study of couples aged 55–79, nearly half of them had been living apart together for more than nine years. Seniors don’t want to marry their dual-dwelling partner, either, and they are less likely to do so than younger couples.

Seniors are also least likely to hedge when it comes to explaining why they prefer to live apart. They are most likely to declare that they have made a positive decision to live apart — that they did not just settle into their separate places out of indecision. There are lots of reasons people give for their dual-dwelling arrangements, from lack of confidence (couples who just aren’t sure they’re ready to live together) to an array of constraints, such as having kids — including grown ones — who may be attached to the family home, concerns about leases or mortgages, or selling one place and moving into another; and more. The one reason seniors give most often is simple: they want their independence. Across all ages, 17% give that answer. Among seniors, it’s 40%.

In Sweden, a pair of researchers surveyed 100+ dual-dwelling couples aged 60–90, and then talked in depth with a few of them. Those people treasured their independence. One woman told the authors, ‘Now, I am free.’ Freedom, to living-apart-together seniors, means the option of carving out time to themselves if they wish. For the women especially, it meant easier resistance to traditional female roles of doing dishes, cleaning up after men trekking dirt into the house, and playing nurse to the ailing and injured.

Most important, it also means maintaining relationships with the other significant people in their lives on their own terms. The Swedish women were adamant about wanting to have guilt-free time to spend with children, grandchildren, and friends. Although close to 90% of them included their partner in at least some of their get-togethers with their children, nearly three in ten kept their time with their friends to themselves.

Homes and the objects that fill them amy also take on special symbolic significance among the oldest adults. Every surface of every room in Dorothy’s home was filled with photos, mementos, and cherished possessions. Packing up and moving in with Simon — or anyone else — would not just be a matter of disassembling a house; it would mean closing down a home and a lifetime of memories. Even the less dramatic option of welcoming Simon into her home would mean making room for his stuff and his style, and letting go of some of her own.

At different times and in different places, that’s just what a dutiful woman would do. She would do all that and more, and be married too. Not now. Not even among the oldest among us. Stereotypes tell us that the elderly are old-fashioned and set in their ways, protective of customs and traditions, and wary of radical innovations in living. Yet there they are, in Heritage Harbour in the U.S., and in communities in Sweden, other Scandinavian countries, and many other Western nations, living life their way. I’d like to think that with age comes a strong sense of self: an understanding of who you are and what works for you, and a noble resilience in the face of quizzical or censorious looks from others.”

“Scholars and pundits who dismiss LAT couples as people who just aren’t sufficiently committed to their relationships have missed a big part of the dual-dwelling phenomenon. Some of these couples care so much about what they have together that they separate in order to save it. At the point when other couples might be filing for divorce, they’re signing separate rental agreements.”

“The nattering nabobs of negativity who are the incredulous friends of the LATs often have a conventional view of closeness. They think about that day-to-day sharing of the minutiae of life, add it all up, and get intimacy. What they overlook is the potential for conflict over the small stuff, for pettiness, and for just plain boredom. Couples who have spent time apart, either because they want to (as with many LAT couples) or because they have to (as when distant jobs put time and space between them), often remark on the unexpected perks. They don’t bother keeping their small grievances alive when they don’t see each other every day. Their communications focus on the positive. When they’re together, there’s often more passion.

Again, I’m left wondering if it’s the older demographic, so often derided as ‘set in their ways,’ who are ahead of the curve in truly getting what living apart together is all about. Dorothy’s friends don’t pelt her with questions about why she doesn’t live with her partner. Neither do Joan’s.”

“Cohabiting couples multiplied over time, from a mere 50,000 practitioners in 1950 to 400,000 in 1960, 500,000 in 1970 to over one million in 1980, and over two million in 1986. As of 2012, there are more than 7.6 million unmarried cohabiting couples, an that number only includes heterosexuals.

The profile of cohabitors has changed, too, broadening to include people from just about every demographic. The young were the early adopters, but now nearly half are 35+ and 13% are 55+. Just over half have at least a bachelor’s degree and more than 40% have kids living with them.”

“Logistically, it’s undoubtedly easier to live apart from your partner when there are no young children involved. And yet, data from an American study of heterosexuals show that it is only men who seem to shy away from living-apart relationships when they have kids: only 9% of LAT men live with kids, compared to 49% of married men and 39% of cohabiting men. For women, there’s no such disparity: 45% of LAT, 50% of married, and 52% of cohabiting women are living with children.”

