Shall we start a commune...?
An exploration into communal living.
A quick note from me… this past weekend Diem saw a record-breaking number of Diemers join the community (and this newsletter!) thanks to this viral TikTok. As a founder, on the hard days, you sometimes question your own conviction, this weekend reminded us all how much Diem is needed in the world. The comments on TikTok alone made the madness of the last few days worth it. We’re so happy and honestly, a little emotional(!) to see everyone so excited to be in Diem. So, in short, thank you for being a part of the Diem journey. If you’re yet to download the app—you can do so via the App Store or Android (we also have a web app). Hope to see even more of you in there over the next few weeks! Now! Back to why you’re all here… the essay!
Have you ever thought about communal living?
If we’re on the same algorithm, you may have recently seen this article about three single-mum friends buying a house together. They had always joked about starting a commune but the conversation became serious after they found themselves divorced as single mothers. I’ve always been semi-fascinated by this idea, and then the other day, I saw this conversation in Diem…
Most female friends I talk about communal living with love the idea of creating a hyperlocal community of friends, one where we could pick a street or building we all live in and raise families together. So why don’t we?
I think several factors at play make it a slightly bizarre idea. The first is the rise of the nuclear family (and marrying for love) over the last century, which has coincided with the breakdown of closeness in female friendships (and community). In her book, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, author Stephanie Coontz explores the decline of acceptable same-sex friendships within the larger history of marriage: “Until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nuclear family was not the common family unit. People’s attachments to their other kin took too much precedence. It wasn’t an expectation that marital intimacy would bring ‘happiness’ per se; the emphasis was on economic stability and producing children.”
As Coontz explains, it was hard to think of personal happiness as the goal of marriage when so many women simply did it to survive. As marriage for survival was a reality for many, it was common for very close female friendships to form in the absence of an intimate marriage. But this all began to change in the wake of a few pivotal societal shifts. The first shift was the breakdown of the sexual intimacy taboo. As marital sex became a more acceptable talking point, the focus on marital intimacy became an obligation of wives. The assumption here is that this focus took their attention away from developing close female friendships in favour of fulfilling their responsibility to deepen the connection with their husbands. The second major shift was the wave of laws passed that made it possible for women to survive outside of marriage. Coontz explains that the progress of industrialization and democratization weakened the political and economic constraints forcing people to get and stay married, and in its place, deep intimacy became a more important aspect of stable marriages. This, in turn, led to people focussing their attention on finding one relationship to fulfill all their needs (love, money) vs. nurturing the important familial or non-sexual relationships they’d previously held. Food for thought!
When researching this essay, I discovered something interesting. Did you know that share housing and communal living are intertwined with the history of women’s liberation? The 1970s was a decade laced with political strife and activism—with women winning many cultural and legal freedoms, but at the same time, share houses (filled with feminists) became a thing. Before this era, women had gone straight from their parents’ homes to their marital homes. Now with the freedom to exist outside of this gendered expectation, they were able to try a new way of living and many chose to do that with each other. It’s perhaps no coincidence that these shared houses existed simultaneously with big societal shifts, given what we know about women’s power to bring about cultural change with access to female-only spaces and men’s fear of this (read on the history of gossip and tea parties for that). There are many fascinating articles from women at the time (including from Lynne Segal who still lives in her share house, 50 years later!) that cover how women came together to raise children, run households, create political change, and cultivate community under one roof. It didn’t matter how much money you had if you contributed to the collective care of the people living there.
Another fun thing I came across: A co-housing community for older women in my homeland, England. It’s called New Ground and 26 women live there in the first co-housing exclusively for women (it was an 18-year battle!). The entire development is managed by women who set it up as an alternative to living alone. As one resident described New Ground, “We look out for each other; we don’t look after each other.” In 2021, 3.64 million people aged over 65 were living alone in the UK, 70% of whom were women, so spaces that combat this isolation feel somewhat essential to me. I’ll leave you with this quote from one of the residents on whether or not new male partners would be able to live there (because it’s a whole mood): “Not necessarily. It would be a great excuse to say: ‘I’m sorry, darling. I can’t live with you but we can have great weekends together!””
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that all the women run away to start a commune (although, I will if you’re all down). I just think we should normalize co-housing amongst couples, families, and friends. If we could create, say, systems that require shared responsibilities on raising children and other tasks that typically burden mothers, I think we’d all be better off for it. As Segal reflected on her memory of her 1970s share house: “One thing was sacred: we had strict household rotas for the six or seven adults who lived for several years in the house. There was a rigid rota for cooking, cleaning and childminding, which enabled everyone, mothers or not, to engage with the political excitement of those days. Each day, one person was responsible for getting up, making breakfast, taking the children to school on weekdays and collecting them afterward, as well as making their evening meal. Another took charge of putting the children to bed, reading to them and childminding for the evening. Other tasks included cooking an evening meal for the adults and doing the weekly shop, which was always a favourite, using the few pounds we all put into the kitty.”
To that end, communal living and alternate living arrangements gets me thinking about matriarchies (my Roman empire). Specifically, the Musuo community in China that I learned about reading Choo Waihong’s book, The Kingdom of Women, which documents her time spent living there. Here’s Waihong’s description of Musuo: ”Women own and inherit property, sow crops in this agrarian society, and run the households – cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. The men provide strength, ploughing, building, repairing homes, slaughtering animals and helping with big familial decisions, although the final say is always with Grandmother. Although men have no paternal responsibilities – it is common for women not to know who the father of their children is, and there is no stigma attached to this – they have considerable responsibility as uncles to their sisters’ children. In fact, along with elderly maternal great-uncles, who are often the households’ second-in-charge, younger uncles are the pivotal male influence on children.”
Practicing collective care and remembering our interdependence on each other, as humans, feels especially important in this generation where loneliness is on the rise and we’re increasingly detached from our natural surroundings. I believe normalizing this way of life could help to counter the rise of individualism that has grown in our society over the last few decades because our nuclear-family living arrangements have only been bolstered by our digital social landscapes, which are pushing us further apart. Or as one Diemer summarized: “We're social creatures so if anything, the whole individualistic culture is the weird part! I'd love to live in community.” At a minimum, I believe we need to create third spaces away from home and work that are rooted in collective care because there is a desperate need to expand social infrastructures and find new ways to combat domestic isolation. Above all, communal living feels very… feminine. Women are the OG community builders, so while I may be biased, I think everyone should follow our lead.
What do you think? Do you fantasize about creating communal living arrangements? And most importantly, should we create a Diem house…?
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