The first inklings of the idea to live in a multigenerational household with my parents began when Kit and I were living in southern Texas during the first two years of our marriage. 

We were fresh out of college and fortuitously garnered jobs at the same small Catholic parochial school. I taught 4th and 5th grade English Language Arts and he taught middle school Latin. We were newly married and not from Texas. We hadn’t gone to college in Texas. We moved there purely because we needed jobs and this school offered us both positions first. 

It was a very nice little school and everyone there in the school and parish community welcomed us with open arms and showered us with far more love than either of us deserved. (But I feel like that’s Texas for you.) And we really loved it there! But…at the end of the day, we were still lonely. Really, really lonely. There weren’t a lot of people our age around and we didn’t have any idea how to go out and find them. We had just spent four years completely immersed in the ready-made community of small colleges, and now we didn’t really know what to do with ourselves. 

It was around this time that I read an article which planted the seed of an idea. 

I don’t have any idea what the article was called, or who wrote it, or where it was published online. I have a terrible memory for things of this sort and I really wish I could be better at citing my sources! So, if it’s your idea and article, or if you’ve also read this, or if it was someone you know who did–please tell me! 

The article was about why so many people idealize college, fantasize about their college experience, and why so many people miss it so desperately in the few years after graduation. (I was so stoked to be reading this article–it was describing my experience to a T!) As I remember it, the article’s argument went along these lines: we are a tribal species; we evolved to live in small, closely related groups, and in current-day America (and indeed many places in the Western world) this runs totally counter to the way we live. We live with our nuclear family, no grandparents, aunts or uncles or cousins around. We work with one group of people, go to church with another group of people, our children go to school with another group, and live next door to another group, and we have a smattering of friends scattered in each–if we’re lucky. And we live our lives in this highly compartmentalized fashion. All except for four years in college. 

For four years in college, you live, work, sleep, play, study, and eat with the exact same group of people, day in and day out. You only have to be alone if you want to be. Life is totally shared. And this is the last vestige of tribal living that persists. (If you want to get technical and historical, then I will add that higher education didn’t come about to preserve the tribal experience, but nonetheless, it does.) And that experience of tribe is a powerful one. I would posit that college is such a formative experience for so many people because it comes at key point in brain development and it is our first and often only experience of that primal life. It perfectly fills our desire to live life in common with other people. 

Then we are thrust out into the “real world” all on our own. No community. No friends. No help. No wonder we long for college in those first few years after it is over. There was a kind of joke and trope from the colleges that Kit and I both went to that so many of the graduates stuck around and continued to live and work in the college town or they went back home to their families. That seemed to annoy our college professors who were hoping to educate individuals who would go out and change the world. Why wouldn’t we go out and do that? Why did we insist upon hanging around? Or going right back to where we came from? Well, as someone who did neither of those things, I can tell you: it’s because “going out and changing the world” is a lonely and largely pointless business. Or rather, the change that we make to the world is smaller, quieter, humbler than we usually think in our early 20s. Far better to stay with your people–or go back to them, for this is where we do actually make an impact. I understand that much better now. 

It’s because we need our people. We aren’t really made for rugged individualism despite the romantic appeal of the frontiersman and the great American cowboy. We are made for each other and we deeply desire that and that’s a good thing. It’s why great societies exist. We band together and create the opportunity for art, literature, music, science, medicine, poetry, and ordinary human flourishing. Aristotle rightly says that a man outside the city is either a beast or a god. Because life outside the community is not a normal life. Us normal people are made to live together.