It’s been a heck of a weird year so far, and what with quarantines and pandemics and protests and everyone’s ensuing mental health crises, I know a lot of group houses that have seen significant internal strife, my own house among them. So I’m writing this not necessarily because I think it’s insightful, but because I think it might be healing (or, failing that, at least explanatory).
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When choosing housemates, you’re usually thinking along the lines of, “Are these people interesting to talk to, financially responsible, and generally non-odious to live with?” You probably want to have in place mechanisms for conflict resolution, but those conflicts will likely be along the lines of “should we hire cleaners or just be stricter about chores?” or “how late at night is it okay to play music?” – relatively low-stakes. In many cases, you can also just move out if you find you have irreconcilable conflicts, which puts an upper bound on how bad the situation can get.
But lately, we’ve been thrown into a world where the housemate question is more, “Do I trust these people to make life-and-death decisions for me and be arbiters of my every action, and do we have conflicting neuroses that will drive us crazy if we’re forced to spend every day together for the foreseeable future?” To me, that sounds a whole lot like marriage, and I sure as hell wouldn’t marry someone on the basis of, “well, they happened to be there and seem pretty okay overall.” (I don’t even want to marry my wonderful boyfriend of three years!) And while moving is always costly, it’s much more so in a world where you can’t have other people come in your house and touch your stuff, you can’t feel safe renting a car to move the stuff yourself, travel is very limited, and wherever you move to is where you’ll have to spend nearly 100% of your time.
In the archetypical marriage – a close and trusting relationship between two people who love each other – you can sit down and talk through major problems, and come to really understand one another’s point of view, hopefully bringing you to a compromise that doesn’t hurt anyone. In a California-standard social bubble of 12 people, it’s difficult to do the same. Even small decisions require an hour of discussion, you have less emotional safety than you would in a one-on-one discussion with someone you love, and even if everyone does share their honest emotional perspective, it’s often impossible to come to a decision that doesn’t hurt anyone. And for me at least, it’s impossible to care about 11 other people’s emotions to nearly the extent that I care about my boyfriend’s, which makes for a less productive decision-making environment.
All that is to say – the many fights and housemate breakups that have arisen in the past few months don’t mean that anyone involved is a bad person, or that the people can’t ever be friends again. It just means you weren’t ready to get married. And that’s okay.
Housemate conflicts
It’s been a heck of a weird year so far, and what with quarantines and pandemics and protests and everyone’s ensuing mental health crises, I know a lot of group houses that have seen significant internal strife, my own house among them. So I’m writing this not necessarily because I think it’s insightful, but because I think it might be healing (or, failing that, at least explanatory).
---
When choosing housemates, you’re usually thinking along the lines of, “Are these people interesting to talk to, financially responsible, and generally non-odious to live with?” You probably want to have in place mechanisms for conflict resolution, but those conflicts will likely be along the lines of “should we hire cleaners or just be stricter about chores?” or “how late at night is it okay to play music?” – relatively low-stakes. In many cases, you can also just move out if you find you have irreconcilable conflicts, which puts an upper bound on how bad the situation can get.
But lately, we’ve been thrown into a world where the housemate question is more, “Do I trust these people to make life-and-death decisions for me and be arbiters of my every action, and do we have conflicting neuroses that will drive us crazy if we’re forced to spend every day together for the foreseeable future?” To me, that sounds a whole lot like marriage, and I sure as hell wouldn’t marry someone on the basis of, “well, they happened to be there and seem pretty okay overall.” (I don’t even want to marry my wonderful boyfriend of three years!) And while moving is always costly, it’s much more so in a world where you can’t have other people come in your house and touch your stuff, you can’t feel safe renting a car to move the stuff yourself, travel is very limited, and wherever you move to is where you’ll have to spend nearly 100% of your time.
In the archetypical marriage – a close and trusting relationship between two people who love each other – you can sit down and talk through major problems, and come to really understand one another’s point of view, hopefully bringing you to a compromise that doesn’t hurt anyone. In a California-standard social bubble of 12 people, it’s difficult to do the same. Even small decisions require an hour of discussion, you have less emotional safety than you would in a one-on-one discussion with someone you love, and even if everyone does share their honest emotional perspective, it’s often impossible to come to a decision that doesn’t hurt anyone. And for me at least, it’s impossible to care about 11 other people’s emotions to nearly the extent that I care about my boyfriend’s, which makes for a less productive decision-making environment.
All that is to say – the many fights and housemate breakups that have arisen in the past few months don’t mean that anyone involved is a bad person, or that the people can’t ever be friends again. It just means you weren’t ready to get married. And that’s okay.