Living With Roommates Is Sorely Underrated

Milholland (standing) shares a Thai breakfast at home with friends and housemates on Feb. 2, 2019. Credit - Shawn Linehan

In March, a group of U.K. biologists, zoologists, and chemical ecologists published the latest results of a long-term study on group living among wild great tits. (Yes: wild great tits—birds.) In the winter of 2018, they tracked 105 great tits at two sites in the Wytham Woods, curious to test whether these small birds’ social networks influenced what they ate. This turned out to be the case—the scientists found that when the tits had larger social networks and were embedded in more expansive communities, they felt safer taking risks and eating new foods. The researchers call this “social learning.” These findings echoed the results of other avian studies: group living allows for more complex cooperative hunting, more terrain covered in search of food, and a greater ability to avoid predators.

Assuming you’re not a biologist or ethologist, when you read the words “group living,” what comes to your mind? A sloppy college dorm experience? Hippies baking sawdust into bread? A cult with a charismatic overlord? An institutional home for elders? Typically, the words “group living” conjure two contradictory ideas: on the one hand, too much disorderliness and chaos—a messy house with trash bags that haven’t been taken to the curb—and on the other, too much order, too many rules, too many gurus. In both cases, absolute lack of privacy.

These ideas are out of touch. Group living continues to be stigmatized and misunderstood, but it is widespread and long-lived. The nuclear family is a relatively recent ideal, built on a racist, classist foundation. Before the 1930s, multigenerational households in the U.S. were the standard. Even today, just shy of one-third of adults live with a fellow adult who’s not their spouse, romantic partner, or a college student, and more people in the world live in communal settings than nuclear ones. Group living represents a galaxy of ways to structure our home lives. In the face of growing economic disparity, unaffordable housing, the loneliness epidemic, and women’s disproportionate domestic labor, we need to become more flexible in how we conceptualize family and home.

For the past 17 years, I’ve lived in a communal household in Portland, Ore., with three (and sometimes more) housemates. Living together has been a tactic for financial survival. I moved into the house in 2007, during the first throes of the Great Recession. Most of my roommates were and are artists with unimpressive salaries. And we’re not the only ones struggling. On the West Coast, we face an acute housing crisis that has obliterated the possibility that most people could buy a house, yet home ownership is still presented as the foundation of financial security. Many of our neighbors within the working class can’t get a mortgage, minimum-wage workers can’t afford rent on market-rate apartments, and the number of people without shelter rises all the time. Group living isn’t a solution to housing inequity, but sharing costs can make the difference between being able to afford a roof over our heads and living on the street.

Despite all the factors that should encourage it, our culture still views group living as a hassle to be avoided. The dream is a posh apartment or an orderly, single-family home with a bathroom for each occupant, a washer and dryer, and a two-car garage. Communal arrangements are seen as a toll paid by the poor, the young, and counterculture weirdos. While I don’t think everyone needs to live in a communal household, we’d all benefit from exorcizing stigmas that are out of date. The single-family home tells us the only meaningful life is one lived in isolation. What a paltry premise for growing up and growing old.

Read More: Meet the Friends Buying Houses Together

There are many wonderful reasons to choose group living for its own merits. Learning how to share space thoughtfully and making time for others can combat the currents of isolation, alienation, loneliness, and apathy. Group living can also make it easier to live lighter on the land, spend less money by sharing resources like that car and those appliances, and divide domestic activities, including care work, which is traditionally done by women and, consequently, devalued. In my experience, when the group is a little larger than a couple, it’s easier to give without tallying the score and to take without feeling guilty. Remove the financial incentives, and I’d still stay right where I am—my life is richer for it.

My housemates and I give each other the gifts of time and camaraderie. We hang out, often in the kitchen while cooking or over a shared meal. As among the wild great tits, our flock has expanded what I feel safe and excited to eat by sharing foods they love with me. Our meals together feel intentional, considered. Because we’re enmeshed in each other’s lives, we expose one another to new ideas, inspire each other to take risks, expand how we engage with the world, and take care of each other. We also offer each other privacy when we ask for it. Over time, we’ve built bonds of affection and familiarity. Borrowing the vocabulary of ethology, this is also “social learning.”

Of course, none of this is guaranteed. I’ve lived in a group setting that wasn’t built on a common commitment to each other, and it was worse than living alone. We all know that one can feel very lonely and unseen inside of a family, as well. But adults can choose each other for compatibility rather than yielding to genetics or dorm-room assignments.

I feel less lonely when a conversation with a friend is as easy to spark as walking into the living room. I feel more capable when I have companionship while I’m processing hard things. I also know the relief of coming home to friends who will make me laugh, watch a show with me, and cook me dinner when I’ve had a bad day. These are the moments I cherish: watching John Woo movies while sick on the couch and wrapped in blankets, or slowly going about our morning routines, ricocheting off each other gently as we make coffee and eat toast. In real time, these moments glide by without grabbing attention, but cumulatively, they constitute the texture of our lives.

Recently, I’ve been wondering what to call our household unit. The contemporary name for a group like ours is a chosen family. While I like those words, they feel both broad and fuzzy, like an image projected awkwardly over a familiar three-dimensional form. We have many words for groups of birds: a colony, an unkindness, a parliament, a chattering. A murder, a flamboyance, a quilt, a convocation. An exaltation, a scold, an asylum, a descent. Each of these collective nouns expresses something about the communal experience—the challenges of decision-making, the loudness of many voices, the treachery of intimacy, the delights of it. No doubt, most variations of group living are raucous and complex, but they offer social connections that may keep us safe and help us thrive. Our lives fill with new meaning when we’re together.

Group Living and Other Recipes: A Memoir on Amazon | Bookshop | Barnes & Noble

Contact us at letters@time.com.