Commitments beyond coupledom: Negotiating relational futures in Finnish small-scale communes

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the possibilities for organizing one's personal life around co-residing friendship and roommate relationships in the life course position of adulthood. The normative significance of coupledom and procreation as markers of adulthood has hardly diminished, although the nuclear family model has opened up in past decades in Euro-American countries. I argue that the close connection between coupledom and adult status sidelines communal living as a relational arrangement when persons age beyond the socially shared understanding of youth. Moreover, resisting this temporal order leads communal dwellers into a socially structured negotiation of their future trajectories, where personal autonomy in friendship and roommate relations poses an intra-relational obstacle to building a communal future. The paper is based on 31 interviews with residents of Finnish small-scale communes. Communal dwellers’ negotiations of future trajectories dealt with finding someone to build their life with, whether commitment could be expected in friendship and roommate relations, and whether long-term communal living is compatible with existing housing structures.

Introduction

Is it necessary to leave communal living behind after youth and ‘settle down’ to coupledom and nuclear family life in order to become ‘a proper adult’? In this paper, I analyze the possibilities for organizing one's personal life around co-residing friendship and roommate relationships in adulthood. In contemporary Euro-American societies, living with friends and roommates is understood to be a customary arrangement during the socially diverse and self-seeking time of youth (Kenyon and Heath, 2001: 631–633; Lahad, 2017: 82–87). However, detailed analysis of communal living in various life course positions after youth is still scant, although communal living is increasingly approached as a possible housing arrangement for people of all ages in societies where housing, working life and relationships are all taking on new shapes (Druta et al., 2021; Heath et al., 2018: 3–8). In this paper, I ask how the life course position of adulthood affects personal relationship arrangements, and whether future trajectories can be built on friendship and roommate relations at that point.

Based on 31 semi-structured interviews with Finnish communal dwellers, I argue that the close connection between coupledom and the adult status sidelines communal living as a relational arrangement when persons age beyond the socially shared understanding of youth. Moreover, resisting this temporal order leads communal dwellers into a complex, socially structured negotiation of their future trajectories, where personal autonomy in friendship and roommate relations poses an intra-relational obstacle to building a communal future. Thus, the study sheds light on the bond between coupledom and adulthood from the perspective of friendship and roommate relations. In the structural whole of intimate relationships, the couple normative logic is also woven into the fabric of these relations. Valuing each person's autonomy in communal relationships means that friends and roommates do not promise each other a common future, nor expect such a promise.

In this article, I bring together the sociological perspective on the life course and the critique of couple normativity stemming from singlehood studies and queer theory. The article contributes to debates in life course studies considering the role that coupledom has as a marker of adulthood in contemporary societies (Blatterer, 2007; Brückner and Mayer, 2005; Kohli, 2007: 263) and provides new insights with regard to suggestions that people are increasingly organizing their intimate lives beyond coupledom (Budgeon, 2006; Lahad, 2017: 127–128; Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004). Studying the node of relationships and time is increasingly relevant due to the ambivalent developments in contemporary Euro-American societies. Legally and culturally, coupledom and nuclear family models are bolstered through same-sex marriage rights for instance, but simultaneously the couple-centred model is challenged in people's lived realities as the number of people living without a partner is growing (Eurostat, 2021; Roseneil et al., 2020). The paper contributes to an understanding of the ways in which time structures various relationships in the changing societal situation.

The paper analyzes both co-residing friendships and roommate relations. Based on the interview data, some communal relations are complex friendships where living together is just one component of the relationship. These relations mostly outlive someone moving out. Some are casual roommate relationships where the relationship is limited to sharing a home, and the roommates do not specifically seek support from each other. Between those extremes, there is a variety of warm, support-providing friendships that easily fade when someone moves out. People also live in couples and family relations in communal homes. Approaching the relational categories in a precise manner is important because the type of relationship has an influence on how people practice those relationships and what they expect from them.

The study setting is Finnish small-scale communes, referring to a spatial structure that consists of one shared apartment or house and a modest level of political goals and joint ownership (Heinonen, 2022; Törnqvist, 2019). The amount of everyday shared space distinguishes the small-scale commune from other communal structures, such as co-housing, where people dwell in private apartments and share additional communal spaces (Vestbro, 2010: 29). The small-scale communes usually host a maximum of ten residents. Kommuuni is one of the terms commonly used in Finland to describe the form of residency in question. Using the term in an English-language article is slightly problematic because of its strong connotations of communist and hippie countercultures in English-speaking contexts. I ask readers to bear in mind that the connotation is much less evident in contemporary Finland, and the term refers more casually to popular forms of communal living. However, I find it important to stick to the vocabulary used locally. One of the reasons, in addition to local differences in housing policies and communal ideologies for instance, is that in the Finnish language, the vocabulary used refers to communality, not sharing, as is most often the case in English (cf. Heath et al., 2018: 9; Steinführer and Haase, 2009: 574–575). This semantic difference highlights the fact that longing to be with other people was the most important reason for my interviewees to live communally.

The interviewees felt that they were ‘going against the current’ in Finnish society by living in their small-scale communes and building their everyday life beyond coupledom or family life. Calling the housing arrangement by a certain name can be seen as a part of the process whereby communal dwellers make sense of their living arrangements in their life situation. Through individuals’ motives for living communally, the meaning-making process touches upon questions of wealth and class. More often than not, my interviewees could have afforded to live on their own instead of being forced to save on housing costs through communal living, even though saving money was often a pleasant bonus. Additionally, almost all of the small-scale communes were rental apartments. Renting at this age is at odds with the normative housing career in Finland, where accessing owner-occupied housing is culturally appreciated as an important step in adulthood and the middle-class life path. Thus, choosing to live with others in rental apartments is a part of negotiating the social norms of the life course.

Coupledom, adulthood and building alternative relational futures

From a sociological perspective, the life course is a socially constructed temporal structure, which directs people through distinct life stages that follow each other in a particular order from childhood and youth towards adulthood and old age. Legally and institutionally, the structure functions, for instance, through educational systems and working life, and age-regulated legal norms. Simultaneously, it is an internalized normative structure of expected or appropriate positions and status passages in life (Diewald and Mayer, 2009: 6; Kohli, 2007; Mayer, 2009: 413). The life course structure offers individuals a frame of rather customary positions to inhabit at various points in their life, and age functions as a marker separating the different life stages (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000: 71–79, 155–162; Kohli and Meyer, 1986: 146). However, the stages and positions are culturally changing and varied – allegedly increasingly so in contemporary, individualized late-modern Western societies (Mayer, 2009: 421; Settersten and Mayer, 1997).

Thus, the life course structure can be seen as an overarching structure that incorporates levels from an individual's personal experience to social structures and the way that institutions are organized. Through the life course's biographical level, people make sense of their experiences in life, and weave narrative coherence between events that have happened at various time points (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000: 155–168). Biographical coherence helps people to acquire agential capacities as they recreate temporal continuity between past and present experiences, and imagine possible courses of action for the future based on the past (Becker, 1997; Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Kohli and Meyer, 1986: 148–149). However, a personal temporal experience is always bound to the norms, expectations and limitations set by an individual's immediate social network and society on a larger scale (Bidart, 2013: 268–269; Flaherty, 2013: 251). Through these social linkages, individuals evaluate whether they are on- or off-time with their life events (Bidart, 2013: 268–269; Holstein and Gubrium, 2000: 79; Lahad and Madsen, 2016).

The various life stages are socially produced and are tied to the particular social conditions that produce them. It has been debated whether the traditional markers of adulthood – marriage and family formation, entering working life, and independent living – are still valid in today's increasingly unstable living conditions, or whether they are an outdated model from mid-20th century Western societies (Blatterer, 2007; Brückner and Mayer, 2005; Shanahan, 2000: 684–685). Another debate concerns the delayed completion of all of the markers and whether it means that there is now a new distinct period of ‘early/emerging adulthood’ (Blatterer, 2007; Furstenberg et al., 2005; Gilleard and Higgs, 2016: 305). When it comes to patterns of intimate relating, there is indeed a significant change. Whereas in mid-20th century societies, couple relationships were largely established through marriage, they now include extensive periods of dating and cohabitation. Culturally, legally and normatively, cohabitation has become the definitive marker of an established couple relationship, while marriage rates are in decline (Kohli, 2007: 236; OSF, 2022; Roseneil, 2006; Roseneil et al., 2020: 21–29).

