How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century

CONTENTS

NOT GOING NUCLEAR

So Many Ways to Live and Love

1. HOW WE LIVE NOW

Finding Our Place, Our Space, and Our People

2. ONE BIG, HAPPY FAMILY

Relatives Sharing and Caring

3. ONE BIG, HAPPY FRIENDSHIP

Housemates Go Long and Deep

4. LIVING IN A COMMUNITY

From Neighbors to Friends

5. NOT-SO-SINGLE PARENTS

Finding New Kinds of Community

6. THE NEW COUPLES

So Happy Not Together

7. LIFESPACES FOR THE NEW OLD AGE

Institutions Begone!

8. THERE’S NOTHING SWEETER THAN SOLITUDE

Living Alone

REVOLUTIONS IN LIVING, NOW AND IN THE FUTURE

Acknowledgments

About Bella DePaulo

Notes

Bibliography

To my siblings, Peter, Lisa, and Joseph

And to lifespace pioneers everywhere, finding their place, their space, and their people, and inspiring us all

NOT GOING NUCLEAR

So Many Ways to Live and Love

I’ve been writing about single life for many years, in academic articles, in my book Singled Out, and in blogs such as Living Single at PsychologyToday.com. I take on just about every aspect of single life that is of interest to people who want to live their single lives fully and joyfully. In 2010, I wrote a blog post, Not Going Nuclear: So Many Ways to Live and Love, with the tagline, Increasingly, households and personal communities are not anchored by couples. Right away, readers began to share stories of their own non-nuclear ways of living that they had found magical. They talked about their communities of friends from their young adult lives and the extended families of their childhood. They lovingly described people who were not relatives yet had been invited into their homes and their lives. They admitted to their envy of couples who are truly committed to being with each other for the long term but not to living together. Rather than attracting trolls, the discussion generated reactions such as, Your comment brings tears to my eyes.

Other readers emailed their stories to me rather than posting them online. That continued long after the post was published. The topic had captured their imagination and their emotions. Still, I may not have pursued the matter any further if I hadn’t noticed something else—lots of people were talking about this beyond my one little blog post. Within just a few years, stories about imaginative living arrangements appeared in major newspapers and news services such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Reuters, in sections ranging from garden and homes to aging, to the national and regional pages and the opinion pages. Magazines such as the Atlantic, Time, Newsweek/Daily Beast, More, SmartMoney, Elle, and Dwell all described innovations in living. Segments aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. Regional media highlighted local examples, and bloggers of many stripes swapped stories and shared fantasies.

It was time to take the topic seriously. I wanted to learn more about the creative ways of living that today’s adults are fashioning. I wanted to go beyond the mostly brief sketches that had been published and explore in greater depth the psychology of the choices people are making. I wanted to know how people living in different ways get help when they need it and companionship when they want it. I wondered what home means to people who are not living with family. I wanted to hear about the different arrangements people tried, what worked for them and what didn’t, and what they learned about themselves along the way.

So, I spent a few years traveling from coast to coast, interviewing Americans in their homes. Men and women ranging in age from nineteen to ninety-one told their stories. More than four hundred others described their places, their spaces, and their people in a survey I posted online; their observations also shaped my understandings.

Some of the innovations I learned about in my research were contemporary inflections of longstanding traditions. Living with a group of friends under one roof, for example, is no longer just a young-adult way of living. That arrangement has become so popular among women of a certain age that there is an organization devoted to making it happen; it is, of course, called Golden Girl Homes. Multigenerational homes might sound old-fashioned, but they, too, have become increasingly popular over the past decades. The twenty-first-century versions accommodate more generations and more diverse sets of relatives than ever before.

I don’t think I fully appreciated, before starting this project, the depth of some Americans’ yearning for the communal experiences of village life. I had never heard of cohousing communities, in which people create neighborhoods with homes arranged around an open, green space. The special twenty-first-century adaptation of village life is that autonomy matters as much as interconnectedness. Cohousing residents share a common house, where they typically meet a few times a week to share meals, but they have their own private homes or apartments as well.

