Cultivating Non-Romantic Intimacy
Group Living and Other Recipes
Sometimes I’ll get an email in my inbox asking me to take a look at an upcoming book and as soon as I read the book description I know: this is deeply Culture Study. Sometimes it’s because the topic and approach asks us as readers to look much closer at some component of the culture that surrounds us — whether that’s the culture of gay Republicans or tracking our kids. And sometimes the topic just intersects squarely with an ongoing theme of the newsletter, like the value of caregiving or, frankly, what reactions to Taylor Swift tell us about ourselves and our values.
Group Living and Other Recipes, the beautiful new book from Lola Millholland, falls into that second bucket, intersecting with so many of the conversations we’ve had in this space over the last few years about building and sustaining community, and living with (or very near) friends. Lola grew up with parents who instilled the value of close and messy community in her — but she’s also gone through various periods of rejection, reframing, and figuring out what living intimately with others can look like. I found the book wonderfully readable, and it’s given me so much to consider as I continue to interview people about how they’re figuring out what non-romantic intimacy and community looks like in their lives.
If you’re group-living curious, this interview is absolutely for you — but it’s also for you if you think about living with friends and get a little nauseous (there’s even a specific question/answer for you!) I can’t wait for the comments on this one — and I can’t wait for others to spend time with this book.
You can follow Lola Milholland on Instagram here, read her newsletter here, and buy Group Living and Other Recipes here. (All Bookshop affiliate proceeds go towards this year’s IndigiPalooza)
I chuckled at one of the anecdotes in the intro to the book when you talk about how your brother reacts to the various types of “mess” and chaos that result from group living, from clutter on the coffee table to an overflowing storage closet no one wants to take responsibility for. “Let’s say I found a beloved bowl chipped,” you write. “That’s group living,’ I’d hear Zak’s voice saying, even when I was alone.”
In the paragraphs to come, you talk about how you wanted to reclaim “group living” from its various cultish connotations and stereotypes because, as you put it, “Most people in the world live in communal settings. To stigmatize group living is to dismiss the pressures of the housing crisis; the need to reimagine women’s unpaid domestic labor; the fact that loneliness and isolation menace all ages; the racist, classist roots of the nuclear family and single-family home.”
Which, first off all, thank you for putting all of that in one place for me to reference, but as you point out — you also just really like it. You really like eating dinner together with all your friends. The chipped bowl is group living….but the ritual of a shared meal is group living, too.
Can you talk a little bit more about the tension there, and what you felt, in your words, you had “to prove” when it came to group living?
Even though I live in a communal household, when my brother started saying his catchphrase— “that’s group living” — I was surprised by my gut response. The words “group living” still conjured extremes for me: the Rajneesh and his followers in Central Oregon, wearing handsome sunset colors, having group sex, and doing whatever their guru and his chief executors instructed; or one of the crust punk houses where I saw shows in my early twenties and where malodors roamed the halls like ghosts. These are actual places, but they’re also anomalies—ones that burn so brightly they obscure the constellation of ways group living presents in the world.
If these were the examples that jumped first to my mind, what about people who know even less about this subject than I do? I decided I wanted to tell stories about real people, people I know, that illuminated group living in more nuanced ways. In writing about the big and small moments in our lives, I hoped to expand our definition of those words. We’d all benefit by exorcizing stigmas that are out of touch.
As I wrote, however, I began to feel like a proselytizer, telling everyone to move in together, when actually I don’t think any single solution should be imposed on (or would work for) everyone, whether that’s the nuclear family or group living. Communal living is not a panacea — and it’s not, I should note, a solution to the housing crisis. Honestly, the increase in group living over recent years is a product of housing inequity — although that shouldn’t prevent us from having honest conversations about its merits.
I began to wonder what it would look like to extend group living as an idea, taking the definition I was building within the context of a house and applying it beyond those walls. I believe the defining characteristics of healthy group living are seeing yourself as integral to a whole, learning about generosity and its fruits, and expanding your understanding of the world and yourself through the eyes of others. This requires cultivating non-romantic intimacy.
What would group living, based on that definition, look like as a guiding principle in our lives—however we structure our homes? I think the first step toward that is building routines with others—like the ritual of a shared meal, as you mention—things you can do inside of a home and outside of one. I wanted to encourage readers to look for ways to participate in tightly woven communities, wherever they form, that are organized in ways that don’t pit people against each other. How we listen, share ideas, work through conflict, and make time to laugh, celebrate, and be silly together—these are skills we all need to organize the movements and build the solidarity that might help us achieve larger collective goals. And maybe that’s group living, too.
I love how you evoke your time studying abroad in Japan and living in a group dorm in college and how very normal it was to live that intimately with other people. Sometimes I think back and remember that I shared a single bathroom with a 70 year old French lady — who I ate with every week night! — and just absolutely marvel at it….or just living so closely with others from age 18 to 25, and very rarely craving solitude.
