we should all just live together

what would a house with all my best girls look like? And why is it all I've ever wanted?

Is it weird that I can see my future with a house of women so much more clearly than one with any man?

Oftentimes it’s after a droning conversation surrounding men, over glasses of spit and wine intermingled, our hearts flipped to the outside of our chests that we think on this. My friends and I sit on couches and floors anointed with cloth, stare into each others hopelessness, and say:

“We should just live together. Would that be so bad?”

The scripture of living with a man and the Apostles of women who desire it embellishes a dark wound that heals and scabs over and over in different forms. Existentialism around long-term partnership in the form of a romantic relationship, one that brands itself as a penicillin for the humming need for love, is nothing but a tool for us to live in systems that exacerbate our qualms with the world.

To be honest, another episode of “Love Island” or a talk about the fickleness of “the apps” might just kill me.

So I began thinking: if there were a house with all my girls, how would it look like? and what are the spaces that would exist within it?

Places to Convene

Without pretense of conversation and havens of adjacent play, these communal areas would be places to just exist.

Their purpose: to validate and witness the existence of one another.

One of these central spaces would be a library, comprised of authors from around the world and media to check-out. Shelves would reach til the top and light would stream from the ceiling. Everything would be self-service and would be organized as any normal library would. A TV room would be attached for those who want to watch things with one another.

The mode of communication here would be space.

Everyone surrounded with individual bubbles made aware by silence - it’s a notion that although we don’t have the energy to speak, we want to be acknowledged. We want to be around others without needing to pay with words.

The Kitchen would be no different.

There’s almost a palpable humanity that comes with the Kitchen: a need to energize and sustain our corporeal being that validates that it exists. It is a communal meeting with mortality. We are alive, these spaces say.

The Kitchen would be so large, with multiple stoves and ovens and ingredients galore, that multiple people can remain without interacting or speaking at all. But they will see each other. They will know one another is there.

There will not be duplicates of ingredients, which is the best part. You will need to notice and be attentive, share and divide with or without conversation. Just the notion that someone knows you need the pepper or salt next is enough. It is simply a reassurance that you impact someone else.

For what is more powerful than having someone to witness you just being?

Places to Share

One of the most cruel things the world has done is isolate women. Whether through means of pitting themselves against each other (forcing them to fix the mess with notions of being a “girl’s girl”), removing crucial spaces of conversation between women or demonizing, or all in all invalidating their want to spend their time with one another instead of their partner there has been pools of knowledge lost in a sea of seclusion.

To fix this is easy: a conversation pit.

I doubt many of women's problems would go unresolved if we all had easy access to conversation pits.

We would share our experiences. Bechdel tests would be passed only half the time. There would be a social contract to contribute, whether through your attention or through your adventures.

They would be spaces of growth and understanding of findings disproved or proved. The sharing would never need to be intellectual or even right by any means. It would just have to be said and talked about.

A true third space, these pits would welcome whoever wanted to join and the primary currency would be conversation to remain.

The central square, the Lyceum of the house, these pits could be shaken down and out would fall advice that could have changed lives at one point. My hopes are that this house would be multigenerational as well, so people of all ages can benefit from the wisdom of shared experiences without being demonized, infantilized, or disregarded completely.

Diaries of our lives, we would revel in the shared and unshared nature of it all surrounded by warmth and exceedingly soft cushions.

Places to Retreat

As valid as our need to be around each other and to share, the need to self-isolate and reckon with our existence is just as strong and pertinent to our makeup than anything else.

Portals that you can temporarily retreat then return back are essential to survival. Whether it be a balcony attached to everyone individual rooms or a meadow to run into - these spaces are increasingly necessary for us to think for ourselves and deeply at that.

Indoors would be a sun room where you can just bask in the sun, alone. It could be a space to convene, but with your eyes closed as they were meant to in this room, it won’t seem so.

A courtyard, ripe with fruit trees and large bushes to hide behind would be a must. It would live outside, away from our balconies and in a subtle brush. A canopy of vines would conceal it from everyone above, and only those who enter would know of its constituents for the evening. You could be utterly naked and no one would know a thing.

Around the entire house would be a dirt road: to walk, to think, and to withdraw even with another person. The path would lead back to the entrance of the house, if you want to go back in, but otherwise it will wind round and round til you’ve filled your rabbit holes with enough soil.

Walking back through these portals will be easy. They are always open, and always comforting beyond compare.

Places to Work

Oftentimes, when interests or activities associate themselves with women, they become trivial despite the hours and hours of time that goes into them. 3 days of putting together childhood memories in a scrapbook could obviously never rival the restoration of car!

In Where the Girls Are, Susan Douglas wrote that we are of a culture that has long dismissed women’s contributions as "frivolous" unless they align with traditional male standards of value (Douglas, 1994). God forbid we talk about Etsy. Side hustles my ass, find another place for your custom apron then.

The nature of these spaces of work are really to just change the nature of fulfillment for us. Maybe if we saw life as a series of projects instead of a constant career chase, we would be a lot more satisfied.

The Project Room would be a joint space filled to the brim with stationary, craft tools, whiteboards, desks, and chairs you can criss-cross on without throwing out your back.

You can work on anything in here. Whether it be raising seed funding, drafting a novel, or learning how to knit a scarf from scratch there will be space for it all in this room.

No pursuit here less worthy of praise or care, what you do in here doesn’t need to justify itself—it just needs to matter to you.

Phew.

Places to Rage

There’s no good place to scream nowadays without causing a whole scene.

We’ve socialized crashing out for women to be quiet. Who is the PR team on that? Nothing would help more than a good ole yell into the void.

I want to be outdoors. Visceral. Released.

We will have a cliff that will do just that.

“The screaming cliff” will be an offshoot of the house, secluded but easily accessible to all. There will be no socialized rage, just unadulterated screams of your wildest desires.

With no pretense of cloistering yourself, you can crash out in peace here. Thank God.

Places to Leave

Policing of women’s behavior, particularly to leave situations and things they don’t like has been a plague.

To rectify this we will have more doors in this building than Monsters Inc.

Doors will be installed to every person’s individual room if they so desire so you can bid goodbye at any moment without explanation or evidence of leaving. The front door will be for guests only, and the others will be just for us. Obviously, you can let people know you’re leaving but there will be no one to actually know if you did.

Safety has also been a concept used to trap women into their environments. But what we don’t acknowledge is that wanting to be safe is also a desire and should not be a tool to police our everyday.

If we don’t want to be safe, we don’t have to be.

Alarms will exist for break-in, and for intruders, we will have a guard stationed at the front entrance. The doors leading outside will have passcodes that change frequently, given to the respective owner of the room.

How freeing to be able to say goodbye without reason?

so this place does indeed exist

The problem isn’t that this house doesn’t exist.

It exists in college dorms, off-campus housing units, and spaces of mutual trust with women. Sofa bed conversation pits and rooftop retreats are real.

The problem truly is that these spaces are not considered valid for a enduring approach to life.

Platonic relationships, especially in today’s age, are in a severe legitimacy decline. They suffer from further adulteration from new media that glamorizes heterosexual partnership as the beacon of hope.

No one understands that female friendship can be a long-term plan.

But it most certainly is.

As far as this house goes, its whereabouts will be a mystery.

We will probably have figured out magic by then, an expectation honestly with a group of brilliant women that believe in worlds beyond their own.

But if you want a close second, maybe just live with your friends and hang out in the living room for a day and see how that goes.

It’ll probably restore your will to live if all goes right.