I’ve just finished reading the memoir of group living expert Lola Mulholland (I promise it’s not about swingers). It’s about the different ways modern shared living can play out.
And which of you can tell me with a straight face you don’t love hearing and gossiping about other people’s flat dynamics.
I am an only child, so moving into a flat in second year has meant living with more people than ever before. It has taught me a lot and I want to learn more.
There’s no doubt the term “group living” comes with stigma! Mulholland says herself “the words group living still conjures extremes for me: the Rajneesh and his followers in central Oregon wearing handsome sunset colours, having group sex and doing whatever their guru and his chief executors included”. These realities do exist, she admits, but she also insists they are huge anomalies that take away from the simple case that most people in the world live in communal settings, and so, to stigmatise group living is to dismiss in a privileged manner many of life’s troubles, including the cost of living and housing crisis.
From an early age, Mulholland lived outside of a nuclear family. In Anthropology, this is common; in fact, my tutorial reading this week was about a Peruvian Andean society who create their kinship simply by eating together. Living in a nuclear family structure can be fragile, because, if it breaks, it can quickly lead to isolation. It also means higher levels of consumerism, because if everyone has their own home, they need their own fridge, dishwasher (a golden nugget in Edinburgh flats) and more.
Living in a shared flat entails compromise and generosity, something that definitely went on the back burner when I lived with just my parents. It’s interesting to observe the dynamics of different student flats who all approach the concept of shared living slightly differently; how the cleaning works or if the milk is shared or personal.
I think that the compromise of shared living comes with some really magical, special small moments that can make your day. Mulholland writes about a moment when she is folding laundry with a house mate and realises how much having people around adds value and community to your life, which is something I am starting to really understand. There have been so many casual moments in my day made magical by my flat mates. Living with others also brings in strange people and connections, which Mulholland writes are important “life surrounded by characters, even painful heartbreaking ones, is preferable to isolation. One needs strong, unpredictable experiences to gain perspective and learn how to gauge risk”.
This relationship doesn’t create itself, it must be looked after, fed and cherished like the people within the flat. My flat aims to have a flat dinner at least once a week, where one of us cooks for the other, we drink a bit too much and dissect our weeks, inevitably leading to our relationships and then our lives. Whether we laugh or cry, these dinners tether us and centre us as a community.
I am just beginning to learn what living with others looks life, learning to put less emphasis on personal singular goals and learning how to live life in my little flat community.
Photo by Katarzyna Grabowska on Unsplash