The cherishing of autonomy and independence among today’s adults is reflected in the record number of people who live alone—in the United States and around the world. It was news to me—of the very best kind—that there is a modern-day innovation dedicated to fulfilling the lifestyle wishes of people like me. At sixty-one, as I look ahead to my later years, what I want most is to stay in my own place, on my own, as long as possible. Thanks to the national Village movement, that is more attainable now than it has ever been before.

Some of the ways of living that I discovered are utterly contemporary. I had not known that there is a nationwide registry, called CoAbode, of tens of thousands of single mothers looking to live with other single mothers 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.

Lifespace Literature

Until now, there has been no unifying concept or name to tie together the stories that have been written about the ways we currently live. I’ll call the topic lifespace literature. It is about the lives we envision and then build around our places, our spaces, and our people. It taps into Americans’ obsession with real estate and with the popular best-places-to-live features, but goes beyond that relatively narrow focus to incorporate the people who are important to us and our own psychological relationships to places and spaces and people. It recognizes that a place to live is also a way to live, and we have never had as many choices as we do now.

In this book, I pull together many media accounts of contemporary experiments in living and put them in the context of the changing demographics and values of American society. I also draw from social-science research, some of it my own, to make sense of how we are living now. Why are our choices so different than they were in the past, and why, in some instances, are they so very similar? Many of the studies I describe were based on representative national samples, so they transcend any of the idiosyncrasies of the particular set of people I interviewed.

The heart and soul of this book are the people who let me into their homes and their lives. I didn’t know what to expect when I sent out tentative feelers. Years later, I am still blown away by the graciousness and openness of the people who responded. They told me their stories, warts and all, knowing that they would be released like balloons into the publishing air and not knowing into whose backyard they might land.

The people I interviewed do not make up a very large group, and they do not capture the experiences of all Americans. Their lifespaces are just a sampling of the many creative ways that people are living in twenty-first-century America. Still, I hope their stories will help readers realize how many attractive options they have now and inspire them to think up some new ones.

Some of the people I interviewed asked me to use a pseudonym. I use the real names of the other people—either their first names or their full names, as requested. The ages I report are from the time of the interviews.

When I ask people what matters to them in deciding how and with whom to live, they mention everything from dealing with the tasks of everyday life to existential concerns about who will care for them in later life. On a psychological level, there are two things that just about everyone wants, though in vastly different proportions. You won’t find them mentioned in real-estate circulars, in reports from demographers about the ways we live, or (with rare exceptions) in the writings of architects, builders, or city planners. They want time with other people and time to themselves.

Everyone is seeking just the right mix of sociability and solitude, with both easy to come by. Sarah Stokes, who lives on her own, sometimes has so many social invitations that she stops answering her phone. Other times, though, her social circle is too quiet, and she is disheartened by having to be the one to initiate.

By living in cohousing, Karen Hester has found a way to have a place of her own and easy sociability too. Just steps outside her door, she finds neighbors in the courtyard or in the common house. There are community dinners several times a week, and a day now and then when the group comes together to keep the grounds in good shape. Anja Woltman and Tricia Hoffman live at opposite ends of a duplex, so each has a home of her own as well as a friend right next door. Robert Jones lives with his brother and sister-in-law in a big old Southern house in a charming small town. He finds his easy sociability, though, with his poker buddies and his theater group, and the neighbors he sees every day as he walks to work.

In choosing a way to live, people are also regulating access to themselves in ways that are both profound and mundane. Whether they end up satisfied with their situations depends on the fit between what they want psychologically and what their living arrangements afford. The important questions include:

 To what extent do you want to know other people and be known by them?

 How much control do you want over the depth to which you are known by other people?

 Do you like the sense of presence of other people?

 Is solitude something you enjoy now and then or something you crave?

People who want to know other people and be known to them are happy to engage in the day-to-day exchanges of pleasantries, but they don’t want their contacts with their fellow humans to end there. They want to be friends and not just acquaintances.

A New York Times story captured the essence of the conditions conducive to the development of close friendships, as documented in social-science research: proximity, repeated and unplanned interactions, and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.1 The rhythms of cohousing, with regular or semiregular dinners, meetings, and the occasional workdays—together with the spontaneous chats along the pathways of neighborly spaces—offer magnificent opportunities to develop relationships with breadth and depth. In cohousing, relationships can grow in their own good time. The more deliberative versions of house-sharing, which go beyond mere roommate mentalities, are also rich with the potential for forming close, personal bonds.

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. When I visit Diane Dew, who lives on the first floor of a two-story building, I notice that the people on the top story across the way could probably see into her windows. That might make some people feel observed and self-conscious. Diane, though, tells me that she loves opening her shades in the morning and waving to the children eating breakfast near their kitchen window; they, in turn, blow kisses to her.

Not everyone wants closeness from the people around them. That’s what Lucy Whitworth learned from her community of women, who live in a house and two duplexes arranged around a generous stretch of gardens and fruit trees. Telling me about the kinds of people who have fit into their group well over the years, Lucy said that it was important that you don’t mind if people know about who you are.

The sense of the presence of other people, though distracting to some, can be reassuring to others. One of two widows who live next door to each other told me that in the evenings, when she looks outside, she is comforted by the sight of the light on in the home of her friend. Marianne Kilkenny, who shares a house with four other people, likes the privacy she has in her own suite. At the same time, she enjoys hearing the soft sounds of her housemates going about their daily routines outside her door. She missed that when she lived alone.

Just about everyone I interview wants at least some private time. I thought for a moment that I had found one person who doesn’t, Danica Meek, a twenty-one-year-old who lives in a tiny room in a big house that she shares with one other woman and three men. When I ask Danica what she likes to do by herself, she can’t think of anything at first. Then she says she might like to do some writing but has not done any yet. As we continue to talk, though, she mentions how much she enjoys being the first one up in the morning and starting her day in peaceful solitude. Len, a ninety-one-year-old widower who opened his home to his daughters and grandsons, does not see the appeal of living alone. But he also shares with me what he remembers of a quote from Einstein: Being alone can be painful in youth but sweet in old age.

For some, solitude feels more like a need or a craving than a mere desire. Arlia, who has a committed relationship but insists on living on her own, explains that she requires time alone to get centered and balanced, to feel solid.

How We Live Now opens, in chapter 1, with a sneak peek of some of the innovative lifespaces that anchor the subsequent chapters. That chapter is also the place where I offer a nod of appreciation to some of the dreamy lifespaces of the past, including some of the better-known ones (the hippie communes) and a few that are less well-known but had so very much to offer (such as a city that was built to cater to single parents). I’ll also spoil the ending and tell you what I’ve concluded, after years of research, about the relationship that I think is the most significant one in twenty-first-century American life: it is friendship.

The book begins with lifespaces involving the most togetherness and then proceeds to the ones offering the most privacy and solitude. Chapter 2 is about a way of living that is not so new but has been newly embraced in the past few decades: sharing a home with two or three or even four generations of family, or with extended family or adult siblings. Chapter 3 is also about people who live under the same roof with other people; but this time the housemates are friends or acquaintances who soon became friends, rather than family. The people featured in chapter 4 all have their own private residences where they may be living alone, with friends, in a nuclear family or other family, or some combination. What makes them special is that they and the other people who live near them have decided that they want to live in a genuine community, where they get to know and care about each other, and become part of one another’s everyday lives. Toward the end of the book, in chapters 6 and 8, I share the stories of people who live alone. The people in chapter 6 are all in committed, long-term, coupled relationships, but they have chosen to live in places of their own. Chapter 8 is dedicated to single people who live alone.

Two groups of people—parents who are not couples (chapter 5) and seniors (chapter 7)—get special chapters. Some of the most innovative lifespaces have been created by people who are solo parents, or who are single and want to be parents but do not want to raise children on their own. Also remarkable are the many creative lifespaces imagined by today’s seniors, who looked at the too-frequent institutionalization of their elders and vowed not to let that happen to them.

Many of the people I profile could have fit in more than one chapter. There are, for example, single parents who live in cohousing, whose stories I tell in the chapter on living in community (chapter 4) rather than the chapter on single parenting (chapter 5). There are also seniors who are sharing a home with other seniors or living apart from the love of their life, whose stories I tell in chapters 3 and 6 rather than in the chapter on living arrangements for the new old age (chapter 7).

