Investing in a shared life

Times of life that we expect to leave

When we talk about ‘caregiver burden’, we’re talking about quite a lot of different things. Some aspects of caregiver burden come from the way an increase in care needs and the consequential change in roles can be a stress test for relationships.

In certain ways these relationship issues are unsolvable, because relationships are far too complex to “solve.” On the other hand, their unsolvability changes the goal to something achievable — we don’t expect our relationships to be perfect, just semi-functional. We also have the power to enact dramatic change with our relationship. While we cannot control other people, we can shift the dynamics in our personal life far more easily than we can shift government policies or make advances in medicine. We can also shift the way we feel about things.

I recently finished reading God’s Hotel by Victoria Sweet. One of the things that surprised me was her mourning for the loss of the open wards when her old hospital building was replaced with a modern one with private ensuite rooms for patients. I — and the people who make medical policies — imagine that putting each patient in their own room with its own bathroom is better, because it gives people privacy. Sweet explains that, while privacy seems nice in theory, it’s not worth the trade offs.

Instead of being in a big, sunny, airy room, each patient is placed in a tiny, dark room. Instead of being in view of the nurses, patients must wait for a response to the call button each time they need help or even experience an emergency. Instead of seeing the doctors in the ward throughout the day, they only see the doctors when they come to check on them specifically. Instead of being integrated into the community of the ward, with their various personalities and visitors, each patient is isolated and alone.

This mismatch between what we think we want and what we actually enjoy goes beyond the hospital. I think some of our struggles with care work are because we cling to privacy even when it doesn’t necessarily improve our lives. We want privacy, but when we get it we discover that we are lonely and that daily life is a lot harder with less interdependence. Our annoying roommates play an under-appreciated role in keep us safe and content.

Even with our friends, we have such firm boundaries. A lot of people live alone, sure, but we also restrict our friends to curated social events, rather than integrating them into our lives. Socializing is something extra, when we have time. Few of us know how to “do” community, even if it’s something we aspire to.

For those of us who’ve never shared a room before, shared dorm rooms in college is a major source of anxiety. Perhaps it’s less so for people who grew up in big families, or perhaps it’s harder to open up with strangers when you grew up only socializing with kin. So many of my friendships (and adventures) stem from being randomly assigned a shared intimacy with strangers. It’s awkward and uncomfortable and rewarding.

It stopped being common for families to share homes in New York City a long time ago, but the price of housing means it’s common for adults to have roommates. I was shocked to move from New York to Toronto and discover that not only was living in a shared flat as an adult taboo, even most students were expected to live in ‘bachelor’ apartments.¹

In most of North America it’s barely acceptable to live with your parents or siblings as an adult. As much as I bemoan how homes in the US aren’t set up for multigenerational living — with accessory dwelling units or at least multiple bathrooms — I know that my father-in-law grew up sharing a toilet with a dozen (mostly related) families whose homes huddled around the same muddy courtyard. Privacy is a luxury that comes with its own pros and cons.

This lack of experience (and social acceptability of) sharing housing creates hurdles for people whose care needs make living alone impractical. Just like chickenpox is not a dangerous illness for most children and a serious one for adults, learning to share a household is a lot harder when we do it late in life.² Even people who grew up in a bustling home sometimes struggle with navigating the different norms and expectations of people from outside their family.

I’m looking forward to reading Alice Wilkinson’s How To Stay Sane in a House Share. Reading her interview with Rosie Spinks, I was intrigued by the way Wilkinson pointed out that part of the problem is that we don’t invest in learning how to share a home.

Living with roommates is viewed as a temporary situation, so instead of developing the skills required to create healthy dynamics, we bide our time until we can afford a place of our own.

Living with other people is not easy. Even the most peaceful homes involve a lot of compromise, negotiation, letting things slide, and repairing relationships after conflict. It’s a lot easier to spend time alone. Yet, we all say that it’s our family and friends who make our lives meaningful.

Those interpersonal skills we develop living with roommates are required when we develop care needs or step in to provide care for another. Life transitions are never easy. They’re even harder when we’re navigating sharing territory with other adults for the first time. It takes the work of providing care — the actual housekeeping, care navigation, and personal care — and multiplies it with the stress of interpersonal conflicts. This is the resentment and the bitterness that poisons everything else.

The way Wilkinson explains the lack of investment in this liminal space of sharing a home with roommates reminded me of the way people so often view their role as caregiver as temporary, not part of their real life:

“it’s a time of life that we expect to leave. Which means that people don’t invest in that space. There is an investment in romantic relationships and in a family structure that people feel they don't have to do in house shares. And that’s where we get stuck.”

How can we invest in developing the skills that allow us to have interdependent relationships that feel warm and supportive most of the time? Do we have models for what that even looks like?

There are a lot of guides to caregiving and a lot of caregivers are reading and watching and listening to them. The tricky thing is that the skills we need to develop fulfilling interdependent relationships aren’t the kind of thing most of us can learn from reading a book or watching a video. The way we learn them is by seeing other people living that way…and our current notion of privacy gets in the way of that.

1. These are compact single room apartments, known as studio apartments or efficiency apartments in the US.

2. One of my friends went from never sharing a room to spending two and a half years in a hostel and loved it, so clearly for some of us this transition is an opportunity to grow into our own.