Grad school was the first time I’d lived alone, and while I absolutely loved it, I also recognize (particularly in hindsight) the ways it activated and encouraged some of my worst inclinations. It made it so much easier to say no to things, to retreat into work, to elevate “alone time” over all of my other social needs. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how living alone, or even just living with one partner, can “ruin” us (for lack of a better phrase) for the joys of group living.
Oh my, I want to eat with that 70-year-old woman every weeknight! I love that example because you shared, well, a bathroom, and that created an unstructured, unscheduled place of collision. When we live alone or with one partner, seeing friends requires some planning, which can feel like work. Meeting up takes us out of our rhythm. It often requires going someplace, the time of transit. We must get dressed. We may feel we’re supposed to be entertaining. It may cost us money we don’t have or want to spend. How much easier to stay home! How nice, after a long day, to lie in our pajamas on our own and watch TV. What I think we lose when we maintain isolated private spaces is the pleasure of lying in our pajamas and watching TV together. We lose the unstructured delight of bumping into someone on the way to the bathroom and learning about their day.
It can be so wildly sweet to be lazy with friends. There have also been times, of course, when I’ve felt low and thought I needed to be alone. I didn’t want to be seen in my filthiest unwashed clothes, snacking on the couch. Though those were exactly the moments when I needed someone to come along and pull me out of my torpor.
I think a psychological hurdle to moving in with others is the assumption that we’ll have to attend to their needs and their mess—that somehow the work is doubled and chaos reigns. There are undoubtedly many instances where that’s the case. Many people’s first taste of communal living is when they’re very young and very sloppy. But that sense of increased work is something I associate more with other living structures: a romantic couple where each person tallies their contributions, whether financial, care-based, or otherwise; nuclear families where, typically, the mother is doing outsize (and unpaid) care work. Move beyond those structures and I don’t think exhaustion and disorder are an inevitability.
At its best, I think group living can halve (or more!) a lot of the domestic labor of a home. I don’t cook myself dinner every night, and that often frees up my time, which I might spend hanging out or spend alone, writing, reading, walking, volunteering. I can’t always be there for intimate conversations with my brother, my boyfriend, my friends, but usually someone can be. We share care work among ourselves—both giving and receiving it—and that allows the possibility of more alone time.
I think communities gain oxygen when there are lots of opportunities to give and receive. Generosity likes to multiply. It’s a true and magical riddle!
Your mother is half-Filipino and there’s a very cute bit in the book where you explain that she intended to name you for your Grandmother, but instead named you the Tagalog word for Grandma (Lola!). That story is nested inside a larger discussion of how you think of your identity, which you describe as, well, “messy”: you weren’t raised within a larger Filipino community, you grew up attending Japanese immersion school and speak Japanese, you’re white-passing. “I don’t identify as Asian American,” you write, “If anything — and this still feels confusing — I identify as the child of hippies who hold very idealistic notions about multiculturalism, ones I got swept up in and am still untangling myself from. I see my identity as irreducibly bound up with countries and cultures I don’t claim as my own.”
You also write about how your parents vehemence around non-assimilation — that you didn’t have to be part of any organized religion, or stand for the flag, or doing anything compulsory — can also feel unmooring, like “so many hippie kids,” “adrift in our supposed freedom, trying to figure out where and when we should drop anchor.”
I know some stories of people who’ve grown up in similar households who’ve become effectively reactionary to their parents’ way of living: they’re deeply into organized religion, or VERY ORGANIZED in their ideal suburban home with their nuclear family. But you seem to be trying to figure out a way forward that isn’t reactionary so much as your own. What’s still confusing? And what’s (gradually) clarifying?
I went through a reactionary phase in my teens and early twenties, which involved, if I look at it now, trying to become a square. I thought I was preppy. I avoided drugs and alcohol and attended an elite college in the Northeast. I wanted to control my environment as tightly as possible. If I saw someone I perceived as too hippied out, I felt itchy all over. Sometimes I still do. But living at Amherst, where some of my peers had actually gone to prep schools, I realized — and this gets to your next question — that I felt much happier in situations that were not so buttoned up. I don’t want to abide by someone else’s rulebook. I love to create secret languages with people. I don’t mind having someone wipe food from my cheek. I want closeness with people and that requires inviting in some chaos.
I’m not a religious person, and I mean that in the largest possible way. I like how different people are, and that there’s so much I don’t know. I find dogmas of almost every kind too rigid for the diversity of human experience. They also make me itchy. What’s still confusing for me is that I want to believe in a path forward (politically, economically, culturally, socially) that operates on a large enough scale to effect the level of transformation we require. But I also always want to pick things apart. I don’t believe in idols. I distrust slogans. I shrink from flags. The very things that electrify mass movements make me feel anxious. I fear the same old power structures hidden in new disguises.
