All over the world, women are joining forces under one roof, sharing the load of child care and household bills through the age-old power of sisterhood....
“In the patriarchal, heteronormative story, you get divorced and stay in the house, or you buy another home, and you live this isolated life where you’re supposed to date and fall in love again and get remarried or blend families,” Ms. Hopper said. “It seems like it’s always a binary, and we have dispelled this myth that there’s only one path forward.”...
“When I had to leave my husband, all I could think about was how I now had to figure out how to do everything on my own — buy a house on my own, pay my bills on my own, and raise my child on my own,” said Ms. Batykefer, whose divorce was finalized in February and now splits custody with her ex-husband. “I never thought about finding another single mother to live with and do it together. We just fell into it. But now, it’s like, why isn’t it more common for us to join forces?”
From the comments over there:
Mommunes are great, but they are also a red flag that men are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Generally speaking, men have not adapted with the times to be good partners, especially when kids are involved.
I'm a married Gen X mother of two. Thirty years ago, I (and all my friends!) thought that the men [we] had chosen would be excellent husbands and fathers who would live into the realities of a family with two working adults. For most of us, those expectations have not held up.
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35 comments:
I used to call them roommates!
......and there was ALWAYS one that was $10 short on the bills.
Why think that two women will find it easier to work in with each other than a man and a woman? Who will allow anyone else to raise their children? especially these days. What's fair in dividing bills - more from the one with more money? less from the one using hot water and lights less? Etc. I lived in communal houses back in the Sixties and I know from that past that these issues will come up. And what about drugs, my sisters - thank God, we didn't have fentanyl or powerful marijuana back then. But they are around now. I think marriage will be rediscovered by some; mental collapse by others; Ohio by still others.
Sisterhood? The Age Old Power of Sisterhood?
"I don't understand women. But women understand women. And they hate women." - Al Bundy
Or isn't it really the Age Young Power of Court Ordered Child Support (aka Modern Day Slavery) paid for by the divorced father ... support mom spends on herself getting laid, so she needs sisters to pay the actual bills the brats incur?
I think we all know the answer to that.
You ... people ... need to sort yourselves out and quit living in your New York Times novel.
Sisters are doin it for themselves.
Who needs dads, anyway? As we're told (over and over and over and over...) by- well, just about everybody, men are idiots. Much better for all those women to raise children without them. What could go wrong?
"Generally speaking, men have not adapted with the times to be good partners, especially when kids are involved."
"Men have not adapted" can be read as "Men do things differently than women". And by "differently" (according to women), that means "wrong". Because women are never wrong. Right?
I'm a married Gen X mother of two. Thirty years ago, I (and all my friends!) thought that the men [we] had chosen would be excellent husbands and fathers who would live into the realities of a family with two working adults. For most of us, those expectations have not held up.
I think I see the problem. 44 years we married with the expectation that as soon as child #1 came along she would be a full time housewife and mother. Five children over 19 years, all successful adults, with better jobs and more money then I had at their ages. And- all recognize that they’re the sex they were born with, and recognized their uncle with drug and alcohol problems was an excellent bad example of how to live.
And I’ve mentioned here before in my small rural town where the HS graduating class has dwindled from 100 when we arrived to 45 last year that over the years the #1 and #2 graduates every year have been from a family where mom and dad are both on marriage #1 and mom was a full time mother.
And since YT is a paywall, I don’t know why she HAD to leave her husband. had to, as if there were no options.
Most of my acquaintances who married with the same expectations are still married. The male friends of mine who married career women are on their second or third wife.
Shades of 'Kate and Allie' with Jane Curtin from 40 years ago.
Yeah, women need to get together in one house, and raise each other kids.
Isn't that every women's dream?
"But the co-living partners, who call themselves platonic spouses, have had their ups and downs. A year after moving into the Siren House, the women launched a drinks and snack shop that failed. Their two new tenants, one of whom had never dated women before, fell in love with each other and eventually moved out. Ms. Hopper and Ms. Harper still live in the home, but they now rent the basement unit to a gay man, and are keeping the upstairs unit vacant as a shared space for homework, dance parties and quiet time."
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"Back in Florida, Ms. Gilder and Ms. Batykefer also don’t plan on staying in that four-bedroom house in Jacksonville area forever. The duo hopes to buy and remodel a fixer-upper of their own in the coming year, and to allay costs, they’ve signed a deal with a television producer who believes the process of renovating their new mommune could make for entertaining reality television."
I suggest Platyspouse
Sounds more like sitcom premise than a viable lifestyle.
This reads like another “global movement” that the NYT made up based on some academic wet dream and a few scattered anecdotes..
I want some proof that this is real before speculating on its implications.
And why was it printed in the Real Estate section?
Shorter NYT: Divorce yet another area not meeting women’s expectations.
"how I now had to figure out how to do everything on my own — buy a house on my own, pay my bills on my own"
Without money from her ex? I call BS.
"and now splits custody with her ex-husband"
So, not on her own.
"Generally speaking, men have not adapted with the times to be good partners, especially when kids are involved."
But that stereotype does not prevent women from sucking them dry for alimony.
"And since YT is a paywall, I don’t know why she HAD to leave her husband. had to, as if there were no options."
Let me guess. She had a right to be happy. And the fact she wasn't was her husband's fault.
Am I close?
