Carnal Knowledge: In Praise of Roommates

In Shoplifters, the 2018 Japanese film about an impoverished, loving family, the reveal is that while our protagonists live together, they are not actually a family in the biological sense. The moment I saw the film, I forced all my roommates to go see it immediately. And Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein, as we all know, is about a man who desires a roommate so much that he creates one out of stolen flesh and blood—and then the horror of what happens when he doesn't treat that roommate well.

Even before quarantine, a video about seven women in China who decided to live together in retirement went viral as "a life we can only dream of." As the women walk around lush green rice fields, they list the activities they will do together as they grow old: “cook together, barbecue in the fields, sing, and collect food in the village.” As we socially isolate, I've heard friends without roommates suddenly want them, while those who have them are wishing they lived alone. Quarantine neatly lays out our competing desires for examination, like gems under a loupe. This one, we exclaim with certainty. As if we have any understanding of the things we want on any given day. As if we are all suddenly gemologists.

These conflicting impulses aren’t limited to the grubby apartment crowd. Celebrities Cara Delevingne, Ashley Benson, and Kaia Gerber, a friendship trio long in the making, have been recording Tik Tok videos and were spotted stocking up on groceries together, yes, amidst coronavirus. (Actor Margaret Qualley was also hanging with the “quarantine crew,” although she was soon after spotted “social-distancing,” i.e. just being alone.) After they brought their supplies home, Benson, who was, until recently, dating Delevingne, posted a photo with Gerber in matching tie-dye sweaters captioned “twins for the month,” implying that they were all quarantining together like modern-day witches of Eastwick. As one Daily Mail caption succinctly put it: “Social distancing: The large group of friends did not seem to be concerned about social distancing.” All the money in the world can buy you an enormous Los Angeles house, and all the federal health warnings can tell you to stay away from others, but what some people want, deep down, is too carnal to be controlled: roommates.

I’ve always had roommates. For the past three years, I’ve slowly learned the peculiarities of the people I live with now. Chester likes to cook us elaborate dinners, using every dish in the kitchen. Alison has the most core strength and can hold plank for the longest. Ana thrives on surprises—last Christmas, we came home to a tree made of string lights and stacked toilet paper rolls (our house gift), decorated with items stolen from our rooms. When the city we live in shut down, we took care of each other: cooking, cleaning, sewing masks. On one slow night we played roommate trivia, grilling each other with questions like: What is Clio’s favorite kitchen utensil? Tongs. How tall is Chester? 5’11”.

As the people I live with can attest, I’m the roommate who’s most often in a terrible mood. I stomp around barefoot and shut myself in my room when I’m home. But when I come out, I always feel more settled knowing others will be there. In the end, I’m a roommate proselytizer. For decades, we’ve been taught that roommates are a proxy for failure; a lack of financial and romantic success. Market forces relentlessly encouraging homeownership have made living alone, or with your nuclear family, the pinnacle of adult achievement. Yet those same forces are the ones behind rising rents and lower incomes, making what we’re taught to want increasingly out of reach.

As the virus ruthlessly separates many of us from our families, we’ve found ourselves relying on the people we live with and the people we live beside: neighbors, strangers, everyone in between. If someone in our community gets sick, we get sick. It's impossible to protect our families unless we protect everyone else.

In her 1979 essay about the family, Ellen Willis argued that for people living under a hostile system of precarity, families were the only sense of security. The ethos of family and capitalism were inextricable—if people started looking beyond their families for aid, they might start demanding broad government programs and just working conditions, too. As Willis wrote, “Capitalists have an obvious stake in encouraging dependence on the family and upholding its mythology.” (A pro-roommates mantra if I've ever heard one!)

It might be silly to consider roommates as an anti-capitalist idea, but allow me to at least gesticulate wildly at a general sense of solidarity beyond our two-bedroom, one-family society. The need has never been more self-evident, but obviousness isn't a political position. We don’t require strangers right now because our system is failing us; our system is failing us because we haven’t reached out and helped each other as strangers. This is a moment to try to broaden our organizing in every way possible, starting with marshalling our own desires. Reorienting ourselves against the homeownership ideology is where that understanding starts, not where it stops.

But when the city shut down, our three-bedroom, four-person apartment suddenly felt very tight. I took work calls in my bedroom, had to wait to shower. I got more and more irritable. An opportunity presented: a friend’s one-bedroom apartment, just blocks away, was empty. Despite my declarative love of roommates, I committed roommate treason.

Living alone for the first time in my friend’s apartment, I feel like I'm inhabiting a borrowed life—one that I want, and also don't. Cavernous rooms, tall windows, a full kitchen table, all priced to share with someone I love. I am even more upset about having such desires at all, for measuring myself against them.

But here, again, I am forgetting the elastic nature of solidarity. My roommates and I are able to self-isolate and be as safe as possible because of the care shown by our wider community. I know this apartment well: it’s rented by two people who have been, at different times, my friends, and my co-workers, and my fellow organizers. I never told them directly that I was feeling cramped—I suspect a phone tree of close friends relayed the information, linking us together when they were looking for someone to offer their space to. On a recent call with my mom, she worried that we weren’t together: “Who will take care of you if you get sick?” I gently reassured her that I have never felt more cared for than now, alone in this space.

When I think about my ideal future—the one I am teaching myself to want—it's not living with a single partner. The more blurred the lines between families are, the larger we can make them. Perhaps it’ll be a house with close friends and our children, a la Cher, Sarandon, and Pfeiffer. If we’re lucky, this story might end where it started—with roommates too.

Clio Chang is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. She covers politics, culture, and more.