In my interviews, I talked to people who are not looking for the one perfect living situation. Instead, they believe that different arrangements suit them best at different times in their lives. Others simply crave novelty. Even if they like the way they are currently living, before long, they are itching to move on.

Then there are the people who really do want to find their ideal living situation and settle in to live their best, most authentic, and most meaningful life. 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.

Q: When you have been away for a while, how does it feel to come home?

A: I love it.

Q: What has been the most contented time in your life?

A: Right now.

Q: How long will you stay here?

A: They’ll carry me out of here.

1

HOW WE LIVE NOW

Finding Our Place, Our Space, and Our People

In the fall of 2012, an article in the Great Homes and Destinations section of the New York Times began like this:

In a slowly gentrifying section of Bushwick, Brooklyn, where gunshots are no longer heard and the local brothel has been turned into a family home, five friends made a 10-year commitment.

The group—two architectural designers, two fashion designers and one advertising executive, all in their 20s—rented 2,700 square feet of raw space and agreed to fix it up and live there for a decade. Two years into that commitment, it seems to be going pretty well.1

In just a few understated sentences, the Times captured a way of living that would have been nearly unthinkable not so very long ago. A confluence of cultural, demographic, and economic factors have turned the opening decades of the twenty-first century into a time of unprecedented innovation and experimentation as Americans search for their places, their spaces, and their people.

The choices of the five twentysomethings are remarkable in a number of ways:

 Demographics and relationships: The five men and women in their twenties are making a ten-year commitment, and it is not to a spouse or even to the goal of finding a spouse, though that is not out of the question. It is a commitment to one another; as friends. In 1956, the median age at which Americans first married was as young as it has ever been—22.5 for men and 20.1 for women. By 2013, though, the respective ages had jumped to 29.0 and 26.6—and that’s just for those who do marry.2 Today, the twenties can be devoted to all manner of pursuits; marriage and children, while still an aspiration for many, no longer dominate.

 Geography: They are staying in the city and not looking toward the suburbs. That’s new too. For the first time in at least two decades, cities and surrounding suburbs are growing faster than the regions beyond the suburbs.3

 Architecture and design: A century ago, many Americans were selecting houses from a Sears catalog. Now, adults can step into a big hunk of raw space that stretches beyond a space fit for a couple or a nuclear family, and envision a place they will call home.4

The friends have separate bedrooms. They share showers, a bathroom, and space for entertaining. They are also sharing their lives; they consider themselves family.

These five people could have followed a more familiar script. Instead, they dreamed. They designed their own lives, with their own place, their own space, and their own people.

Another group of young New Yorkers, all heterosexual single men, began living together just after they graduated from New York University. That was eighteen years before they were interviewed about their experiences by the New York Times.5 When the rent for their loft in Chelsea doubled after fourteen years, they could have gone their separate ways. But they are close friends, and they chose to look for another place they could share instead.

The four men, all approaching forty, found two stories of a concrete building in Queens that they affectionately call Fortress Astoria. The men have their own rooms (more like tiny apartments) and share a kitchen, living room, and garden. None of the bedrooms are adjoining, so the men have privacy when they want to bring dates home.

We are really close and care about each other deeply, one of the men said. And yet we give each other lots of space . . . We’ve got all the benefits of a family with very little of the craziness that normally comes along with them.

Not one of the men is a parent, but that doesn’t make them all that unusual. In 2012, the birthrate in the United States fell to the lowest level since 1920, when reliable records first became available.6

The ease and comfort they feel with one another is clearly one of the main attractions of the way the men live, but so is the money they save by splitting the rent and utilities four ways. Without the pressure of a pricier housing tab, the men can pursue circuitous, risky, and exhilarating career paths that the company men of eras past could not imagine. One of the friends tried an office job for a while. The health insurance was nice, but the work wasn’t. He is now a personal trainer. His roommates are in filmmaking, acting, and the design of role-playing fantasy games.

