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When she was 29 and facing health issues, writer Samantha Paige Rosen made an unexpected decision to move back home with her parents, Patty and Stu.
She’d stay for the next six years – an arrangement that elicited questions: When would she find her own place? Why wasn’t she partnered up? Even as these years brought the family closer together and helped Ms. Rosen repair her health, she found herself defending her choices.
The experience left her seeking out others organizing their lives differently around connection and care. Ms. Rosen’s new anthology Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection collects 15 essays and six Q&A’s broadening our concept of home beyond the single-family household.
Samantha Paige Rosen’s new book ‘Living, Together’ considers how broadening our concept of home past the single-family household could help ease an epidemic of loneliness.Laura Piccoli/Supplied
The submissions, from across the United States, follow siblings moving in together, grandparents cohabitating with their adult kids to help raise young children, and friends sharing homes. Ms. Rosen finds co-housing communities where neighbours get to witness every stage of life and support each other. She interviews nomads who live out of their vehicles and look out for one another on the road, and talks to the brains behind a planned neighbourhood bringing together families adopting foster children with seniors who serve as surrogate grandparents.
They are ways of living that diverge from the conventional path of marriage-children-single family home, expanding possibilities for the future of housing.
In this country, nuclear households have been on a steady decline, the share of children living with two married parents falling to 63 per cent in 2021 from nearly 94 per cent in 1961, according to Statistics Canada. Other living arrangements are on the upswing. From 2001 to 2021, roommate households increased by 54 per cent, while intergenerational households, homes with two or more families, and families living with other people jumped by 45 per cent.
Ms. Rosen argues that for some people, these types of communal arrangements are more valuable in easing isolation, aiding with aging, caregiving and the expense of housing, bringing them into closer proximity with friends, family and those they connect with over shared values.
The author spoke from Penn Valley, Pa., where she and her parents now live in neighbouring townhouses.
Rosen moved back home with her parents when she was 29, while dealing with health issues. They now live in adjacent townhouses in the same complex.Samantha Paige Rosen/Supplied
Despite a housing crisis, we remain skeptical of adults living with others who aren’t their spouses or children. You begin your anthology with an appeal to stop glorifying the nuclear family home this way. Why?
There was an Atlantic article by David Brooks about the nuclear family being a myth. He made the point that it was really only successful for about a decade from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, when women stayed home and ran the household, and neighbours were incredibly interdependent and watched each other’s kids. Since then, all the context has changed, support-wise.
One of your contributors, Sarah Thankam Mathews, says organizing our lives exclusively around the suburban, nuclear family home is a “recipe for long-term loneliness.” How do you see this model risking disconnection?
Before industrialization, people lived on family farms or close by, working the family business. They migrated less and had family nearby.
With the rise of the more detached nuclear family, it’s not encouraged to ask for help. There is this emphasis on independence. If you’re independent, you’re successful. If you need help, you’re kind of a mess.
But there are so many stages in life when people need help, and parents are just two people. That’s a big part of the loneliness. It’s not that we only need more people around because we need help. We need people because we need sounding boards, joy and laughter.
People aiding each other: How does it factor in these alternative models?
People helping one another are at the centre. Dani McClain’s essay is about moving back with her six-year-old daughter to the house where she grew up, to help her mother after a stroke. McClain is incredibly direct about how much she is overexerting herself. But she also sees how easily she can do things that are so difficult for her mother.
Adam Vitcavage’s essay is about moving in with his sister in their twenties, after her divorce. The siblings lived together for four years. He taught his sister how to be more self-sufficient, and she helped him blow up less and grow up.
Adam moved out when he met his wife. He just had a baby, and his sister was considering living on his street. His mom might move nearby. The interesting thing about communal living is that it opens a door to interdependence. When you become flexible in this capacity, that door is always open.
Others are turning to friends. Contributor Rhaina Cohen buys a house with her husband and another close couple, saying she’s “hacked adulthood.” Is this idea resonating with younger generations facing financial strain?
What I see with the younger generation is an aversion to coupledom. There’s more of an openness to community. Adam Meyer, a contributor who was 25 when we talked, his dream living situation is an apartment where everyone on your floor is your friend.
The more young people see real examples of alternative ways of living, the more they realize what’s possible. If you’re feeling isolated, under supported or trapped financially in your home life, not being able to see how things could be different – this is what loneliness is made of.
Do the people in your book see their choices as Plan B – as settling?
Some of us are doing this because we need support, because something went wrong. Some choose to do it because it’s more interesting and freeing.
Suanne Carlson, co-founder of the Nevada-based Homes on Wheels Alliance, lived in a nuclear family household for most of her life. Her daughter passed away from cancer. After this tragedy, she felt deeply that she had to be in nature and be moving around. This was healing to her.
She drove from state to state, spending her winters in one place, her summers in another, travelling to see different loved ones. Meeting with other nomads – people travelling by vehicle either by choice or circumstance – there is a like-mindedness on the road. They don’t see each other all the time, so when they do meet up, there’s no small talk. They get down to what’s important.
You also followed older people aging in co-housing, where neighbours have their own living quarters but share common spaces, including central kitchens, courtyards and vegetable gardens. What do they hope for as they grow older in these places?
Kate Madden Yee wrote about the co-housing community she founded with friends 20 years ago in Oakland, Calif. She’s considering whether this is where she’ll retire. She looks to her 85-year-old neighbour Louise and how the community has been there for her.
Louise didn’t think she was going to get old. She was hiking a mountain when she was 78. She’s an activist. When Louise did need help, her neighbours stepped in for her. That’s not to say that regular neighbours wouldn’t. But the shared values of a co-housing community – where the idea is being close in proximity and helpful to one another – meant her neighbours were more attuned to her needs.
Why did you extend this project beyond housing, to community? There’s an LGBTQ writer estranged from relatives finding chosen family; military wives connecting in new towns; mutual aid networks mushrooming in the pandemic.
The desire for interdependence is also there for those who don’t feel like living with others. I wanted to show different ways of enriching your life with people, whether it’s opening your home with regular dinner parties, or chosen family who live 15 minutes away.
After six years of living living with mom Patty and dad Stu, Rosen came to see her parents as friends.Samantha Paige Rosen/Supplied
After your parents downsized the family home you shared, you all bought townhouses in the same complex. What are your routines now?
My parents live 30 seconds away, across the parking lot, so I can come over for a meal or a TV show, spur of the moment. Every Tuesday night, when my mom plays canasta with her friends, my dad and I have soup and watch a TV show together at his house or at my house.
I found out I didn’t like living with bad roommates, or alone. I enjoy the dynamic of having someone in my space, without having to plan to see them. There is something so fun about being able to share casual space and time with people who love you, and who you love back.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
