This summer, Z, E, and I are embarking upon six months of living in our house without other housemates. I've felt anxious about this, about losing the presence of other people and about losing income. I've also felt anxious that we would become entrenched in the lifestyle of living without housemates and that inertia would keep us from having housemates again.
Z has been the mover toward this period of not having housemates, and often, she thinks her ideal is to never have housemates. I've expressed my anxiety to Z. At one point she said, "well, I might be open to having just one housemate, in the basement" and I said, "but I like it better with two housemates." In exasperation, she replied, "What is it that makes you want to stuff our house with people?!"
I felt very defensive in that moment. But lately I've realized more and more that when my partners accuse me of something in anger, it almost always has important truth in it. So I've pondered this question on my own: what is it that makes me want to stuff my house with people?
In 2008, I bought the 3-bedroom house I now live in. My intention was to live there with E (I had not yet met Z) and two or three housemates. E and I would share one of the two large bedrooms, a single person or couple, or parent with small child, would live in the other large bedroom, and another person would live in the third bedroom. I would receive rental income that would enable me to afford the monthly mortgage. With the income I had at the time, I would not have been able to afford the mortgage payment without rental income from E and at least one other person. Even if I put nothing into my retirement fund, I'd still need that rental income to stay in the black.
I was anxious that I would not be able to create a harmonious living situation. I'd always been in favor of living in community. At least in theory. In practice, I found that when I lived with others, I almost always over time developed irritations with people's idiosyncrasies. In fact, these irritations have developed in every living situation I've stayed in for more than a year. For each such situation, I can remember complaining to somebody about the situation and, from time to time, feeling dread about returning home at the end of the school/work day and needing to be in close contact with my housemate(s).
My solution back in 2008 was to only have housemates who wanted to live with us for a year or less. This is in contrast to most communal living situations, where folks are seeking long-term housemates. I was anxious about my solution because it revealed to others my misanthropic intolerance. However, I mustered the courage to move forward with it, and it has served extremely well. We have had over twenty different people live in this house and each situation has been quite harmonious and enjoyable.
Then, in 2015, the 4-BR house directly behind this house came up for sale, and I bought it with intention to extend our household. I added a bedroom in the basement of that house. Now, there are typically six people living in that house (the west house) and five living in our house (the east house). By U.S. standards, both houses are indeed stuffed with people! What is it that drives me to create this uncommon situation?
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I've had two dreams lately that have helped elucidate the answer. The dreams were similar. The second came last night and is fresh in my memory.
In the dream, I am living with the same people I live with now in the east house, but instead of being an aesthetically pleasing 1926 Craftsman, it's a very plain ranch style house with a plain white walls and inexpensive wall-to-wall carpeting. It's a long house, with the living room in front and a long hallway with bedrooms leading to the back door. There is a scene where I'm standing in the sparsely furnished living room talking with a woman housemate, and in the middle of our conversation I notice that two young men are also standing and talking in the living room, and I remark, "This household is so great, there can be two pairs of people conversing in this room and it doesn't feel crowded, in fact I didn't even notice those guys were there until just now."
Through the course of the dream, people are constantly coming and going in the house. Some are housemates, some are familiar friends, and some are people unfamiliar to me. They are young people, multi-racial and multi-ethnic but mostly white, and there is a sense that they are flowing through the house. Often they come in the front door and leave through the back door. At any given moment, I don't know exactly who is in the house, and this provides me with mild satisfaction and delight. There is also some uneasiness, but it is manageable and worth bearing because it is so pleasurable to know that the house feels like home to so many people.
The backyard is barren, triangular, and enclosed by a low chain-link fence with a gate on each side of the triangle. This backyard is similar to the backyards of houses I've stayed in in Denver, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe. I go out the back door and into the yard. People are flowing through the yard, too, sometimes staying a while, sometimes just passing through. I have an encounter with a dark-complected man in his 30s. We have some kind of disagreement. There is struggle, verbal, emotional, and physical. We end up on the ground, and I know that he is considering raping me. I think I could get away and run into the house, but I feel drawn to staying in this interaction. There is something I want to get out of it; I want resolution. I can't remember this part of the dream very clearly now; it has faded from memory faster than other parts of the dream. It is similar to many, many interactions I've had in real life; it is typical for me to feel that I cannot extricate myself from a relationship, even an unwanted and potentially harmful relationship. Through psychotherapy and solo inner work I have a strong sense that this relationship pattern began in infancy with my mother, and was reinforced during a very dimly remembered episode of sexual abuse with an older male relative (who, I realize now, would likely have been a dark-complected man in his 30s). At some point the interaction with the man in the dream ends and other things take place.
