12: Reframing The American Dream (Pt 2): Communal Living Makes a Family
What happens when you expand beyond the nuclear family home? In this episode, we meet people who've chosen to share their daily lives with others in unconventional ways - from two married couples buying a house together to raise kids, to a man who's spent 14 years living on a hippie commune. Their stories challenge our assumptions about what makes a successful adult and show how living communally might be an antidote to America's epidemic of loneliness.
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Episode transcript is below. Transcripts may not appear in their final form.
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Julia Winston: When Etosha Cave thinks about her college experience, she looks back on it fondly.
Etosha: I went to a school where everyone for the most part was living on campus. It’s effectively an intentional walking community where you're surrounded by people who are engaged in similar but very different lives. And you all are sharing those experiences. You're sharing food, you're going to activities together and you're meeting each other's families. You're just really engaging in, in deep conversations.
Julia Winston: After Etosha got her Bachelor’s degree in engineering, she got an internship with the National Science Foundation in Antarctica, where she once again lived communally- just like in college.
Etosha: I was stationed at McMurdo, which is one of the largest stations on the continent of Antarctica. And it's a US base. It's about a thousand people there over the summer. You know, I, I loved it. I had an amazing time. There’s only two bars and it was, there was one coffee shop and you'd go and you'd just talk and you'd get to know each other. And so you would, yeah, you just have these amazing conversations and really get to know people and feel part of a group.
Julia Winston: After Antarctica, Etosha wanted this kind of living experience again. So she lived in a dorm type situation in grad school. When she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for work, she looked for communal living homes. For the last 15 years, she’s lived in a larger community on and off.
What that’s looked like for her: organized homes in the Bay Area that bring together a group of unrelated people who share their home life together.
For a while, Etosha lived at The Radish. The Radish is an intentional community in Oakland, where 20-30 people live in a few homes near each other. Each person has their own room but shares living spaces and kitchen with the group. They all rotate chores and obligations.
Etosha: People either jokingly or maybe not so jokingly, um, will say, Oh, it's like kind of like a hippie compound or cult. A lot of people just don't know how to place it and they think it's very radical.
Julia Winston: It’s not any of that. For Etosha, living with a larger group of people just works for her lifestyle. As a single person she gets to share the obligations and costs of a home with other people, which gives her more time for her work and hobbies. It also gives her a built in social circle.
Etosha: I consider myself introverted and I would say half of the people in the communities I've lived in tend to be introverted as well. I think as an introvert, I still like being around people. I just don't always like interacting with them or talking. And so like if I can just be in a room with like 10 other people and be quiet because every, you know, the more extroverted, egregious people are talking, I'm in my happy space.
Julia Winston: I'm Julia Winston and this is Refamulating, a show about different ways to make a family.
Living communally is a way that Etosha built a support system in her adult life. But like she said, many people have assumptions about what that means, they think it’s very radical. And that’s because many of us have a story about how we should live: You’re allowed to have roommates when you’re young, but as you get older that’s less acceptable. Living with your spouse and kids is normal- living with other people and their kids is not.
In part one of this episode, we explored how the American dream and the nuclear family might be making us more lonely. In this episode, we're going to explore what it could look like to expand our families in our day to day lives. Itasha's story is just one example, and now we'll hear from others who've found different ways to live more communally.
In part one of this episode, I interviewed author and professor Kristen Ghodsee, who wrote a book called everyday utopia, which talks a lot about the benefits of communal living. If you didn't hear it, I suggest you go back and listen. Kristen gave us so much good information to chew on when it comes to the nuclear family and how that's influenced the way we live here in the U. S. and why communal living seems so weird to many of us.
Kristen Ghodsee: We live communally when we're young. And we tend to want to live communally when we get older in retirement communities or golden girl type houses. But precisely in these middle years when we need the most help from allo parents, it could be godparents, friends, colleagues, neighbors, we tend to isolate ourselves in the nuclear family.
Julia Winston: FYI- Alloparents are people who help raise kids they aren’t related to.
Here in the US, we’re facing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. Kristen believes that communal living is one tool that could help some of us feel more connected. Think about- we’re told to aspire to homeownership or at least to live with as few people as possible. That’s success. And many of us have internalized that- a third of Americans now live in a home by themselves. I’m one of them.
Kristen Ghodsee: This is a very American thing. People associate Autonomy and privacy and Lack of connection with success.