Although increased individualization in contemporary Euro-American societies introduces greater variety into relationship arrangements and life course navigations, they are still socially bound, and deviation from established models may have social consequences (Flaherty, 2013: 251). According to Blatterer (2007), adulthood is an increasingly personally defined and experienced status position, but when people specify what has made them adults, they attach the personal experiences to socially shared meanings in which the traditional markers continuously hold significant normative value. In singlehood studies, Lahad (2017) has shown how significant coupledom still is for the experience of attaining adult status (see also Roseneil et al., 2020: 27–28). Single life and centering friendships are culturally valued during youth, but as a person ages beyond the socially shared understanding of youth, those relational arrangements start to become off-time in comparison to the social norms of the life course (Lahad, 2017: 30–33). When coupledom takes precedence in the life course structure, it blurs the vision of a future trajectory for those who are not coupled: there are no collective imaginaries of what adult non-coupled relational futures could include (Halberstam, 2011: 72–74; Kolehmainen et al., 2023; Lahad, 2017). In contemporary societies, 30 years has become a normative temporal landmark in reference to the expected transition. It is connected, for instance, to the overall delay in attaining the traditional status markers, to the average age of marriage and family formation, and to the medical discourse determining the limits of fertility for women (Blatterer, 2007; Halberstam, 2005: 4–5; Lahad, 2017: 34; Roseneil et al., 2020: 225).

In studies on ‘non-normative’ or queer intimacies, friendship is often brought up as a possible alternative focus of relational life beyond coupledom (Halberstam, 2005: 1; Lahad, 2017; 127–128; Roseneil et al., 2020: 234). Yet very little is still being said about how life would be organized around friendship. Grasping the promise of such an alternative begs practical, temporally oriented questions regarding shared responsibility and care, living arrangements, and commitments. In short: can people plan their futures together with their friends, and if yes, how and to what degree?

In attempting to build relational adulthood beyond coupledom, for instance through friendship or roommate relations, people must engage in a reflexive practice of negotiating the life course structure. Such temporal agency is often approached from an individual's perspective, referring for instance to a capacity to exercise reflexivity, question norms, and embrace an open future that does not offer a given path (Flaherty, 2013; Holstein and Gubrium, 2000: 199–200; 209; Kolehmainen et al., 2023; Lahad, 2017: 87–93, 122–125; Muñoz, 2009: 177–178). However, in relationships, temporal reflexivity is enacted on an interpersonal level between all persons within the relationship arrangement, connecting further to their social networks and the wider society, for instance through questions of residency (Bidart, 2013; Holmes et al., 2021; Kubala and Hoření Samec, 2021).

Friendship and roommate relations are not formed within a vacuum but are connected instead to the structural whole of intimate relationships. In the current couple normative structure, friendship is important for people, but it is supplementary with regard to life choices. It is based on an understanding of each person's autonomy within the relationship, and flexibility is required to adjust the relationship to conditions set by coupledom and family, work and place of residency (Goedecke, 2018: 87–91; Ketokivi, 2012; Luotonen, 2023; Martinussen, 2019). Roommate relationships usually include even greater autonomy and are prone to break up easily when, for instance, a roommate finds a romantic/sexual partner or the co-living becomes strained (Törnqvist, 2019: 908–910). Challenging the couple normative structure and pursuing a relational future based on friendship and roommate relations revolves around questions of personal autonomy and flexibility, as well as the possibilities of challenging these norms because imagining a relational future with others necessitates an intention to be in that future together.

Data and methods

This paper is based on 31 semi-structured interviews with Finnish residents of small-scale communes, conducted between 2018 and 2019. The interviewees replied to my call for participants in Facebook groups focused on communal living. I contacted some people posting in these groups personally, and utilized my personal networks and snowball sampling. I particularly sought communal dwellers living in one shared apartment or house, and who were not actively looking for a way out of communal living. To this end, I began the call with these questions: ‘Do you live in a commune where you share one house or apartment with your roommates? Do you consider living in a commune to be a more permanent way of life for you?’ The definitions were not absolute. I included a few homes where, in addition to the bigger house, there were one or several smaller apartments. Moreover, a few participants had moved to other kinds of residences or were planning to do so.

Out of the 31 interviewees, 29 lived in 21 different small-scale communes, and two had moved to other kinds of residences after living communally. Nineteen identified as women (one of them problematizing the identity category), nine as men (one of them experiencing it as a given juridical and social category rather than a fitting identity), one as genderqueer, one as non-binary, and one did not identify with any existing gender category. When referring to the research participants, I use either gendered personal pronouns or a gender-neutral singular-they pronoun according to each interviewee's personal preference. Two-thirds of the interviewees lived in the capital area—in Helsinki and Espoo—and the rest in the regional capitals—Tampere, Turku, and Oulu. All names used in the article are pseudonyms, and I have anonymized other personal details. The research participants all gave their written consent. I followed the principles of the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK) and the European Union's GDPR regulation at all stages of the research design and implementation.

The ages of the participants ranged from 24 to 67 with a median age of 32 years. Approximately two-thirds of the interviewees were in their late 20s or 30s. In this paper, I analyze the interviews with persons in that age group, but the 31 interviews form a whole from which different age groups stand out. The groups are obviously not clear-cut, but they are separated with fuzzy boundaries regarding positions and experiences that share certain age-related similarities. The interviewees had moved into their small-scale communes at various points in their life and their age is not comparable with the years spent in communal housing.

The themes of adulthood and age emerged from the interviews when the research participants reflected, for instance, on their own experiences compared to those of their peers, the symbolic meaning of 30 years, or what they considered to be ordinary and unordinary life trajectories and relationship arrangements. I had not originally intended to cover the themes of age and adulthood, but the semi-structured form of the interviews led me to engage with these themes on the participants’ initiative. The analysis follows Layder's (1998) model of adaptive theory, starting from the data and then combining inductive and deductive analysis by alternating between engaging with theoretical literature, and thematizing, coding and interpreting the data. I reworked the theoretical categories and concepts in an interplay with the data, refining the direction of the research processes, and elaborating both the analysis and the theoretical framework along the way.

In the first analysis section, ‘Facing adulthood in communal living’, I analyze the meanings given to adulthood in connection with relationship arrangements. I focus on the interviewees’ temporal experience and making sense of it. The second part of the analysis, ‘Personal autonomy at odds with communal futures’, broadens the discussion towards the future scenarios that the interviewees considered. I also asked the interviewees about their wishes for the future towards the end of the interview. Discussing the future was a way to reflect on the possible courses of action through each interviewee's experience. Future scenarios deal with social norms through the individual's consideration of the opportunities and limitations they face. Simultaneously, they map individual reflexivity and creativity in acting both along and beyond those lines (Uprichard, 2011).

Facing adulthood in communal living

The way that communal living started to be out of step with the life course temporality around the age of 30 became evident in the interviews. For the youngest research participant, Tessa, 24, communal living was the obvious housing choice among her friends: ‘[…] my circles are really like-minded […] and many other [friends] also live in shared flats’. However, many of those who were approaching 30 had noticed a change among their peer groups. Such was the case with Matilda, 28: ‘[…] there is indeed a little bit of a boom going on: my friends have moved to live alone; clearly there's some growing up, getting older; I don’t know, something's happening. Because, like, just a couple of years ago all of these people lived communally […].’ Or as Taina, 29, put it: ‘Everyone became so damn 30-year-old. Or even though we’re not 30 yet, it still feels like so many of my friends started dating seriously at the same time or moved into their own studio flats. There has been this new decline in my social life within the past couple of years.’

Tessa, Matilda and Taina made sense of the temporal stage they were inhabiting through comparisons with their personal networks (see Bidart, 2013: 268–269; Holmes et al., 2021). Matilda and Taina referred to the temporal markers of adulthood as an explanation for what was happening among their friends, linking the change to the larger life course structure. Both temporally situated the change from a friendship-centred lifestyle towards coupledom or solo living to the late 20 s, and Taina spoke of 30 as a status position where the value given to coupledom and personal privacy decentres friendship and a busy social life more broadly, reflecting the contemporary association of 30 with the end of youth (Lahad, 2017: 29–33).

Some participants around and over 30 felt significant inner pressure as communal living started to emerge as an uncommon choice at their age. Henri, 36, had lived in the same place for years and had now become the person living there the longest. He had proceeded to inhabit the biggest room in the house, which had cast him into introspection and doubt:

[…] sometimes I wonder if this makes any sense. What am I doing, do I belong here, what should I do with my life? Somehow being in this room, where you always want to get to in this house, is now the place from where you can’t go forward anymore (laughter). And living [in this room] indicates that I’ve been here quite a long time. Is it weird, is it somehow like, am I an odd relic, a police officer or a dad, who lives here or looks back on the past? Or, like, should I make some other choice in my life?

For Henri, moving into the big room had signified the end of further possible progression in the house, giving rise to a new set of questions concerning his course in life and his social role in the small-scale commune. Reaching a point where there is no longer an opportunity to seek something better, to ‘go forward’ in the small-scale commune, called the meaning of living there into question. Henri needed to figure out whether he still belonged in the household or whether he should continue somewhere else. Thus, living through a phase, spatially symbolized here as arriving in the big room, created pressure to transition towards a subsequent phase in life, or to recreate a novel meaning for the current situation.