New Options for Seniors

“In the earliest American nursing homes, residents were assigned to beds around the periphery of huge, open rooms, with staff stationed in the center. There were no private bathrooms, and sometimes there were not even curtains between the beds. Even the names of the places were bleak: an 1883 Maryland home was called the Keswick Home for the Uncurables. These places were the product of a medical-model mentality. Like hospitals, these nursing homes were clean and antiseptic, and allowed for easy monitoring of the residents from the centralized nursing stations.

The stunning lack of privacy didn’t sit well with the residents, and the better off among them began to clamor for more. Eventually, some of the vast wards shrunk to smaller quads, and then to rooms shared by two. When the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, followed by Medicare and Medicaid, nursing-home care attracted more funding and more regulation. But minimum room sizes soon became standard room sizes, and the impersonal, institutionalized feel remained.”

“This telling vignette opened a New York Times article about the ElderSpirit cohousing community in Virginia:

When Carol Edwards, 86, returned home after rotator-cuff surgery, her right arm in a sling, she couldn’t bathe, make her bed, or fix a meal. She lived alone with no family close by. Still, the thought of a six-week recuperation didn’t faze her.

Her friends in the community brought her meals, helped with her chores, and drove her to doctor’s appointments. ‘My every need was taken care of.’

In traditional intergenerational cohousing, the caring and sense of community that’s at the heart of such endeavors are valued. In senior cohousing, it’s vital. It’s life-affirming and possibly even life-extending. A popular aspiration of elders is to age in place. Seniors in cohousing want even more than that — they want to age in community. Their hope — often realized — is that by living in a cohousing community, they will put off the institutionalized care of nursing homes or assisted-living facilities for as long as possible — and maybe even forever.”

“When I ask how Anja’s life would be different if she had all the money and resources in the world, she says it would make the finances of her travels easier; but otherwise, nothing much would change. ‘Right now, I think my life is better than it has ever been.’ She’d probably give the money away.

When I ask Tricia the same question, she says that she used to play the lottery. Then one day, she thought, What if I won the lottery? And she realized that she loved her life just the way it is.

Tricia doesn’t play the lottery anymore. She already won it.”

“It’s now systematized in templates such as Share The Care (a book by Sheila Warnock) and more recently, in online formats such as LotsaHelpingHands.com and CaringBridge.org, but when Lucy was figuring it out (mostly on her own), she would sit down with the person who, say, was about to have surgery, and ask her to think about every single thing she does in her everyday life. Then Lucy would be the point person for the friends and relatives who wanted to help with the various tasks, asking them to sign up for different things on different days. The power of the system is that helpers get to contribute in ways that best suit their talents and preferences and schedules, and no one person or set of persons feels overburdened. The person in need of help can specify what she does and doesn’t want, when she wants it, and then focus on healing — without always worrying about asking for help.”

“Anyone 55+ from the county of Santa Barbara can join the Village for a monthly fee. Then, with one call or email to the Village, members can usually get what they need — often for free — from someone in the Village; or they can get referred to someone or some service from the outside, often at a discount. Membership fees are on the high side because Santa Barbara is such an expensive place to live (though scholarships and more affordable rates are available). In other places, Village fees are lower. A few don’t charge at all.”

“Across the many Villages, what members ask for most is a ride. Usually one of the trained and vetted volunteers helps with that. Local members have also gotten help with errands, housekeeping, filing and organizing, techie troubleshooting, replacing lightbulbs and batteries, and finding info. Some want friendly visits or daily phone check-ins. Other members are the caregivers for parents, partners, or loved ones who need constant attention, and what they want most from the Village is a break. When someone from the Village comes by for a while, the caregivers can finally get some time to themselves.

Sometimes the help that Village members need is beyond the expertise of the volunteers or staff or fellow members. In those instances, the Village functions as a concierge service, putting members in touch with the roofers, accountants, computer experts, professional drivers, and others, all of whom have been screened and typically provide their services at a discount to Village members. Then Village staff follow up to make sure that members were satisfied with their experiences.”

“Though the federal government funds long-term care for the elderly, they’re overwhelmingly focused on nursing-home care. Activists, such as Henry Cisneros, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, have been urging a shift in resources toward more community-based solutions (such as Villages), with some success. Seniors who can stay in their own homes longer seem to be happier, healthier, and more socially and civically engaged. The tab for the services they use is a lot less too.”