Julia Winston: And that’s the story I’ve been telling myself, but honestly, I long for more connection in my day-to-day life. I’m childfree, but people with kids have a whole other set of challenges. Most people raising kids don't have a strong enough support system, which can be extremely isolating. Our housing is one of the things making us lonely. So why aren't more of us considering a new way of living? Well...like I said earlier, we’ve attached how successful we are to our living situation.
Kristen Ghodsee: And so, so much of what we need to do, if we're talking about expanding our families, if we're talking about expanding our communities, if we're talking about living more collectively, is redefine our definition of success in the world, of what it means to be an adult.
Julia Winston: That's what today's episode is all about. We're going to hear from five people who choose to live with more people than just themselves and their immediate family members to have more community in their lives. And they all do it for different reasons: it saves money. It makes parenting easier. It makes them feel less lonely. I talked to people who do this in a smaller town and a major city. No one I interviewed is in a cult, and they all say living with more people makes them happier.
Julia Winston: The first group of people we’re gonna hear from are two married couples. The first...
Deborah: My name is Deborah. I am 46 years old and I live in Washington DC.
Luke: And I'm Luke and I'm 41 years old and I also live in Washington DC
Julia Winston: Deborah works for an Anglican Church. Luke is a pediatric oncology nurse. And here’s the other couple…
Bethany: I'm Bethany. I'm 35
TJ: And I'm TJ and I'm 36
Julia Winston: Bethany and TJ are college sweethearts who got married in their early 20s. By the time they met Luke and Deborah, they'd been married for a few years. So how did these two married couples get together? First let’s clarify one thing…
Luke & Deborah: Yeah. I think before we, uh, shacked up, um, we're not swingers.
Julia Winston: Actually, they were all members of the same church and met regularly with a small group of friends from church for a supper club. Here's Bethany:
Bethany: Once a month we would like rotate houses where we would all have dinner together. And then we started having dinner with Luke and Deborah on the side. We were like cheating on supper club. And so, we started hanging out, um, and just became really good friends, like, through that.
Julia Winston: During this time, both couples were independently talking about their futures. Luke and Deborah had been married for a few years, and were starting to explore what family meant for them.
Deborah: When we got married, I was older and so we knew we probably were not going to have kids. I'm six years older than Luke is. For some people that would be a sadness ,for us that was not a sadness. I think we kind of knew going into it that that, ship was sailing or had sailed.
Luke: We got great advice from our pre marital counselor when we were dating. He was like, if you're not going to have kids, that's fine, but you need to, you need a third. You need something outside of yourself that the two of invest in that keeps you from just completely, uh, turning inward and being just classic dinks, um, just spending all of our money on ourselves and totally focused on ourselves.
Deborah: And I think I felt like after we got married, I just had this feeling of like, okay, this is great. I love being married to Luke, but I just, I'd like more people to be around. And so I started sort of floating with Luke, like, Hey, you know, we could, Buy a house invite people in to live with us.
Julia Winston: Luke didn't love this idea. Both he and Deborah grew up in big families with lots of siblings. Because of that, Deborah finds comfort surrounded by lots of people. But for Luke, an introvert, all those people just made him want to live alone as an adult. Which he did for many years until he met Deborah.
Luke: Getting married and just living with one other person was quite the adjustment. That was one of our early struggles that we had to work through was our introvert, extrovert difference. So I felt we had reached a nice equilibrium on that, finally, a nice understanding and then Deborah is wanting shake that up a bit by living with other people. I said, no, of course, immediately and vehemently, but I thought about it. And I think I was listening to a podcast with a random pastor. he was talking about he and his wife, they were empty nesters and kind of reaching retirement age and that they actually were making the decision to sell their house and move into community with other people, anyway, he just kind of sold it, and, and I was like, oh, interesting.
Julia Winston: Meanwhile, TJ and Bethany were also having a conversation about family. For them, that meant having kids. They both wanted to be parents, but like many Millennials, they also both wanted to have careers. And that felt daunting while living in DC.
Bethany: I grew up in Alabama and a very conservative environment. And so people got married right out of college and started having babies like right away. I didn't see myself in that situation. I always imagined myself with a career and like, and I would have kids and I would have a partner who, you know, we like equally participated.
TJ: So I think that's where like we had the shared vision is like, we both love people. We both want community. So I think we've always thought about raising our kids and having a family in that context.
