Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Sexuality and CoHousing

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

At Sharingwood, Sexual relationships are private matters. This is also 
true of Religious beliefs and other family issues which do not affect 
the operation of the community. I suppose if some private situation 
came up which affected everybody in some way we would deal with it in a 
Sharing Circle.  It hasn't yet other than the divorce case I mentioned 
in an earlier posting.

So to put it in more concrete terms, at Sharingwood who you sleep with, 
where you go to church, how you relate to your partner or spouse  is 
nobody else's damn business and if someone has a problem with it, it is 
up to them (the person with the problem) to deal with it.  Private 
matters are handled the same as most neighborhoods except that if my 
wife beats me, I have a built in group of friends I can talk to about it.

The most difficult arena in this privacy-public boundary is in 
parenting.  The parents do talk to each other a fair amount about child 
raising issues and we have had some group meetings to work out some 
common understandings of how to deal with things like discipline of 
children in the commons.  I know as a parent I have my moments of doubt 
and insecurity and I really appreciate that I have several other 
parents to talk to and bounce things off.  Having a built in parent 
support group is one of the best aspects of Cohousing.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood