Is Cohousing the Answer for People Who Prize Solitude and Sociability?

Just about everyone wants time to themselves as well as time with other people. They want both solitude and sociability, autonomy as well as belonging. What differs is the relative proportions each person prefers. The kinds of living arrangements best suited to people who love lots of solitude and autonomy, such as living alone, are not the same as the ones best suited to people who love lots of sociability and belonging, such as living in a multi-generational household.

A living arrangement that offers a flexible mix of solitude and sociability is cohousing — communities in which people have places of their own as well as shared spaces. The U.S. cohousing website describes the arrangement as:

“... community intentionally designed with ample common spaces surrounded by private homes. Collaborative spaces typically include a common house with a large kitchen and dining room, laundry, and recreational areas and outdoor walkways, open space, gardens, and parking. Neighbors use these spaces to play together, cook for one another, share tools, and work collaboratively.”

When I researched cohousing for How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, I visited six communities, all in the U.S. The US, though, was following the lead of Scandinavian countries, where cohousing was already established, although it comprises just a small proportion of all households. Much more common are 1-person households. In Sweden, for example, about 47% of all households are 1-person households; in the capital city of Stockholm, it's as many as 60%.

Living with, or Among, People Who are Not Romantic Partners or Family

A few years ago, Swedish scholar Maria Tornqvist of Uppsala University conducted an intensive study of the experience of living in cohousing in urban Stockholm, reported in the journal Sociology. She interviewed 13 people from 3 different cohousing communities. Two of the communities included people of all ages and one was for seniors with no children. Most members of the residents were middle-class and well-educated. Tornqvist spent several hours visiting most of the people she interviewed, and she also participated for 18 months as a member of the cooking team in one of the communities, helping to prepare food and then sharing it over dinner.

Tornqvist also interviewed 15 people who shared a place with other people – they all lived together under one roof. That’s different from cohousing, which includes private homes or apartments (where people might live alone or with other people) as well as shared spaces such as a common house where people often gather to dine together or share other activities. Tornqvist calls the shared housing arrangements “small-scale communes,” but some included just two people, and none were like the U.S. communes of the 1960s in which members shared just about everything, including clothes, and none earned a living within the communes. Basically, these were people who were sharing a place. What made them different from many other people who live together under the same roof is that they were not members of romantic couples, nuclear families, or other families.

What People Like About Cohousing

• Flexibility and choice. Because people in cohousing communities have a place of their own as well as easy opportunities to be among others — for example, by spending time in the common house or just seeing other people out and about in the community — they have a lot of flexibility. They can choose when they want to see others and when they want to be alone.
• Feeling connected without feeling controlled. Cohousing communities offer members opportunities to hang out with other people in casual ways, and share confidences and support, but without the same pressures and obligations that can come with what some described as controlling parents or jealous spouses. For example, they did not feel obligated to spend holidays together, to be accountable for their whereabouts, or to be deeply involved in one another’s lives. The bonds they had with other cohousing community members were not necessarily prioritized over other relationships they might have with friends, coworkers, or romantic partners who lived elsewhere.
• More gender equality. Women were especially likely to comment on how liberating these living arrangements felt to them. Previously, some had lived with romantic partners or in nuclear family households in which they were expected to do more than their fair share of household work, caregiving, and emotional labor.
• Freedom for community members and their relatives who live elsewhere. The seniors who lived in cohousing and had grown children who lived elsewhere were grateful for what cohousing offered them. Tornqvist said that they “recounted how their lifestyle unshackles their children from caring responsibilities and feelings of guilt and thus creates opportunities for more equal intergenerational attachments.”
• Exits free of conflict and drama. Community members who wanted to leave could do so fairly easily. The intensity of some romantic break-ups, for example, was largely missing. Some community members, though, felt saddened if the people who left did not return to visit. (The people I interviewed in the U.S. cohousing communities did not talk about easy exits, and in some communities, there was very little turnover. Community members wanted to stay.)

The people living in cohousing, or living under the same roof with people other than relatives or romantic partners, were not motivated primarily by a desire to have close friends. They liked being left alone a lot of the time. They liked the continuity and support of living in a cohousing community, but they liked having their privacy, too. They got to live “individualized lives, while, at the same time, being connected and embedded.” Some were also comforted by the knowledge that other people were nearby if they needed them.