Bethany: And you know, we were living in D. C. And our families didn't live anywhere near there. And we knew that we wanted to stay and live in D. C. And have our kids. And, you know, we were trying to figure out how are we going to do that, With the two of us and, doing all the things we wanted to do.
Julia Winston: So the four of them are becoming close friends. They're all thinking about the future, and then comes New Year's Day, 2018.
Luke: We invited them over for a New Year's Day brunch. We were having, pancakes and bacon and, mimosas.
Bethany: we were like, two bottles of champagne, and, and Luke is like, what if we live together? We were like, what? what if we did?
Luke: And, uh, I actually forgot to ask Deborah, talk to Deborah about it beforehand. So it was a shock to everyone at the table.
Deborah: No one was more surprised than me when he asked them to live with us.
Luke: TJ and Bethany are great. We have so much fun together. They're so thoughtful. They're kind. They had lived with several other people in community before, like renting, group house situations in DC. And I was sort of like, wow, like we love TJ and Bethany. Like, why not?
Bethany: and TJ and I just looked at each other, and we were like, sure, yeah, we could, we could think about that.
Julia Winston: This was not a strange possibility for TJ and Bethany. Because they got married young, they had lived with a lot of friends as a couple to save money.
TJ: But we had actually, to that point, actually lived longer with other people than separately in our marriage. So that's important context. We weren't just like, yeah, this sounds awesome. Like we had experience doing it.
Julia Winston: TJ and Bethany said yes, and the next step was talking out the details.
Bethany: We decided to start meeting weekly, like we had weekly dinner, and during that time we would talk through things that we thought you should know about someone if you're going to live together. So, I mean, we talked about finances. We talked about what we would want in a house.
Julia Winston: One thing they all agreed on, was they wanted to buy a house together. Luke and Deborah had only rented and were ready for something more permanent, and to start building equity in their home.
Deborah: I think we thought like, okay three to five years feels like we'll get our money back if we do it for that length of time. And so I think that was part of the calculus too, is that this wasn't just like a one year decision that we were willing to commit for at least a few years, and so it seems like, let's just go ahead and buy a house, be investing in an asset together.
Julia Winston: But they all agreed there was a psychological component too. If they all co-owned the property, their commitment to their arrangement would be as serious as their commitment to the home.
Luke: when you're a rental, like your commitment to each other is only as good as your lease, right? We didn't want to just have a one year sort of casual, like let's live together and have fun. We were looking for something kind of more significant with more staying power.
Bethany: A lot of people ask us, or they assume that like one person, one couple owns the house and the other couple rents. And we made that decision pretty early on that we would buy the house together. There's four of us on the mortgage because we didn't want that power dynamic. We wanted, you know, everyone needed to have an equal say and what was going on in the house.
Julia Winston: The budget for their house was the first of many logistical conversations the two couples would have. It was also the first time they let each other into their lives more than just typical friends.
TJ: they knew how much we had in every one of our bank accounts and savings and retirement accounts. We knew how much they had.
Julia Winston: During their home buying process, the four of them encountered a lot of pushback from people in their lives. Most people didn't understand why they wanted to share space with another couple. They also got a lot of pushback about buying with other people. Deborah said she heard a lot of fears- fears that apply to a couple that live together by the way.
Deborah: What if they get a divorce? What if Someone has a mental health breakdown. What if they're actually don't have financial integrity or, you know, all different kinds of things that could happen.
Bethany: Our families didn't think it was a good idea. I think people were worried about the money thing with like splitting the mortgage and like, it's a lot of money. Do you really trust these people?
Deborah: Ppart of that is that this is not, um, modeled in our culture. Right. And so I think people were like, this is really strange and it feels like really, like you're putting a lot of money and risk on the line.
Julia Winston: Of all the people who were skeptical about this working, their realtor came up with an idea for addressing some of the fears they might have.
Luke: When the four of us sat down with our realtor, actually, the first thing he said is, I think this is a really terrible idea. So, like, How about you guys convince me that this is actually a good idea? And, uh, something he encouraged us to do, is to actually sit down and assume that this fails in a year. Like, all of you should write down, like, why did it fail?
Bethany: Like what we are the worst case scenarios of what could go wrong and like talk through them.
Luke: And really just some of the like most vulnerable things that you know, like you, we have a kid, and you actually hate our kid. Or like, um, yeah, someone's mentally ill. Our marriage falls apart, or all sorts of just all sorts of fears about like, what might happen. It was really an amazing experience. That sort of skepticism really forced us to talk about and consider potentially really hard things and I think that actually made our relationship stronger.
Bethany: And we did that exercise. Everybody cried, you know, we made it through.
Julia Winston: After a lot of logistical and emotional conversations, and some house hunting, they bought a three bedroom home in DC. In some states the laws make it easier to live communally. Washington, DC is one of those places. But like we mentioned in part 1, there are places like Shawnee, Kansas that have actually banned co-living for more than 3 unrelated adults.
The two couples told me that when they talk about their house with others the first question is usually: is the house a duplex? It’s not - it’s a traditional single family home.
Deborah: When you walk in, an open floor plan, kitchen, living room, upstairs, three bedrooms, two bathrooms. We did each want our own bathroom. That was critical. And then in the basement we ended up converting it into basically office space post pandemic. And so Bethany, TJ and Luke all had offices in the basement.
Julia Winston: Because their home ownership looked a little different than other people, they did create some paperwork to formalize what they were trying to do.
Bethany: So we have like a document that we did get notarized But it's probably not legally binding, but it's like a contract between the four of us. And so in that we had a three year agreement But like we would, you know, we wouldn't buy or sell for three years.
Julia Winston: Once they closed on the house and had a move in date, they all rushed to get settled in the house. And then on moving day…
Luke: I think Bethany was eight months pregnant. She was not carrying a lot of boxes in.
Deborah: When we started talking with TJ and Bethany about buying a house together, they were not yet pregnant, but we knew that they wanted to have kids in the near future, that they were getting ready for that. And so, we knew that was part of equation that we would be buying a house that would have, children in it, and that would have rooms for children in it. And they became pregnant while we were searching.
Julia Winston: When we come back, we hear about co-living with four adults and two kids.
Julia Winston: When Deborah, Luke, TJ and Bethany all moved into their new house, Bethany was seven months pregnant with her and TJ's daughter, Mary Haley.
Bethany: it was exciting to move into the house and we were about to have, we felt like we were all about to have a baby, right? And so we were preparing the house for the baby. And so there was a lot of anticipation for that, but none of us had ever had kids. We never lived with a kid. So we didn't know what it would be like, you know, we could guess, but we didn't know what it would be like.
Julia Winston: Before the baby was born, they all talked about what Luke and Deborah's roles would be:
Luke: early on, they, they, decided that we would be the kids godparents. We take a vow to be part of their like spiritual upbringing and to see them raised in the faith and to be models and in the faith for them.
Bethany: Luke and Deborah are there like aunt and uncle. They don't discipline our kids they can like remind them of the rules, right? Which is a role that they are very comfortable in playing. But TJ and I discipline our kids.
Julia Winston: TJ and Bethany had another baby a couple years later, their son, Pax. And the kids actually ended up being a big reason why communal living worked so well for these adults. For TJ and Bethany , it’s easy to see why. They had double the amount of adults on hand to help juggle parenting, work and keeping house.
TJ: Our daughter greatly benefited from spending the first five and a half years of her life With four adults versus two. And just like, yeah, they talk about the 30, 000 words thing or whatever.
Julia: TJ is referring to research suggesting that kids should be exposed to 30k words per day to improve their language and reading skills.
TJ: Like she got hers by the time she's like, whatever, she probably got it half twice as quick.
Bethany: Yes. Yeah. Luke's vocabulary
TJ: and Luke has, Luke has an amazing vocabulary. E very place she's been like in school or pre preschool or whatever she just like talks to the adults and like, basically has conversations with them.
Julia Winston: At one point, TJ started a three year MBA program while working full time, with two toddlers. If he and Bethany had lived with only each other, in a city far from family, this could have been incredibly stressful. TJ would have been gone all the time at work and school, and Bethany would have been trying to juggle her job and most of the childcare. Instead...Deborah and Luke stepped up.
TJ: Like they would go on evening walks with Our daughter, Mary Haley, when she was, you know, two or whatever, and I was away at class. All summer basically, like, Deborah was doing breakfast with them. Like, she was cooking eggs and sausage and, like, they, like, loved it. It was special breakfast.
Bethany: They were like, can you make me some of what you're having?
