it seems so strange to me that the only people it is socially acceptable to live with (once you reach a certain stage in life) are sexual partners? like why can’t i live with my best friend? why can’t i raise a child with them? why do i need to have sex with someone in order to live with them? why do we put certain relationships on a pedestal? why don’t we value non-sexual relationships enough? why do life partners always have to be sexual partners?
My grandmother and grandfather more or less adopted my grandmother’s best friend back in the 50s. After my grandfather died (before I was born, back in 1968 or so) they continued to keep house together, platonic best friends, and they hung together until they died, a few months apart, in 2007.
It’s quite recently, as far as I can tell, that living arrangements like that have stopped being regarded as normal.
It’s absolutely a new thing to find this stuff weird, and it has a lot to do with media pretending that the nuclear family and marriage are the only reasons to live with other people.
I’ve lived in a 3 adult household my whole life. My parents and their best friend. This was never weird to me, even though everyone my age thought it was because the media never portrayed these kinds of housing arrangements. As far as i was concerned, I just had an extra non-blood parent.
According to my parents, it was very common in the 70′s-80′s to buy houses with your friends, because it was financially smart to do so (so long as you were certain they were close friends who wouldn’t fall out with you and fuck everything up). Houses and house payments are much more manageable when you split the bills 3-4 ways instead of just two.
Millenials aren’t the first to think it’s a great idea to just shack up with friends. That’s housemating without the hastle of living with strangers. It’s still a good idea to shack up with people you’ve known a long time so you know how you’ll get on living together, but still. In the current economy, it’s pretty much now our only option for affording anything.
I think, and I’m not researched on this, but I think conservatives probably tried to suppress images of non-nuclear families because they likely thought it would encourage ideas of polygamy, polyamory, open sexual relationships with or without marriage, as well as other relationship types they thought of as un-christian or unsavoury. I could be wrong, but that shit wouldn’t surprise me.
(And i want to make a note that there’s also a disturbing amount of asexual denial around that makes people go ‘if they’re living together they HAVE to be banging because why wouldn’t they?’ and that shit both creeps me out and annoys me no end. People can be in relationships without sex. People can live together without sex. Sex is not the be-all and end-all and people being taught to think it is really need to stop).
Don’t let the media fool you into believing you can only live with a sexual partner or blood family. Someone somewhere has an agenda for making these seem abnormal, when really it’s just practical.
A lot of people acted like it was super weird when two of my brothers decided to move states with me when I started my postdoc. I got really used to giving a little canned speech about it because it seemed to bewilder people so much. (Their leases happened to be up! We could share rent! They wanted to try somewhere new!)
The notable exception was my grandma, who was just like, “oh, yes, when we were young my sister and I decided to move cross-country together and it was lovely.”
More of this kind of thing for everyone, pls.
The implication that close sibling relationships must also be a warning sign for incest also peeves me off; what kind of society are we living in anyway
Having a multi-adult household unit also just makes a shit-ton of sense, tbh. Much easier to split not only the bills, but also the housework and child-rearing responsibilities. Communal living ftw.
Look at golden girls, look at Full House, examples of these types of households were popular in old media
Hell, going back farther, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert are siblings who raise Anne Shirley together. And historically there were communes of Shakers and other people trying to create Utopian communities where people lived together instead of in nuclear families.
girls dont mature faster than boys, girls are punished from an early age for the same behaviour that boys are allowed to indulge in well into adulthood
i actually talked about this with a psych professor and she believes that women/young girls have been pushed into responsibility from young ages for so long that its actually triggered an evolutionary effect where young girls are literally developing mentally early in order to cope with the stress.
Local Girls Literally Evolve To Deal With Patriarchal Bullshit
This is the 10th one of these flowers Slash has stolen and brought home.
Here is number 11…
Here’s his third catch of the night.
And that second photo is his face right after I told him “People on the internet love your flower catching skills, Mr. Slash!”
Guess what Mr. Slash is up to tonight?
And, he’s back at it again tonight.
He got another one, and he is proud of himself.
He brought in another one tonight.
Thank you, Mr. Slash!
He is so beautiful 😭
He’s aware of that, and loves being told that. 😛
Sometimes, he will hold my hand when I ask him about the flowers.
He brought these two flowers in last night, and decided to pose for me when I put them near him to take photos.
Plot twist! He brought back a hibiscus tonight instead of the usual ones.
He must be feeling more tropical.
He’s back to the normal ones now…
Even when it’s raining, he still decides to go and find these. Good thing for him that whatever breed of cat he is, he has remarkably water-resistant fur!
He had a very busy night while everyone was asleep last night…
Caravankids 