I have often heard it said that you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your family. That never sat right with me. From a young age I knew I could feel a sense of family with a lot of people under the right circumstances.
I discovered this at summer camp. Raised in New York City with working parents, since the age of 5, each summer my sister and were sent off to the same camp in the Catskills. Seeing the same people each year, the other campers felt like siblings to me. The counselors and adults running the place were like parents, aunts and uncles. In my experience, all those people became my extended family, at least for the summer. I didn’t know it then but basically what I was experiencing each year was communal living. The variety of personalities to bounce off of allowed me to express all the sides of myself. It was a rich, full, joyful existence that was what I thought family was meant to be - all these people behind my goals, interested in my life as I was in theirs. Returning home at the end of the summer to our nuclear family unit, as wonderful as my parents were, my sister and I felt like we were going back to a kind of fabricated social construct. We would wait patiently until summer came around again.
Later in life I looked for a way to recreate that environment. Living at college had some of the elements but it was transient. After graduating and getting a job and my own place, I longed for that feeling of being surrounded by people I care about and who care about me. But how was I going to create it?
I considered the Peace Corp, the Navy, working on a fishing boat - something that would entail living closely with other people, but I didn't want to go to a foreign country and being a poor swimmer was deathly afraid of floating around in water. It looked like I could possibly find a reason to live with people if I would just subscribe to a philosophy or religion or take up some kind of a cause, like organic farming. Unfortunately I didn’t have any of those callings. What I did have was the desire to have a big family and I didn't want to have to give birth to most of the members.
In fact, even marriage was not something I aspired to, which set me apart from my girlfriends growing up. I knew that, even if I were to find the guy of my dreams and fall in love, going off into the sunset and setting up a home with just him would likely turn into a nightmare. It just seemed unreasonable to expect one person to fulfill all of my interests and yearning for social interaction. From my experience of summer camp, it was clear to me that it would take a composite of several different people to keep me fully entertained.
So there I was, a group dweller in search of a group, knowing I would not be satisfied with the conventional model of a marriage and family. I wanted to be part of a pack where I could carve out my own lifestyle and live as I wanted in the middle of a bunch of people.
Fortunately my sister was looking for this too. Thanks to her, I found Morehouse. She had been living there for six months and knew I would love it too, just like we both had loved summer camp. I visited and liked what I saw. The central goal of the group was to live closely and overtly study the dynamics of pleasurable group living. Through deliberate living, could everyone have everything they wanted while getting along? This was clearly an active exploration that included a lot of communicating and examining of goals and interactions and discussing all proposed actions before they happened.
I also liked the diversity of the group and their acceptance of people with all different lifestyles. There were single people with and without romantic partners, married monogamous couples, couples with outside romances, divorced people who still lived together in the community but kept their friendships and raised their kids. It seemed like you could create the life and relationships you wanted as long as it didn't make anyone else’s life uncomfortable. It was the Burger King of communal living. I could have it my way.
So at the age of 23, as a relatively shy, single person, I moved into Morehouse. I delved into the group social experiment investigating what it takes to have my life and the lives of those around me be pleasurable. I quickly befriended a nice guy in the group who was also single at the time. He did not seem like the man of my dreams so I felt free to enjoy myself around him and felt no pressure to have our friendship be anything other than it was. As the months passed he became the best friend I had ever had and a wonderful roommate. Because I had made friends with the other people living so closely with me, there was no pressure for him be my dance partner, my tennis partner, my shopping buddy or even like to eat the food I liked, read the books I liked or watch all the shows I like. I had the rest of the group from which to pick people to share my various interests.
I was happy. I had found my lifetime summer camp and a relationship that was thriving largely due to the interest and support of the other people in the group. After living here for a year it dawned on me that I could be married without making my husband be my sole companion. We got married and became parents.
27 years later we are still together. Our son was born and raised in the community and had the kind of childhood I had dreamt of. I have an unconventional relationship within a large unconventional extended family and it suits me perfectly. Of course having this large, extended family brings with it exponential problems. There are more people to disagree with, be betrayed by, leave messes behind and to see through difficult times. It doesn’t get easier with more people in your “family”, but it’s never dull and there's always someone to relate to over something crucial. One thing I am certain about is that my relationship with my husband would not have started and certainly not have endured or increased in intimacy over all these years without the group around us for support, an extended family beyond what blood relationships could provide.