TJ: And that's just, like, something organic that just happened. When we went into it all, we were like we're not co parenting. Like we're going to try to like have boundaries and, you know. We're not expecting any of this from you guys. Whatever you give is great. But they're just great people. So they
Bethany: love our kids. They're really generous with their time. The relationships that our kids have with them. It's just really beautiful. They have like, you know, deep relationships with like a bunch of adults that care a lot about them.
Julia Winston: Even though Luke and Deborah knew they'd be living with kids when they started this arrangement, they were surprised at how much they liked it.
Deborah: I would not consider myself to be a kid person, but I'm crazy about those kids and like became so attached to those children. I think I was surprised by how much they just captured my heart. The kids were such a joy watching them grow up, watching them learn how to walk and talk and being part of their day to day lives. That was such a joy, such a privilege to be part of their lives. Um, and also that's challenging, you know, the kids, kids are, kids are kids and they're. Messy and loud and they kind of take over the house.
Luke: Deborah's a little bit of a, a little bit of a neat freak, little OCD around crumbs and stuff like that. And the kids know, like, Auntie Deborah doesn't like crumbs. And so Mary Haley, you know, would be sitting at the table and she's like, Deborah, I'm going to sit next to you. But don't worry, I won't get any crumbs. And then you like, look over and she's, you Scraping crumbs off the table to make room for Deborah because yeah, you know, You're like, oh how sweet she's gonna have crumb issues now. Great
Julia Winston: She's, they're, the children are taking on your neuroses and their parents neuroses.
Deborah: That's right, they've got four sets of neuroses to take on
Julia Winston: One of the things I was most curious about, and I think most people are, is how do the logistics of living like this work? Does it feel like a college house with five roommates and carefully labeled tupperware? How do finances work? How did they divide chores?
Deborah: we didn't come into it with a strong plan of the logistics and how we would live together. Yeah. But very quickly, we realized that it was just a lot easier if we could share everything basically. So share cooking, share cleaning, we chore chart, um, share groceries. We ended up going on a family phone plan.
Bethany: we shared all of our groceries and so it wasn't like, Oh, this is your shelf. This is our shelf. We all are committed to tracking the spending and, T. J. and Deborah would settle up at the end of every month about who owed who'd what and they put in the spreadsheet.
Deborah: It was not a financially driven decision, but at the same time, there were these kind of like wonderful financial implications. Like we had to repair the roof and we had to repair the deck and we had to like, yeah, buy new appliances that you're just splitting that cost. It makes it a lot more manageable. We brought in a house cleaner every couple of weeks and we were splitting that in half. And I don't know, just everything suddenly becomes more manageable when you're splitting with other people.
Julia Winston: They also found the right roles and tasks for each person. Deborah was the house manager.
Deborah: I was the one who managed the house inventory And so I always I don't know. It's not um Is that a virtue? It's just actually innate. I just know. She
Luke: can't help herself.
Deborah: like know everything that's in our house at all times. All
Luke: of the cans are facing the same direction in the cupboard.
Deborah: I do have OCD tendencies. Yes.
Luke: we were really good about having a weekly meeting, usually Sunday night, where we would, you know, sit down after the kids went to bed and, um, talk through the logistics, you know, logistics of the week. Who's, you know, who's eating out? What night? What night is TJ cooking? What night is Deborah cooking? Etcetera. That sort of thing. Um, what do we need from the store? And then also the sort of more emotional or relationship aspect of things like what's working, what's not working.
Bethany: We would always start with like, what's working, not working. And it's just really important to like, for everyone to go around and name something that's not working, especially early on so that when, so you get a lot of practice with like low level conflict.
Deborah: Those things are pretty minor. It's like, you were on trash this week and you just let it really overflow a couple times, you know,
Julia Winston: There were challenges too, of course: Luke sometimes struggled with how much noise the kids made. They had to communicate between four busy people. And there were four adults all weighing in on big decisions. Deborah says they developed a tactic that worked well for making decisions:
Deborah: if you have a strong opinion, voice it. If you don't have an opinion, then don't voice an opinion, let the person with a strong opinion make that decision then. There's no reason to like overly complicated decision.
Julia Winston: She says that splitting the housework, the cooking, and the costs to maintain a house made living communally very practical. One person was never overwhelmed or carrying the burden because the other three adults picked up the slack somewhere else. But sharing so much of their daily lives also brought them closer.
Julia Winston: The integrated lives eventually led to a stronger support system for all of them. They had dinner together most nights with the kids, and often hung out together after the kids went to bed.
