Who are housemates to us anyway?
They aren’t partners or family and there’s no guarantee they’ll be friends either. So who are our housemates to us and how much weight do we give the relationship in our lives? We’re bound to each other by a contract, so maybe that makes them more like colleagues.
But we know too much about each other and see too much of each other. We’re more than coworkers.
When I lived in a bigger house share, I’d be able to pick up any sock around the house and know which of my three housemates it belonged to. I’d never know that about a colleague.
House shares might not feel quite as close knit or cohesive as a family home or a cohabiting couple. But they’re not purely functional like a workplace either. They sit somewhere in between the two and the housemate relationship, somewhere in between the closeness of friendship and the formality of a colleague.
I love
‘s piece On Roommates where she articulates how confusing it is to place a housemate in our lives.“Why are the people who share our homes so significant, so spacious? Even if you try to block them out, even if you say they are not your friend, your lover, just a body taking up space, just a body sighing on the couch, texting at the sink, dropping a glass on their side of the wall, there is no blocking them out.”
Whether we befriend a housemate, are indifferent to them or loathe them, they are in our living space and they impact our day-to-day lives. They are, as Emma says, significant.
Last week, I chatted to psychotherapist Emma Reed Turrell for a big writing project I’m working on (more on this soon) and I asked her about housemate relationships. She pointed me towards her ‘Rings of Relationships’ concept where we map our relationships in concentric circles – close relationships sit in the middle and less significant relationships sit in the outer rings. She challenged me to place my housemate relationships inside one.
I’ve lived with 17 people over eight house shares now and, at least to start with, I feel the emotional connection with a housemate is most similar to an acquaintance, perhaps veering towards friendship but not quite there. Yet because of the physical closeness and the hours spent together, the quality of it dramatically impacts my life. If the interactions are tense, it impacts how I feel in my home. In that sense, housemates take centre stage, in there in the middle with some of my most significant relationships.
Trying to plot it like this gave me a newfound appreciation of just how complex a housemate relationship is, so unlike any other in our lives that it’s almost impossible categorise. It’s one where the physical contact and closeness is in no way reflected in how emotionally connected we are.
The suffix ‘ship’ describes the condition or state of our connections: friendship is a state of being friends. Companionship, a state of being companions. If ‘situationship’ hadn’t already been coined as a casual romantic relationship it would be the perfect word capture the transience and hard-to-pin-down nature of the housemate relationship. Both intimate and distant all at once.
If you know someone who might enjoy reading my writing on house shares, home and belonging, please do forward this email to them. Thank you x