An addendum to yesterday’s post, because I forgot to add a part about the multiple-life-partners setup that does not make sense.
Communities face a struggle between the good of the group vs. the good of the whole. In a typical two-partner household, the assumption is that the two partners will stay together as a unit, which crucially involves cohabitation. If one partner needs to move (due to a job offer, family needs, or any other reason), the understanding is that the couple will discuss their options and then choose the same one: either both partners move or both partners stay. Obviously that does not work out perfectly in every situation. For example, my parents have lived separately at least twice due to jobs vs. moving not lining up, and same with me and my husband. But the understanding in all of these cases was that the couple would reunite eventually. A friend of mine in grad school had to move across the country for her school, with her husband staying behind as he tried to get his shit together to move. He never did, and eventually they divorced. Same thing happened a friend of mine from work. (Note that I’m not describing what has to happen - long-distance marriages/partnerships without the understanding that the two will reunite can certainly work in the right circumstances - but I’m describing what the norm is.)
It’s hard enough to work out life circumstances with only two adults in the partnership. The more adults you add in, the harder it gets. For example, one of my best friends used to live a 5 minute drive from me. Then I moved to be closer to my husband and our work. Then she eventually moved even further to be closer to her husband’s work, which is in the opposite direction from where my work is. We now live an hour and a half away from each other because of decisions made so we could each be closer to our husbands. I’d love to start up a platonic partnership with her, but given our current living situations (she owns her house, and if M and I are ever lucky enough to afford a house, we’d be moving further away from my friend, not closer), it just isn’t feasible.
Let’s say, though, that M & I and my friend and her husband had been in a four-person platonic partnership back when we all used to live in the same town. Then friend’s husband gets a tenure track position and eventually tenure at his current job an hour away from where we all used to live, and M & I both get tech jobs an hour in the opposite direction. This was back before remote work was an option for anybody. We would have had to decide to either (a) all move together, likely forfeiting at least one of the job offers, (b) live together but have at least one person drive huge distances to get to their work, (c) live separately in a long-distance partnership, where we could not necessarily rely on each other for everyday things that require people to be physically together, or (d) dissolve our partnership in favor of individualism. None of these options seem great. It’s some absolute shit that teleportation doesn’t exist yet.
We see this same thing in so many coming-of-age/hero’s-journey stories. Our hero comes from a small community where everyone is happy just doing the same thing all the time and doing what’s expected of them, but our hero needs more, so they break away and go on their own quest and eventually start their own life. I’ve seen so many of those stories, and few if any stories where the moral flows in the opposite direction, towards preservation of the community. I do come from a white western upper middle class society though, so that’s not a surprise, and I bet the situation is different in cultures where the good of the group is valued above individualism. Moana actually does this really well in my opinion: she has her hero’s journey, but at the end she is able to tie it back to her community so they can come with her, and they all grow and evolve together.
I just don’t see a way to form a multi-adult cohabitation partnership in my life, though, where everyone feels both supported and fulfilled. If one person wants to pick up and move to another state, do we really expect all the other adults to pick up and move with them? If folks are allowed to just pick up and move, given how difficult it is to build community, do we really expect the group to sustain itself, or will it dissolve over time the more people take opportunities that bring them further away? If the group comes to some agreement at its formation that all members are to stay in one location to preserve the group, do we really expect that all adults in the group will feel fulfilled for the rest of their lives and not stifled? Perhaps it can work, for example if everyone’s trade in the group had dependent upon where they live, if everyone’s can be done remotely, or if the group contains only a few high-paid members who provides the financial support and the rest work on the land or in the home, and everyone is happy staying where they are and don’t need to uproot. OR IF UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME WERE A THING. OR IF WEATHER PATTERNS WEREN’T SO COMPLETELY FUCKED THAT PEOPLE NEED TO MOVE BECAUSE THEIR TOWN BURNED DOWN OR THE SMOKE IS GIVING THEM BREATHING PROBLEMS. But that situation absolutely does not describe my group of friends, when everyone is moving further and further away and making more and more individualistic decisions each year.
TLDR, and this is by no means a novel statement: Community is stifled by capitalism and also by global warming, aka fuckery that most of us who want the commune lifestyle didn’t even choose.
(An aside: Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota book series contains exactly this kind of group structure that I’ve described. I think some of the reasons it works in the series are (a) transportation is massively improved, such that it takes something like an hour to drive [yes, drive] [be driven in an automatic flying car actually] from Chile to Japan, (b) everyone works only 20 hours a week, (c) every group home has a kitchen tree, so the food situation is sorted out and nobody goes hungry, and (d) poverty and global warming don’t really seem to be a thing anymore.)