Bethany: When you are living with your best friends, you can like talk about at dinner like how much you hate your job. And we can all like put our heads together about what you could do. And you've surrounded yourself with people who love you and care about you and can just encourage you. And see the things in you that you might not see in yourself at that moment, because You're in a low spot.
TJ: And it doesn't just put all the burden on like one spouse, right? Like it's great to like share that with other people like in the same breath that you're talking to your partner, you're able to share with two other people, right?
Julia Winston: Something that struck all four of them about this experience was the vulnerability of living with other people. You can't hide your emotions or bad days when you live with someone, you just have to let them in to witness all of you.
Deborah: I can think of several situations where, you know, you walk into the kitchen and someone is crying and sometimes that's someone else and sometimes, you know, that's me. Someone else walks in and I'm just sitting at the kitchen table crying.
Julia Winston: And they also had a front row seat to each other's habits, marriages, and parenting.
Deborah: TJ and Bethany are such good parents, and they're so intentional. I think I just learned so much watching them parent. Parenting is so hard, it's so hard to be consistent, to follow through on consequences. Kids will just push all your buttons. And so they, I really admire them for being willing to do that with an audience basically 24 7.
Luke: There was one memorable night where Deborah and I were fighting about something, and it's dinner time, so we all sit down at the dinner table, and Deborah just stops and goes like, T. J. and Bethany, I want you guys to know, Luke and I are fighting right now. And Bethany said, T. J. and I are fighting as well. We all like split up, and I think they went on the front porch, and we went on the back porch, and we all got our fighting out of the way, and then like, came back and had dinner together. But like, that's the kind of thing that you don't get that if you're just having dinner together once a week.
Julia Winston: They lived together for six years, three years longer than they planned. But it did come to an end recently. Earlier this fall, TJ got a job offer in Orlando, where he grew up. He decided to take it, and so he and Bethany moved out of the house in DC and moved to Florida. Now they’re living near his blood-related family, but in a house with just the two of them and their kids. The only life their kids have known is life with Luke and Deborah, so they've all felt a void.
Bethany: It's hard. It's really hard. Moving from DC to Florida, that was a really big transition, but I think Even in just like our daily rhythms have just been interrupted and part of it is the move, right? but Another big part is that Luke and Deborah aren't here. And so weekly tasks that a household would do, we divided between four people and now there's two, right? When you live with other people, they're more like moments for like connection and, or that is like spread out across a lot of people. And so, yeah, we just, we miss them. We miss them a lot.
Julia Winston: Deborah and Luke have also been struggling with the transition. Their house in DC feels too big for them now. And they want to have more people around, but they know they had something special with TJ and Bethany.
Deborah: I Think before we lived with TJ and Bethany, we would have said they were really good and close friends, and that we just loved spending time with them. They are such a good time. They're both really, really fun. And I would say after living with them, I would say the same thing there. They were so fun to live with, but I would also say that now it does feel like they're family.
Julia Winston: Recently, Deborah accepted a new job in South Carolina, so she and Luke are leaving DC too. Living closer to TJ and Bethany was actually a factor in deciding to make this move. Soon they'll be just a few hours away from TJ and Bethany in Florida and are excited to see them and the kids more often. And they all said they would love to live with each other again someday. For now, they’ll sell the house they bought together and work out the finances together.
But all four remain huge advocates of living with your friends.
Bethany: I would just encourage people if they wanted to do this to like have a have a period of discernment where you where everyone involved is really thinking about if this would be a great decision for everyone. And like, what is it? What is it that you're hoping to get out of communal living? And if you have a shared vision and a shared value system and. You, um, you talk, you know, ahead of time how you're going to work through conflict or how you're going to work through money stuff and, um, how you are going to be intentional with your friendships and living in community. And you find that you're on the same page, like do it. It's really beautiful. It's really rewarding. It's so much fun.
Julia Winston: When we come back, we take you from living with your friends to a real life hippie commune.
Julia Winston: The way that TJ, Bethany, Luke and Deborah created a communal living situation is something a lot of us could replicate. They found an already existing single family home and turned it into a co-living space. There are definitely logistical challenges and financial hurdles in that kind of situation, but it’s the most accessible way to create a more communal day-to-day life based on the way our systems are built in this country.
But I also wanted to talk to someone who lives in a more official communal living situation.
Adder Oaks: I'm Adder Oaks. I'm 36 years old and I live at Twin Oaks Community in Central Virginia.
Julia Winston: Twin Oaks is an intentional community where 100 people live in 6 large houses on farmland. Adder has lived there for 14 years. It was started in the 60s and might be what you picture when you hear the word “commune.”
Adder Oaks: I think a lot of people that come to Twin Oaks come because they're connected to alternative culture in some way. They're sort of groovy and weird and, and seek out, uh, community living because they have some connection to it.
Julia Winston: The community is self sufficient- they run multiple businesses for income and share their profits among the community members. Adder joined when he was 22 after graduating from college while he was searching for a job and living with his parents.
Adder Oaks: I Googled one day, do hippie communes still exist? and I found it. I wanted some place where I would show up and they'd say, here, we've got work to do. All your needs are taken care of. I went and did our three week visit. And I just fell in love. I think during that, that three weeks, I finally got a call back about a computer programming job. And I was just like, no, thanks. I think I know what I'm doing.
Julia Winston: tell me about Twin Oaks, like paint a picture for us of Twin Oaks. What is Twin Oaks? How does it work?
Adder Oaks: So the way Twin Oaks works is you come there, you work your work quota, which is about 40 hours a week, you know, including the work business work and domestic work, right? Taking care of the kids, cleaning the house, doing the dishes, working in our communal garden. You do your work and then the community takes care of all of your physical needs, right?
We share all of our income, our businesses are owned by the community, and then you have a place to live, you have food, you have health care, you've got your personal spending money. So that's the sort of economic unity. And then furthermore, we, we live close together. We live in shared houses, you know, for the hundred or so of us, we live in six different houses. 15 to 20 people in a house. And, and we, yeah, we do a lot together, right? Every day, lunch and dinner are communal meals. We give our labor credits for people to make those for us. And then we all just get to go and eat lunch, eat dinner together, you know, celebrate holidays and just live a lot more closely.
Julia Winston: Would you describe yourself as a hippie and how would you describe the other people that live at Twin Oaks?
Adder Oaks: My name Adder Oaks, it's not the name that my parents gave me, uh, when I was a kid. It was kind of my, the name that I took on while living at Twin Oaks, which is certainly not something like we as a community do institutionally, but lots of people like to take on a new name, sort of living in a new lifestyle.
So I often describe that as my hippie name, right? but I don't really think of myself as a hippie. I don't spend any time gardening. I like listening to our dance music, but whenever we have our Grateful Dead cover band, I'm like, not that interested. My actual day to day life, it's pretty normie in a lot of ways. I like to read. I like to play board games. These are not the most hippie, hippie things. But! The most valuable thing that I think we can take from the hippie movement, I'm doing air quotes here, is, uh, is that living together is valuable.
It's valuable socially because it's really energizing to live around people and it really helps train oneself in compassion and caring and social skills. And then of course it's valuable economically, like it just is more efficient, in terms of resource uses. When we live together in a single house or we have a handful of cars that we share among a hundred people. yeah, that's just so valuable.
Julia Winston: Twin Oaks owns a variety of businesses to earn income. For a long time they made and sold hammocks, then tofu production became their main income, and now it's selling seeds.
Julia Winston: So does everybody make the same amount of money?
Adder Oaks: No. So Twin Oaks I think is one of the few communities that has survived because we do make sure that everyone is working and is contributing to the community. Uh, but we have this egalitarian ethos, right? We take from each according to their ability to each according to their need. So some people make more money than others. I mean, oftentimes it's not, you know, it's not even seen because it is working in these community owned businesses and they're just doing what needs to get done to make those businesses happen. But we also have one guy that does software engineering part time on contract and. Yeah, he makes a lot of money, um, more so than, than we have, say, Weaving Hammocks.
Julia Winston: Yeah, the resource sharing is a really interesting angle at looking at value, like value exchange. What about retirement? This is something a lot of people worry about. How does retirement work at Twin Oaks?
Adder Oaks: We have this labor credit system throughout the working years of a member. And so we offer pension in the form of labor credits. So rather than, you know, working until you're 65 and then stopping, the idea is starting when you're 50, you can slowly reduce your, your work quota. sometimes we have members that get to a point where they can't work and by fiat, we just say, we're taking you off the labor system. And as long as you remain a member, your needs are going to be taken care of. It is challenging, I think, for people who, put a significant portion of their life into Twin Oaks and want to leave in older age because we don't, you know, except for small loans of a few thousand dollars to help people get going, we don't give people money to leave the community with. So Twin Oaks is a great place to retire, but it's not a great place to build a retirement fund to take somewhere else. Like that just won't happen.
