Cohousing-L Mailing List: Social participation (was How do we hold each other accountable?)

[Muriel Kranowski (murielk]

At 08:07 PM 7/26/2010, Jeanne Goodman wrote:
> I'm *almost* at a Zen state about social participation. Is it that
> cohousing doesn't match the pre move-in image? Is it that life is
> busier than they thought it would be? Is there some unknown wrong that
> has turned someone away from the community? Or are these very limited
> community contacts exactly what those people had in mind and asking
> for more would push them outside of their comfort zone?<snip>
>
> Jeanne

We also have quite different levels of participation in everything that one 
might participate in by different residents, from work to social life, and 
I've thought about why that might be and whether it should bother me.

On the social side, here are the major factors I can think of to account 
for this:
  1) More than half of our residents were not among the founding group, 
and their motivations might not be as intensely communal.
  2) Some of our founders have moved away, further diluting the original 
intensity.
  3) People's personal and family and work responsibilities are all still 
there no matter where they live, all exerting their pulls on time and energy.
  4) Subgroups have developed in very natural ways, whose members 
socialize pretty heavily among themselves whether or not they also engage 
in a lot of whole-group activities. I think those subgroups are very 
rewarding for the people in them, but they don't enrich community life as a 
whole and indeed may undermine it.
  5) I think some especially introspective individuals have returned to 
their former state of needing a lot of alone time even though they enjoy 
being in the community.
  6) Cohousing is somewhat like marriage or an equivalent commitment, with 
the early high-intensity "in love" phase followed by however many years of 
being in a long-term relationship, where you need to consciously keep the 
spark alive and accept that the initial intensity was kind of an unnatural 
state. We were probably somewhat naive to think the "in love" phase would 
last forever in our hard-won community.

That leaves the question, should it bother me?  Sometimes it does, but when 
I think about living in cohousing vs living in a standard neighborhood, I 
feel very fortunate to have so much built-in social life and community 
life. In addition, cohousing seems to attract people with whom I feel far 
more simpatico than I ever did with my pre-cohousing neighbors and I have 
far more opportunities to hang out with them than with my pre-cohousing 
neighbors.

   Muriel
   Shadowlake Village Cohousing, Blacksburg, VA