I like to sleep alone. This was a problem in a lot of my past relationships, as men took it personally. But my current boyfriend recognizes that both of us can get a better night’s sleep if we sleep in separate bedrooms, and sees how being well-rested contributes to a healthy relationship and overall lifestyle.
I’m sure some people will read this thread title and think to themselves that they’ll live how they want and they don’t care if it’s considered “normal” or not. But there’s no denying that some preferences and lifestyles are easier to accommodate if other people consider it normal rather than unnecessarily reading into things and drawing erroneous conclusions.
I have a friend who is polyamorous, and he had a lot of trouble finding a house that had a few nice bedrooms instead on one giant ensuite bedroom and a bunch of little ones.
This might have been easier if it were normal for could to sleep in separate rooms.
I’d like to see it normalized for adults to still live with their parents - for a short while.
In today’s high-inflation, low-wage era, it can be cripplingly expensive for multiple offspring to each rent a separate apartment or buy a house. It makes perfect sense to - temporarily - have everyone live together in one unit (if all are single and unmarried) and thus consolidate the rent while everyone earns an income. In fact, in some cultures, that’s exactly what’s common.
Instead, such people are mocked as “still in their mom’s basement.”
Yup. It also makes perfect sense, for some people, to - permanently - maintain some kind of “joint family” system where (some) nuclear family members with their own spouses and children share a family home. It requires more household cooperation than a lot of American adults are currently used to, but for those who can manage it, the benefits can be significant, from on-the-spot childcare and eldercare, to maintaining fewer household vehicles, etc.
I would like to see casual handwork-craft practice normalized in more non-formal situations, including casual meetings and such in the workplace. Doing some uncomplicated knitting or origami or whatever is not a sign of inattention; on the contrary, it can actually increase your mental focusing and memory retention. (A lot of people side-eye a knitter in a meeting where they themselves are way more distracted than the knitter is, by constantly checking their phones and so on.)
After I dropped out of University in 1973, I got a decent job (computer programmer) and lived with my parents whilst I saved up for a house.
I also paid them ‘housekeeping/rent’ (in the 1980’s it was about $300 / month) and used my original bedroom (not the basement!)
I bought a house in 1987, putting down a 50% deposit.
The only person who ever mocked me was a fool* I met at work.
*he asked me how many credit cards I had (one.) He laughed and said he had three. The first two were maxed out and he was using the third to pay the interest on the first two. (At the time credit card interest was about 25%.)
I said I always paid my card off in full each month and was investing regularly (at the time interest was about 7%.)
He said he owned a car (apparently he’d taken out a loan to buy it) and I didn’t understand finance…
How does a university dropout get a job as a computer programmer? I went to college and graduated with a business finance diploma. I work as snow shoveler in winter, mascot in summers and sign holder all year round.
I want to see adult men taking public transit normalize because somehow we live in a society where adult men taking public transit is ridiculed when they don’t know that most adults including adult men can’t afford to buy a car because the wages suck in the job market.
I’d like to see society evolve to the point where the side-eye isn’t given to couples who prefer living separately while otherwise maintaining a committed relationship.
What others think has never bothered my love and me (36 years as a couple but always separate dwellings), but I’ve had a number of friends privately tell me that they believe their own relationships/marriages probably would be better or might have lasted with such an arrangement.
I left University at the end of my first year (in 1973) and got advice on what sort of job would suit me.
Since I was jolly good at chess and mathematics, careers like accountancy or computing were logical choices.
That year British Telecommunications were hiring all sorts of computing people (business computing was in its infancy) - and it was the last year you didn’t need a degree to apply!
I think this is normalised as much as it needs to be, at least I don’t think anything of it when I hear that my colleagues still have their adult children living with them. The key of course is the qualifiers I’ve quoted. I don’t want it to be too normalised because I would like my children to feel some social pressure to go out and live on their own. I have a family member who is well into his 30s and still lives with his mum. I think he will always live with his mum. What I worry about when it comes to his living arrangement is that his mum will probably die before he does and I wonder if he is adequately equipped to deal with life on his own.
A question, if I may, how does this affect the process of initiating sex? It seems to me that it would have to be more explicit, as in you invite each other into bed for nooky rather than just lying together and letting hands wander.
Co-signed. Same for adult women taking public transit.
I’ve had cops come up to me while I was waiting at a bus stop and (politely) ask my name, because they were looking for a local dementia sufferer who’d gone missing, and a shabby-ish middle-aged woman standing around on a street corner seemed like a plausible match.
Now, I definitely wasn’t being “ridiculed”; I got a chuckle out of it and didn’t hold it against them. But really, folks, it needs to be more normalized that perfectly functional adults can take public transit to get where they want to go.
And yes, gratuitous ridicule from acquaintances or even strangers for being a functional (American) adult who somehow nonetheless doesn’t own a car is definitely a thing, though IME not from cops.
The separate beds thing is strictly for sleeping. We typically will lie in bed together in the evenings when we’re winding down for the night. But in terms of initiating sex, yeah, it is typically more explicit than wandering hands. The most frequently initiated method of having sex is that he’ll approach me in the morning after I’ve already gotten up and get handsy with me and suggest we go into the bedroom.
In my experience *, temporarily living with your parents for a short time is mostly normalized . There are a couple of specific versions that get mocked - but they involve long-term “arrangements” where one side gets all the benefits while the other gets all the burdens. For example, someone I know whose parents paid all the bills and did all the household chores (including his laundry) while he tossed them a couple of hundred dollars a month He had a low-paying dream job ( think taking tickets at his favorite team’s home stadium ) but was able to live much better than people with double his income. Sucked to be him when his parents died- he was 50 ish and had to find a new higher paying job. He got mocked. People who moved out when they were 25 or who contributed more did not.
* Which has a lot to do with where I live and who I know. I am a NYC native who does not know a single NYC native who moved out of their parent’s home alone. TV shows/movies with a youngish, never married person living alone seemed like fiction to me - literally everyone I know moved out when they got married , or moved in with an SO or had one or more roommates.
