Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Romance and Sex in CoHousing

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

Joani asks about nudity and romance/sexual relationships.

As far as nudity goes, we have both a sauna and a hot-tub.  I've never seen 
anybody use a bathing suit in either.  People usually go over there and 
come back in a robe or towel. I'm told that folks have been seen 
occasionally streaking across the community from the sauna late at night in 
a naked condition (though I have yet to observe this myself).  The whole 
thing is not an issue at all.  I *believe* we have a no-sex-in-the-tub 
policy though I can't quite remember off hand.  I strongly suspect that 
public sexual acts would be unacceptable here, though the issue hasn't 
arisen yet.

As far as affairs/romances go:  we have one couple who met through living 
in the community and are now married.  There was another person who was 
hurt by that situation (there was some miscommunication over the ending of 
the one relationship and starting the next).  It never became a *community* 
issue though.  I think the fact that the situation happened in cohousing 
made it worse for the "abandoned" person since she then had to watch the 
new relationship flowering across the community.  I could imagine that 
happening elsewhere too.

We've had at least one case of the major-public-fling-with-another-
-community-member.  It ended quickly with no lasting harm done.  I 
would guess that there is a large potential for affairs/flings 
outside of marraiges to cause problems in a community though.  If 
everybody gets to gossiping and taking sides it could make the 
situation worse.  I imagine it would tend to make things much more 
public than they would otherwise be.

Another case where the community was helpful happened when a resident had a 
very bad break-up after which his former partner (who did not live here) 
began harrassing him.  I think community members were very supportive of 
the resident - just as they are with anybody going through a crisis of any 
kind.  It became very difficult for all of us because the former partner 
was in the habit of coming to community dinner a lot, to some of our 
meetings also, and had developed friendships with some other community 
residents.  She claimed she wanted to continue to do those things and to 
be considered, in effect, a member of the community.  For various reasons, 
it seemed likely to most of us that she was doing this in order to harrass 
her former boyfriend rather than for her stated reasons.

This situation took quite a bit of working out.  Again, it never was 
discussed explicitly at any official meetings (that I can recall), but 
various people attempted to mediate the situation.  Roughly speaking, an 
arrangement was worked out where the two parties would adopt schedules such 
that they could both be in the community and yet not bump into each other.  
Neither was very happy with this, but it sort of worked for a while.  After 
an interval, the former partner ceased trying to come to the community.

It also motivated N St to define its membership policy much more clearly.  
Previously, we had attempted to be as inclusive as possible.  When the 
community was much smaller, we wanted to grow and so we encouraged many 
people to come to meals and be involved even though they didn't live in the 
contiguous houses.  The hope was that this would provide a pool of people 
motivated to buy or rent houses adjacent to us as they became available.  
Thus, four years ago when I moved in, there were quite a few people coming 
to meetings and being involved who didn't live here.  They were sort of 
considered members as good as anyone else - though it wasn't made terribly 
clear what everyone's status was.  It hadn't needed to be.  

The situation I described above made it clear to us that we needed to be 
much clearer about who was a member and who wasn't.  We decided that to be 
a member you needed to live here.  We made various ad-hoc arrangements with 
folks who didn't live here but were involved - but basically we made it 
clear that only people who lived here could ever block our consensus 
process.  That came largely out of fear of what could have happened in this 
bad break-up situation.  We are definitely less open to outsiders now - 
which is perhaps not all to the good.

Finally, as to gay folks: we have had something like six lesbian or 
bisexual women living here at various times.  However all have moved on, 
and at least a couple of them said to me that they did *not* find N St
a great place to be gay.  My impression was not that they met with any
discrimination per se, but rather that they just found it uphill work
living in a heterosexual mind-set all the time.  Being the only person 
in a community to have some some major defining attribute is probably
always tough (Rob Sandelin had a really good post about this a few 
months back I think).  

Stuart.

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Stuart Staniford-Chen           |       Dept of Computer Science
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu            |       UC Davis, Davis, CA 95616
(916) 752-2149  - work          |               and
(916) 756-8697  - home          |       N St. Cohousing Community
Home page is http://everest.cs.ucdavis.edu/~stanifor/home.html