Julia Winston: Adder joined Twin Oaks when he was 22. In the 14 years he's lived there, he met his partner and became a father. He and his family live in one of the houses on the property, with their “small living group” or SLG. Their SLG is eight adults and 4 kids.
Julia Winston: What is your SLG look like? And what is your room like?
Adder Oaks: we've got a couple hallways with almost dormitory style rooms. Um, but then, you know, a shared living room and kitchen, we kind of have an open, open floor plan for the living room and kitchen area. Because this building was built specifically with having rambunctious kids, uh, in mind. You know, the idea was this would be one of our places that is especially conducive to raising kids. I have a wing where myself, my partner, our two kids, we all live right next to each other. We each have our own rooms there.
Julia Winston: So each individual has their own room, even married couples.
Adder Oaks: yeah, yeah, totally. This is really important. I think part of our story and intention about communal living is that, it helps curb the oppression of traditional living structures, as someone who has, been partnered for a decade now and raising two kids together, I do have a lot of appreciation for the value of a nuclear family unit, right?
But we also want to make sure that if someone is in a relationship that isn't working for them, they have their own room to go to, right? They can go to their own place and, and be apart and have their own resources and their own rights. And that couples aren't economically dependent on just each other. We're, economically dependent on the whole community.
Julia Winston: Twin Oaks also looks at parenting a little differently. Adults who want to have kids have to go through a community process first.
Adder Oaks: This is something that a lot of people find shocking. This is not really an exercise in trying to control people's reproduction. It's really just a process to make sure that Parents go through the steps of thinking carefully about their decision to have kids, because we raise the kids. The community is responsible for those kids and we really do a lot. We put a lot of resources into them, you know, partly money, but mostly time. We really value childcare as work, so we want to make sure that Yeah, that parents are coming in with open eyes and seeing what it's going to be like to raise a kid in community.
Julia Winston: And he's seen that the community mindset around raising kids has not only helped him, but also his kids.
Adder Oaks: I think the most enjoyable parts have been the been watching my kids be happy. They just have an amazing life here. It's amazing how much freedom they get and how safe it feels for them to just, run off and play. There are sort of always adults around, but with kids sort of having, yeah, just having a lot of freedom. I think raising kids is also a challenge in community. You know, mostly I think to be a parent in community, you need a little bit of a thick skin. because other people are judging you, right? They see how you decide to parent. and every time your kid has a tantrum, you're like, Oh, like, what does everyone think right now? or the opposite. If you're hard and disciplining your kids firmly and you wonder. Oh, do the other sort of hippie dippie parents judge me for this? Yeah, it is a challenge parenting publicly.
Julia Winston: Wow. Parenting publicly. That is quite a concept. Yeah. I guess that's one experience of being so separated in these single family units that's for better and for worse. People can't see how you're parenting.
Adder Oaks: I think that is one of the main reasons I like I am here and I am committed to being a longterm member is that it just, it just makes parenting so much easier. I imagine that it's a lot easier than raising kids in the mainstream.
Julia Winston: Clearly, there are many practical benefits to living communally. Mainstream society doesn’t want us to. Our systems and stigmas don’t incentivize living this way, for all the reasons Kristen Ghodsee laid out in Part 1: like tax breaks for married people, housing designed for smaller groups and keeping the consumer economy going, one fridge at a time. You have to really want to live communally to do it, so it’s considered fringe. But the people I’ve met who do choose to live communally seem pretty, well, normal.
Deborah: I don't like being strange. I You know, like, I'm pretty conventional.
Adder Oaks: My actual day to day life, it's pretty normie in a lot of ways. I like to read. I like to play board games.
Julia Winston: The party doesn’t have to end with college when it comes to communal living. And as we can see, it’s not just about a party or practicality. What I gathered from all our guests, is that living with others is enriching.
Adder: It certainly made my life better. I have a very rich, fulfilling life. You know, the work that I do, you know, even say the income work that's serving other people I see very locally how it benefits those around me. I feel very, very connected to my day to day work. I feel energized by having you know, having a bunch of interested, energetic, intelligent people around me all the time.
Julia Winston: I know I want to do it again… Maybe living communally is just the medicine we need to heal our epidemic of loneliness and isolation.