Living Solo

“In 1950 (the first year for which there’s data), solo living was rare. In 11 countries (of the 19 for which data was available), no more than 12% of all households were one-person households, and in only one nation did the number top 20% (Sweden had 21%). By 2010, living alone had became commonplace. Data was available from 29 nations, and in only three of them — China, Mexico, and India — did one-person households make up 12% or fewer of all households. (Brazil, Argentina, and Chile reported data from the previous decade, and those numbers were similarly low.) Sweden led the world in solo living again; 49% of its households were one-person, followed by Finland at 41% and Norway at 40%.

In 41 or the 42 nations, solo living increased over time. The most dramatic increase happened in Japan, where only 5% of all households were one-person in 1950, but 31% were by 2010. Only in India did the rate of solo-dwelling remain flat, at 4%.”

“In the 16th century, it was unusual for anyone to have a room of their own, much less an entire apartment or house. ‘Houses were full of people, much more so than today, and privacy was unknown. Moreover, rooms didn’t have specialized functions.’ Typically, houses had just 1–2 rooms for as many as two dozen people, including workers as well as family. ‘It was 100+ years later that rooms to which the individual could retreat from public view came into being — they were called ‘privacies.’

‘Within a household, privacy was rarely possible, even in bed; and since households served multiple functions (educational, commercial, etc.), they were, in turn, under constant guidance and surveillance from the community.

Eventually, rooms designated specifically as bedrooms, with doors that shut, became popular, but the rise of private dwellings was much slower. Many decades passed, and still, by 1950, less than 10% of all American households had just one person. A faint stirring of social forces pushed that number to nearly 13% by 1960. Then all demographic hell broke loose. By 1970, more than 17% of all households were one-person; by 1980, it was more than 22%. Afterward, the climb slowed, but it never stopped. In 2013, 27% of all households were maintained by solo dwellers.”

“Fortunately, alongside the tired old tales of those ‘poor’ single women is a counter-narrative. It is one of strength, fulfillment, and independence. That story is often told of women who live alone.

By living alone instead of with a husband and children, women are liberated from traditional roles and expectations. They’re no longer the short-order cook, the cleaner-upper, and the laundress for a house full of family. They’re freed of the emotional work of shoring up egos and soothing bruised feelings. They don’t have to account to someone else for the money they spend. They also learn how to do the kinds of things that husbands traditionally do — or they find someone else to hire or help.

What’s often less noticed is what men get out of living alone. Researchers Jamieson and Sampson have noticed, though. They point out that as more and more men (and women) live alone in their early adult years, they’re learning all sorts of skills that used to be the balliwick of the other gender. In married life, for example, women were traditionally the kinkeepers and the social schedulers. They kept in touch with family, kept up with friends, arranged social gatherings, and covered all of the other social and emotional tasks of the couple.

In their interviews with people living alone and in their review of the relevant writings, the authors found, as did I, that most men living alone today have good social skills.”

“Today’s married couples are not as enmeshed as they once were. A study of couples in 2000 and twenty years earlier showed that spouses in 2000 were less likely to have their main meal together, work around the house together, go out for fun together, or have as many shared friends as did the couples from 1980.”

Friendship

“In the stories we tell each other about the workings of society, it’s the married people and the traditional families who are holding us all together. Single people — especially those who live alone — are the isolates, holed up in their apartments, lonely and friendless. Yet when social scientists do systematic research, they find something quite different. Results of several studies — some of them based on representative national surveys — show that it is the single people, and not the married ones, who are creating and sustaining the ties that bind us. Single people are more likely than married people to do what it takes to keep grown siblings together. They also spend more time helping, encouraging, and socializing with neighbors and friends. Singles are more likely to live with relatives than married people are, and they do more than their share of caring for aging relatives or others in need. Asked the question ‘Do you currently or have you ever regularly looked after someone, for at least three months, who is sick, disabled, or elderly?’ it was the single people, more often than the married, who said yes. Single people also visit their parents more and exchange help with them more, even when their parents are still relatively young and healthy.

An ideology of marriage and coupling that is celebrated in popular culture is intensive coupling. Couples who invest in it really do see each other as The One.

