As someone who chooses to live without children or a domestic partner, I think a lot about community. I don’t live alone — I live in an awesome house with three roommates — but it occasionally worries me to think what I would do if I got so sick I couldn’t leave the house, or so physically injured I couldn’t walk or navigate stairs. The concept certainly worries my mother, who often asks me pointed questions about this sort of thing over dinner.

But I know that I have a large enough circle of people with whom I am close enough that if something were to happen, I could ask for help, and I am sure enough that I would get it. It feels like I need to hedge when I say that because I’ve never found myself in that situation and I’ve never needed to ask for that level of help, so it’s hard to say for sure. I do know other people in my community who have asked for that kind of help and have gotten it, so I know the resources are out there. It seems more like the question is whether or not I can count on it, and whether I’m doing enough to cultivate it.

This quote from an article I read recently, which is not related to community, got me thinking about this. The last clause in particular caught my attention:

That reading and not understanding, and keeping on reading is one of the singular pleasures and engagements of the life of the mind (and, I guess, the body too). It is so not because it is fun to be confused, but because being lost in this particular way is related to having — or developing — a political life: to the extension of ourselves into the world and to the forming and care for the collectivities that we will need to survive this world, and that, perhaps more importantly, we want to survive us into a different future.

Humans are social animals, and it is fairly clear that we need community and support in order to survive. It seems to me that the cultural standard is still very narrowly focused: one finds another (singular) person to love, to marry, to make a family with. One builds a support structure around oneself that is very small and intimate: one spouse, a house, perhaps a plot of land, one or more kids. Perhaps a few parents or in-laws are thrown into the mix. Maybe the kids move home after college because they can’t find a job, or they move back in when the parents become old and have a harder time taking care of themselves. But the story we’re writing is that we’ve built this little mini-community of family so that we know that we will be able to rely on it later.

There is also a standard cultural narrative for looking outside the family for community support: churches and other religious groups. I’m not going to spend pages and pages here talking about the role of church as support network and the implications of community emerging from a shared religious interest. Instead I’ll say that for me, looking to religion for community feels impersonal in a way that building a community with secular roots does not.

By rejecting these narratives and following a path that is more individual and self-reliant, I am paradoxically also making myself more dependent on community. I am not building a very tight circle of community around myself, or importing myself into a pre-existing community based on shared beliefs. I hope that I am building community in a much larger sense. I hope that I am attracting and maintaining relationships with people beyond those with whom I am (physically, emotionally, spiritually) intimate, and doing so with enough force and love that I will, in fact, be able to rely on those people as we all age. And in return, I hope that they will see that I am promising them that I will do what I can in return.

Getting back to where I started, one of the many things I appreciate about my community is that it does not particularly discriminate against me because I am unmarried and do not have children. As my roommate R. recently put it when penning a wonderful Mother’s Day letter to a mutual friend:

You are friends with the parents of your kids’ friends, your kids are friends with your friends’ kids, and those of us without kids are somehow able to be part of that tapestry, too. Your kids are growing up knowing friendship and community as the stuff of life[…].

The house I live in has two married adults, myself, and another unrelated adult. We share the top two stories of a three-story house (the married couple own it) and live as communally as it suits us. It’s not traditional close community in a way that matches that cultural standard I mentioned before but it does work really well for me — I have my own space when I want it, and there are enough people around that I can have company when I want that. I get lots of benefits from sharing space with others: lower rent, shared expenses, better location than I could afford on my own, and the knowledge that if something goes pear-shaped, there’s another responsible adult living nearby that can help out.

In addition to my own little “bougie commune”, in the larger circle of my friends and acquaintances there are a number of other examples of people building similar sorts of communities: giant sprawling group houses of five or six unrelated adults with lots of common space, three distinct condos owned by three couples plus a few kids in a newly-renovated building, even huge cohousing developments occupied by dozens of families of all sorts of shapes and sizes.

It’s refreshing to know that there are viable alternatives to the standard models, and it’s incredibly rewarding to personally know many people who are making those alternatives work. It gives me faith that the community with which I want to surround myself exists, is already pretty good at supporting itself, and will in fact be there for me when I need it.