In a vibrant Seattle neighborhood, complete with markets, cultural venues, and convenient public transportation, a group of artists longed to find affordable housing. There wasn’t any. There was, though, an old hotel that captured the fancy of their dreamy minds. With help from the city, they converted the hotel into a cooperative home with twenty-one living spaces, including doubles, triples, and solo Zen units.7

The housemates—who range in age from nineteen to fifty—share kitchens, bathrooms, lounges, laundry facilities, and a roof deck. It is their responsibility to keep the building in good shape, but they throw work parties to get that done—so it doesn’t feel like a chore. They have potlucks at home and organize outings to local stomping grounds.

The Brooklyn, Queens, and Seattle stories are all examples of one of the newly fashionable ways of living in twenty-first-century America: under the same roof with people who are not your spouse or family. The bond that unites the housemates is not blood or marriage but friendship.

The trend, however, is not confined to urban areas, to young adults, or to artistic types. All across the nation, unrelated people who once went their separate ways (often with a spouse and kids in tow) are now living together.

Older people have proven themselves remarkable innovators. Americans are not just living longer than ever before, they are also staying healthy longer.8 They may need some help as they age, and the growing numbers who are divorced, widowed, or have always been single may want companionship, but most prefer to find those resources and people outside of institutional settings.9

And so they fantasize and make things happen. After AARP surveyed twelve hundred women forty-five and older about how they would like to live, the published report highlighted this quote from a fifty-seven-year-old: I keep telling my friends that we all need to buy a big house with a common area downstairs and live together—not like a nursing home but truly a place where we have communal living.10

That’s just what three women from Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, did. They were all divorced, living on their own, working full-time, and in great shape. They were in their fifties and concerned that maintaining their independence may not always be so easy. So, they set out to find a place they could share. It has now been about a decade that they have been living happily ever after in a charming five-bedroom brick Colonial on a tree-shaded corner lot.11

Just outside of Indianapolis, two single women, best friends for decades and accustomed to living on their own, also decided to live together. They were fifty-five and fifty-nine when they found a small three-bedroom home in a cozy community known as a pocket neighborhood.12 In Saratoga Springs, New York, another pair of longtime friends—one retired and the other on the cusp of retirement—sold the homes they owned and bought one together. In the single-level home, they each have their own bedroom, study, and bathroom down a long hallway from a big kitchen, dining room, and family room.

Grown Kids and Their Parents Staying Together

Another group of Americans is also, in growing numbers, living with people other than a spouse. They are young adults who are heading back home to live with their parents—or who never left. They are not just the youngest of the grown children but also those hugging the thirty-year-old milestone.

In 1980, hardly anyone in the twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-old demographic wanted to live with their parents, and only 11 percent actually did. That was the lowest percentage on record. By 2012, the rate had climbed to 23.6 percent. The recession of 2007 to 2009 provided part of the impetus for the homeward trek, but not all; the trendlines had been creeping up continuously since 1980.13

Some grown children, such as twenty-two-year-old Georgetown University graduate Aodhan Beirne, head back to their childhood bedrooms to sleep under their dinosaur blankets.14 Others find fresh ways to live at home while still maintaining a space of their own. Ella Jenkins, twenty-three, lives in her parents’ backyard in Frazier Park, California, in one of those undersize homes attracting outsize media attention. She built her mobile 130-square-foot house with the help of her stepfather. It may seem tiny to others, but it is welcoming and bright. I just feel this wonderful feeling of peace, she said. I just walk in and feel it’s huge.15

The sizeable number of young adults moving back in with their parents has caused a bit of a kerfuffle among the punditry. The kids are called the boomerang generation, the go-nowhere generation, and generation stuck. The moms and dads who take them in are called helicopter parents and worse. The critics, though, may be appraising this new trend through twentieth-century glasses.

Today’s young adults and their parents are not the same as the ones from the generation-gap years of the 1960s and 1970s, when many parents just could not fathom what their kids were thinking. They have more in common now: the invisible line between parent and child is dissolving.16

In a 2012 generations survey, the AARP asked young adults about their relationship with their parents, and they also asked boomers to describe their bonds with their parents when they were in their early twenties. In every way, the younger generation reported more connectedness with their parents than did the boomer generation. They said they talk with their parents more often and more deeply, see each other more often, and