What’s clarifying is that I do believe every person is important. That means working on a human scale matters. Things don’t feel small and petty if you really believe every life is precious and fully linked to all life on Earth. I may not be religious, but I hold community as sacred all the same.
There’s another idea from the beginning of the book, describing your parents’ habit of inviting people into your home (or people showing up without notice for dinner) that feels like a recurring motif of the book: “It might sound like chaos, but it felt like security.”
I’ve tried writing a few different ways of framing this question, but I think I’ll leave it at this: for people who read these descriptions and feel that recoil of gahhhhh this is so chaotic I could never, is there a way to being to reframe that reaction? Or does it have to be socialized and experienced? How can we think of the intimacy that chaos can engender as a path to security?
I love this question, and I think it sits at the heart of the project of the book. We live in a chaotic world. We create systems for making order and feeling secure. I understand how intense and overwhelming it can feel to give other people access to our private spaces and personal time. Sometimes the only way I can regulate my emotions is to be fully separate from other people — to be without conversation, without outside stimulation. It’s hard to imagine that living with others might offer us that alone time, or that we might gain more comfort and ease by sharing space, but I’ve experienced both. In that sense, perhaps it does help when that’s socialized and experienced.
However we choose to structure our homes, though, I still think it’s important to ask ourselves what systems actually make us safe. What systems offer us true security? Who will be there for us when we need it most? How will they know we need them? How will we know to be there when someone needs us, or when the time is ripe to join with others and work toward something larger than ourselves?
I find that it’s much easier to show up for other people when I have an idea of what’s going on in their lives—when I see them regularly, share meals with them. I find it much easier to ask for help when I’m in proximity to those people, when they know the context of my current life, and I understand what they can give.
In the book, I wrote: “The intimacy that comes with time and attention allows us to be vulnerable with others. This intimacy, across a group, can become a durable network—like mycelia. We are strongest when we feel safe being soft.” To me, that network feels like security.
This is a bit of a curveball, but wow did this book feel like the Pacific Northwest to me, in everything from the way you describe the color of your dad’s eyes (the blue of Crater Lake) and mushroom hunting to the descriptions of Strawberry Lake and the various communities of hippies, old and new, in Port Townsend. I felt very grounded in this book because of all the various places I’ve made home in the PNW (and fwiw, I don’t think it’s at all alienating if you aren’t from these places — it just evokes a very strong sense of place).
Which is all to say: the book is a very, very good counter-argument to the idea of the Seattle/Portland Freeze. What parts of the narrative of “the freeze” feel true to you, and what parts of the PNW lived experience (yours and others’!) get eclipsed by it?
Strangely, before I read this question I’d never heard of the Seattle/Portland Freeze! That said, I’m very familiar with narratives imposed on our cities and trying to untangle what feels true from what gets eclipsed. Sometimes I cringe when I hear people’s descriptions (and questions) about Portland. I realize that’s coming from a defensive place.
Lately, a common narrative is that Portland is filled with dangerous radical anarchists. If only! I wish we had more radicals in our city. I think of this media narrative as a wild case of mistaken scales: something quite small—a handful of passionate advocates for a more just system—is seen as a bigger threat to society than the issues they’re pointing to. Amplifying this take is a great tactic for pulling the public further to the right.
Another recent narrative is about the rise of homelessness in the city. This is true — the number of people living without shelter is growing — though the tenor with which the story is told is seriously off, as though vulnerable people are the scourge rather than our profit-first, deregulated housing market. The situation is heartbreaking, and the fundamental causes are worth addressing on a national scale. If we see this issue as collective, requiring aggressive policy actions to make housing a human right, rather than pointing fingers at a few cities, we might come together to prevent more people from living without stable, affordable, dignified housing, ourselves included.
The final, and silliest, narrative associates Portland with pretentiousness and self-seriousness. (Is this maybe related to The Freeze?). Portlandia comes to mind. Greased mustaches and latte art, maybe, and someone not looking you in the eye—I’m not totally sure! I asked a few friends what part of the Portlandia narrative feels true and in what ways it flattens or warps our culture. One friend joked, “I like coffee. I drink coffee.” I fear that the best parts of Portland—people supporting each other’s creativity, a diversity of subcultures, the pursuit of beautiful things in less consumerist ways—get transmogrified into an affected (and simplistic) aesthetics. Portland’s character is much better defined by its workers than its business owners (and I say that as a business owner), its poets than its politicians, its dicey bar regulars than its minor celebrities.
I don’t think we take ourselves as seriously as everyone thinks we do. I don’t think we’re up on our high horse (or highchair, as my mom calls it), crowning ourselves the authority on what’s moral. We’re trying to survive, to love one another, to find delight, pleasure, purpose, and camaraderie without shying away from the hard stuff — just like you! ●
You can follow Lola Milholland on Instagram here, read her newsletter here, and buy Group Living and Other Recipes here. (All Bookshop affiliate proceeds go towards IndigiPalooza)
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