[They] look to each other for companionship, intimacy, caring, friendship, advice, the sharing of the tasks and finances of household and family, and just about everything else. They are the repositories for each other’s hopes and dreams. They are each other’s soulmates and sole mates.

A friendship model is about the ones instead of The One. A friendship relationship is usually specialized rather than comprehensive. We can have friends who are great for socializing, others who feed our passions, some who are always there in a pinch, and a few who always know what to say and how to listen. Ideally, friends are not envious of the other friends in our lives; they know that friendship is not supposed to be possessive.

As young adults step into their first marriages at older and older ages (or not at all), as the rate of divorce remains high, and as women continue to outlive men, more and more Americans are finding that they cannot draw a spouse in the center of their social circles — they don’t have one. As more and more individuals live their entire adult lives without ever raising kids, they are finding other people to be there for them in later life — and earlier in their life too. As family size continues to dwindle, individuals are growing up with fewer siblings — if any. That, too, changes the potential look of the social convoys that accompany contemporary Americans over the course of their lives.”

“With little cultural celebration or even recognition, friendships have emerged as the essential 21st century relationship. National surveys of Americans aged 25–74 have shown that adults have an average of ten people they see or talk to at least once a week, and a few more online-only friends.

The values exemplified by friendship also grow ascendant, as they’re the values of modern life.

Modernity believes in equality, and friendships, unlike traditional relationships, are egalitarian. Modernity believes in individualism. Friendships serve no public purpose and exist independent of all other bonds. Modernity believes in choice. Friendships, unlike blood ties, are elective; indeed, the rise of friendship coincided with the shift away from arranged marriage. Modernity believes in self-expression. Friends, because we choose them, give us back an image of ourselves. Modernity believes in freedom. Even modern marriage entails contractual obligations, but friendship involves no fixed commitments. The modern temper runs toward unrestricted fluidity and flexibility, the endless play of possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal, improvisational nature of friendship. We can be friends with whomever we want, however we want, for as long as we want.”

“When needs are more serious or more sustained, friendship circles can be invaluable. That’s what Diane Dew discovered when she had two broken arms, and what Lucy Whitworth experienced when her 49 angels organized to help her through her recovery from cancer. Brigades of friends are godsends to the helpers as well as the person needing the help. When there are lots of helping hands, individual helpers can contribute what they’re comfortable giving, when they’re free to give it. No one is saddled with the role of the sole caregiver for long periods of time; and the accompanying psychological and physical costs so often suffered even by those whose caring comes from a place of profound love.”

Conclusion

“Lifespace pioneers have dealt with the challenge of scriptlessness by writing their own scripts. The arrangements of their lives are the prized products of much thoughtfulness and deliberation. They are living their lives mindfully. Adults who come together only as parents (and not romantic partners) discuss more different topics more deeply than most conventional couples ever do. Single moms who sign up for CoAbode fill out lengthy questionnaires. Paul and the others in Marice’s home are talking through their understandings of how they will live together; their house rules are a work in progress. When Diane Dew sought to become a member of the Mariposa Grove cohousing community, she answered 12 pages of questions. Many cohousing communities ask prospective members to spend a substantial amount of time in the community first, so the new people and the old can feel confident about the fit.

Little by little, the wisdom of the lifespace pioneers is becoming systematized and shared. Those who have mindfully shared a home, or have deliberately lived apart from the romantic partner they love, or have created contemporary versions of multigenerational living, or have spearheaded ways of living the new old age, are writing books about their experiences, which sometimes include tips and quiz questions and worksheets. Conferences on cohousing and other intentional communities include panels and workshops on consensus decision-making and other aspects of community live. Sites such as CoHousing.com, IC.org, NationalSharedHousing.org, CoAbode.com, and FamilyByDesign.com all include generous sections of resources, often with thoughtful discussions. Future generations will be able to continue to live mindfully in a variety of lifespaces, while benefiting from the wisdom of their predecessors.”

“For innovations to work, laws and policies will need to be reimagined. Zoning laws enacted specifically to discourage the additions of mother-in-law apartments and the conversions of garages need to be rewritten to reflect the new American lifespaces. Policies built on narrow views of what counts as family need to be challenged. We all need to transcend our familiar ways of thinking about how to live, recognizing, for instance, that four 60-something women sharing a house do not constitute a there-goes-the-neighborhood threat!”