In the dream it is very close to the birthday of K, a woman who in real life was our housemate until just recently. K has planned a party for herself at the house, and guests have begun arriving, but K is nowhere to be found. In fact, none of us has seen her for several days. I am anxious, but not so much for K's well-being as for the party that she organized-- I feel I must do something about it, I must make it happen successfully. It's not clear to me what day the party was set for, today or tomorrow. Guests arrive at the house, then leave as part of the general flow of people. I fear that they won't come back. Still, I order a cake for this party. I'm irritated that K was so flighty as to disappear without telling us where she was going or when she was coming back, and had organized this party leaving me to take care of executing it. I'm vaguely aware that I am getting myself more involved in this party than is called for, acting out a pattern that recurs in my real life.
Nearby there is a community swimming pool, also with a low chain-link fence around it. There are two pools, small and large. The large one has a deep end, like a 12-foot deep end. I am standing near it talking to someone, maybe the dark-complected man from before. He is explaining that the large pool is supposed to be empty for maintenance, and as I look more closely I see that it is empty with a layer of dirt at the bottom. And he points out to me that the heavy rain currently happening is accumulating in that large pool. Again, I look more closely and see that there is a puddle at the bottom and that the dirt is dark, like mud. It is known that this is important, something should be done about it.
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After waking I talked about this dream with E, and he helped me relate this dream to what may be going on in my psyche, and what is happening in my real life.
Throughout my life I have found it uncomfortable to be alone with one other person. I fear being trapped, or feeling trapped. When I am alone with one other person, I feel that I must give my full attention to that person, especially if they are talking to me, and that it is dangerous to stop paying attention. Anxiety arises and my sense of my own wants and needs almost completely disappears. This manifests in short, medium, and long time scales. For example, I'm ill at ease talking with one other person at a party, working one-on-one on a project, and being in a long-term intimate relationship with one partner.
When I was first getting to know my partner E, we went to an event where scores of friends were all camping in the same campground. After we set up our tent, E wanted for the two of us to hang out there together. I felt a strong drive to get out of the tent and mingle. I explained, "I want to be with the people."
In addition to feeling afraid of being alone with one other person, I also fear committing to a small group of people. I don't join leadership teams or boards of directors. I once joined a musical group with full commitment, but after a very painful interpersonal conflict, I declined to ever offer that kind of commitment to any other musical group. I sometimes feel an initial burst of enthusiasm for starting a new small group of people to pursue a common interest, but almost always escape before the group has coalesced. And I don't want to commit to living long-term with a set group of people.
So all of this contributes to my desire to live with an ever-changing group of people.
In 2008, when I envisioned the kind of community I wanted to create in my house, I envisioned exactly the kind of flow that I saw in my dream! One specific of my vision was that we'd have weekly salons at our house where an ever-changing group of very smart and interesting people would gather, enjoy refreshments, and develop amazing world-changing ideas. I also envisioned that my goddaughter R would regularly drop by the house after school with her friends. Flow!
Perhaps this why the one major flaw I saw with the house was that its only door to the backyard was from the basement bedroom. There was no way to get directly to the backyard from the common areas; it would be necessary to go out the front door and around the side. This felt bad to me. I imagined a trapped feeling. I thought the house would feel constipated. As soon as I moved in, I arranged for someone to build French doors from the kitchen to a new back deck, which would then lead down to the back yard. After this was completed, I asked the previous home owners if they'd ever thought about doing this. They said that it hadn't crossed their minds and that they'd felt completely satisfied with the previous arrangement.
Reflecting on the images of flow through the house, another image arises: that of blood cells coursing through blood vessels, occasionally eddying and churning around corners and obstacles. Curiously, another word for blood cell is corpuscle, deriving from the Latin corpus for body.
Long before I bought the west house, I'd had dreams of buying the west house. And always, a core element of my dream was to take down the fence between the two backyards, allowing folks to move freely between the two houses and also to pass through to get from the street the west house faces to the street the east house faces. The houses are both in the center of a block that's 1/4 mile long, so normally it's a 7 minute walk to get from house to house. It brought me immense satisfaction to take down the fence and create a path between the two houses that allowed us to shorten that walk from 7 minutes to one minute. My fantasy extended to opening up the pathway to everyone in the neighborhood, but in real life I decided this would lead to litter and noise issues I'd rather avoid.
Last month we had a house guest whose daughter and son-in-law were living on the streets in a town a half hour north of here. They were using heroin. A friend helped our guest locate the two and bring them back to Seattle; our guest texted me and asked if the two could stay in our house with us. I brought this up with Z and E and said, "The answer is No. We can't have heroin users in the house. They may steal our stuff." We discussed it a bit more but decided in the end that they couldn't stay with us. Although I gave an emphatic No at the beginning, I was in part saying No to my own self, who longed to say Yes. Yes to every part of everybody.
My identity as a polyamorous person arises from the same desires and fears. I want to be able to say Yes to everybody. And I am afraid to be alone with one person, to feel trapped.
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