The pursuit of frictionless interactions

& life inside Britain's communes

In 2022 author Mim Skinner spent 12 months staying in ten different communes and intentional communities across the UK. Her stays included one at the London’s luxury co-living set up Mason and Fifth, Bruderhof in Kent - a 300-strong Christian commune - and Old Hall, ‘a hippy commune’ set up in 1974 on a farm in Suffolk.

She wrote about her time in each in her book Living Together. It’s the first thing I read when I started researching for my book How to Stay Sane in a House Share so I was excited to chat to Mim over Zoom earlier this year. I wanted to understand whether the more rigorous group structures that these communities put in place could be helpful for house sharers.

Our conversation highlighted for me the main differences between an intentional community and a house share. While one is a group of people choosing to live together because they share certain values and purpose, fellow house sharers are held together by rental contract, sometimes friendship and often not much else.

Mim observed this in some of the communities she visited: “The element of choice completely transforms the experience,” she says. “Where there’s only an economic driver - people who are driven into tightly packed sharing situations because they can’t afford anything else - there’s not a greater sense of ‘what are we doing this for?’ or ‘How do we want to live?’

Yet in both set ups - house shares and communes - there’s a desire to reach a state of what Mim calls ‘frictionless interactions.’ That’s not to say they’re conflict-free living situations, but that those living alongside each other have found a way to navigate conflict and disagreements in a kind and constructive way.

Mim explains how shared purpose infiltrates the interpersonal relationships and interactions in an intentional community because you have a motivation to work through things together and achieve a specific outcome.“In the communities I join, I look for a shared purpose,” she says. “I wouldn't share a space where there wasn’t a kind of a vision behind it, or a communal idea, or some joint purpose that you can accomplish better in a group setting than individually. Those have been things like being able to provide a space of welcome because you kind of have a bigger setup, or living in a greener way.

“You consider other peoples’ lives in your decisions because you need to achieve what you’ve set out to do together,” she continues. “We ran a number of projects from a farm we lived in, where we wanted to improve food access and support people who were in emergency housing. If we didn't have something we were doing together, and we were just sharing space, I don't think it would have been enough. With a communal purpose, there’s a structure. Without that, there’s no reason to overcome the other things that come with living together.”

When I compare Mim’s observations from her time in communes with the women I interviewed for my book, who were living in house shares, I can see what she means. In house shares, where there isn’t one focus, the group isn’t united by something and it shows. They can often feel fragmented - four or five people not really knowing each other but sharing a space.

And yet often, when I was interviewing the women for my book, I felt a real desire in them to create a community in the house shares where they lived, many of them explaining they were choosing to live in a house share over moving in with a partner.

And while many might sense that loss of community, modern lifestyles don’t necessarily offer the time or space they need to build a community around them. Mim explains how she’s seeing a market appearing trying to cater to these people. “There are lots of people who want to buy into a community but don’t have the time to dedicate to it. There are some developer-led communities appearing that cater to these people.”

One is The Collective which houses 700 people in very small units in Canary Wharf. Another is Mason and Fifth. “Lots of people I interviewed there had felt that their mental health had improved. They had someone external who oversaw the washing up. It promised frictionless interactions. And they were happy to buy that as a product even though it was very different to my idea of community.”

I ask Mim about how conflict is dealt with in intentional communities. In trying to understand how we can do it better in house shares, I wanted to see how it’s dealt with among a community where there’s a shared purpose and where people are more motivated and invested in making the community last. “The thing I was most impacted by after visiting the communities for my book was how normal it was to bring up a problem,” she says.

“It’s not an easy conversation to have to say to someone ‘Actually, I don't think you're doing quite enough cleaning in the house.’ It can feel complicated and difficult. But in these communities I visited, these sort of conversations were normalised, they didn’t feel loaded. There was a slot in the diary for them and it worked amazingly. They were framed in a way that meant they weren’t a difficult thing. I found that really interesting, to ask: "Ok, how do we do that kind of interaction and be able to say ‘this isn’t working for me’ in a way that is widely accepted as quite a peaceful thing to do?”

She remembers a technique called Non Violent Communication that she saw being widely used inside the communities she visited. You can even take courses in it, to understand how to break down the conflict to the needs of all involved. Interestingly, two of the psychologists I interviewed for my book also recommended this style of communication for house sharers.

“You call it an ‘NVC,” explains Mim. “You’d say ‘Oh, can I just catch you later? I need an NVC.’ It’s basically a non-critical criticism. I saw how giving somebody an NVC within these British communities was so hyper neutral. It wasn’t a painful or awkward situation. People were so willing to acknowledge it and see the ways they could improve or reflect on the mistakes they’d made.”

You can now pre-order How to Stay Sane in a House Share from various booksellers by clicking on the image below.