Every woman wants a good wife. The stupid ones try to force their husbands to become one. The smart ones hire one.
The writer or editor zinged this ditz:
“raise my child on my own,” said Ms. Batykefer, whose divorce was finalized in February and now splits custody with her ex-husband.
Perfect.
I'm a married Gen X mother of two. Thirty years ago, I (and all my friends!) thought that the men [we] had chosen would be excellent husbands and fathers who would live into the realities of a family with two working adults. For most of us, those expectations have not held up.
A) You chose poorly.
B) Maybe you should have considered looking for a man who would live (lean) into the realities of a family with one working adult.
For most of us, those expectations have not held up.
Join the rest of the human race sister. I doubt your husbands expected what they got from you.
So someone found 1980s television?
Kate & Allie (TV Series 1984-1989) - IMDb
When Allie Lowell divorces her husband and gets custody of their two children, she moves to New York City and moves in with her best friend, Kate McArdle, also divorced and raising a daughter. They form a unique kind of family unit in this comedy from the 1980s.
Living with another adult human being is very difficult. (It isn't easier if there are children in the house.) That is why roommates usually split up after a year or two. The only thing that is strong enough to hold cohabitating couples together is sexual intimacy, and in fact the high divorce rate among lesbians suggest that even that doesn't work very well when two women are involved.
That's how they do it in Africa, where it takes a village full of women to raise a pack of savages.
Sure, NYT. Is it womenhood, or is it woman/trans-woman partnership. The NYT is part of the war on women, supporting all the delusional, angry people who think that XY chromosomes can be transformed into XX chromosomes just be saying "I believe!". This story from the NYT is just another salvo in their war on civilization. The NYT is the paper of record for neobarbarians.
This sounds like an update to the 1980's sitcom Kate & Allie.
Sister wives.
I other breaking news, guys are still going camping in the woods.
This is just stupid.
It strikes me as the same kind of thing as the Bridezilla phenomenon - a narcissistic and entitled "woman" (I don't want to share my title with her!) who makes everyone around her miserable in her quest to mold reality into the shape of her liking. Being a mother of three and a wife of thirty years, as well as a failed wife of two years when I was very young through our joint fault in choosing, I try to avoid saying things like "Her poor kids!" but... her poor, poor kids.
why not?
I met a nice lady out on a walk and she is living with a group of women and aiding raising a child. She is divorced... and the situation works well. At least that is what she told me.
Not for everyone, certainly.
Contrast representation of men: The Odd Couple.
Boys raised in Fatherless households are FAR MORE LIKELY to:
Drop out of school
Become addicted to Drugs
Murder and/or be murdered
End up in Jail
Commit suicide
Have babies out of wedlock and repeat the cycle...
The stats on this are easy to find.
But you go girls!
I assume they all had to find themselves.
Boys raised in Fatherless households are FAR MORE LIKELY to:
Drop out of school
Become addicted to Drugs
Murder and/or be murdered
End up in Jail
Commit suicide
Have babies out of wedlock and repeat the cycle...
The stats on this are easy to find.
But you go girls
Yes. Statistically, women do significantly worse raising boys without a strong father figure in their lives. But it is the fatherless girls who predominate in having the babies out of wedlock. Girls without a loving father figure often end up trading sex for male approval, which they should have gotten from their fathers. And then nail down a guy, for awhile, by getting pregnant.
My maternal grandmother was born in central Utah in the late 1890s. When I was in my teens she told me stories about her mother and her mother's "sisters" who lived communally, dividing labor including house hold chores, child rearing, and even outside work. Everyone, by her description, was happy with their lot.
The only difference between then and now was the presence of one of my great-grandfathers, and the sotto voce approval of the LDS Church.
Mormon Fundamentalists have been doing this for more than a hundred years.
My eight-year-old African-American Nephew is being raise in a home run by too white Lesbians (love them all with my life, btw) and they live in an extremely wealthy neighborhood (yachts and shit). His situation worries me a bit.
I live in the inner-city, so I don't think they have any idea what this kid is up against. In just a few short years he'll be hated and feared wherever he goes. How can two wealthy, Progressive white ladies prepare him for that?
I spend way too much time on Reddit's r/twoxchromosomes. My version of doomscrolling. It is as if you could read the minds of a bunch of neurotic young women/pre-teen girls sitting in a waiting room of a psychologist. This particular article about "mommunes" was posted there - very receptive audience. One commenter said something along the lines of "this is beautiful and exactly how primates have been living for millennia." If I didn't have better things to do, I would have pointed out that if we are going to applaud and mimic primates, are we going to include violent male primate behavior too? Maybe include a link from a nature show that featured gangs of male primates taking down the Alpha primate of another gene pool, killing all the youngsters from that gene pool, and impregnating all the females? THAT primate lifestyle? This is a major irritant of mine: people who suggest we should live more like 'nature' - but only the idyllic parts.
I keep thinking back to a line out of "True Detective", season one. The detective played by Woody Harrelson is having marital problems. The detective played by Matthew McConaughey says to him: "This thing between men and women. It's not really supposed to work. It's just to produce children."
So many young women dream of a world where they can be separate from men. Comes off as very....Islamic or [include strict religion of your choice].
When Hillary wrote "It Takes A Village" I don't recall the primary reason being that poverty and starvation was the only other option to accepting forced collectivism. Live and learn, live and learn.
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