Prolonged communal living made Henri wonder whether he had turned into ‘a relic’ stuck in time, currently representing the small-scale commune's past, ‘a police officer’ enforcing the rules or ‘a dad’ fixing things around the house. Lahad (2017: 62) has argued that a lack of socially shared meanings and role expectations for midlife singlehood symbolically shifts single women from youth towards old age in a premature fashion. Similarly, Henri worried that he was no longer equal to his roommates with regard to his age and the time he had lived in the small-scale commune, and was thus a throwback to another generation, either parenting the others or gazing back on his youth where communal living still made sense.

Henri questioned the nuclear family form along with his wider critique of the current societal order. He had ‘an unspecified urge to try something else’ and instead of moving in with his girlfriend, he wanted to build the home to make it another ‘sphere of sociality’. However, he longed for support from other people. He was worried that no one understood him, including his current roommates, or that he had ‘screwed everything up’. Henri's position in the life course had changed and he resisted the normative expectation of centering coupledom in adulthood by staying in the small-scale commune. Such resistance is a form of temporal agency, whereby Henri attempted to project another kind of future in his personal life and more widely in society, even though he was not sure what that future would look like exactly (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Flaherty, 2013; Lahad, 2017: 122–125). However, he was afraid that the meaning of his action would not transfer to others around him, but rather that it would be interpreted through the established normative order, where his choices would be deemed as a failure to attain an adult status. As Holmes et al. (2021: 747) point out, the possibilities of enacting a queer future are dependent on emotional reflexivity that takes shape relationally. A fear of not being understood or socially recognized compelled Henri to contemplate whether his struggle was worth it (see also Halberstam, 2011; Roseneil et al., 2020: 27–28).

Interviewees around the age of 30 who were living communally with their spouse and/or children spoke much less about the untimeliness of communal living than those who were single or living apart from their sexual/romantic partner and did not have children. Even if they encountered prejudice from outside concerning, for instance, the suitability of communal living for children, the pressuring inner experience of being lost or abnormal did not appear in their accounts. This notion reflects the position given to friendship and roommate relations within the couple normative structure: as long as people take the demanded steps towards coupledom and family life, communal relations figure as supplementary and gain more social acceptance (Berry, 1992, cited in Rubin, 2001: 722; Martinussen, 2019). Thus, one's position within the life course structure is not conditioned only by living communally, but by the relational whole in which a person is situated.

Kaarina, 35, analyzed the social possibilities and constraints of communal living at their age. They were used to making ‘non-normative’ relational arrangements in their life. At the time of the interview, they had started to prepare for having a child with their partner, Meri, which for Kaarina seemed like a watershed in relational temporalities:

[…] I don’t know many people my age really, people over 35, who would live in a commune […] or it feels like for many, it seems to be a temporary and partly a [financially] inevitable phase in their youth. But when you start thinking about having children, for instance, then that would be the latest phase not to live such a life. But I would like to know for how many people it has been a choice of their own and for how many it's just that it's really difficult financially or otherwise to arrange things in another way. It's also a fear of mine that you’ll be forced, if you have a child, to move away. Or if you just couldn’t find anyone you’d like to live with […]

Kaarina had lived in diverse relationship constellations throughout their life. Their childhood home had been intergenerational, and the relationship with Meri was polyamorous. However, Kaarina explained that with Meri, they ‘plan life, or the future, principally for the two of us’, and that having a child was a plan between them despite other people who could at times be part of the relationship configuration. Kaarina's future trajectories were thus entwined with the couple relationship, while other relationships remained rather unsettled in orientation, following the couple normative temporal model. However, Kaarina had an ambivalent and thoughtful take on this trajectory. They saw reproduction as being culturally defined as the ultimate marker of transitioning to adulthood, after which choosing to live communally would become impossible.

According to Roseneil et al. (2020: 225), the entanglement of the norms of procreation and coupledom significantly intensifies the couple-norm's influence, as the couple is seen as the unquestioned or at least the very best site for reproduction. Kaarina's account shows how the entangled procreative and couple normative logic works through multiple levels. In addition to how different relationships would be organized at the time of childbirth, Kaarina worried that financial structures would direct people towards nuclear family life, as renting would no longer seem like an appealing choice, and buying a larger apartment to accommodate more people would not be financially possible. Kaarina's account shows how owning is an attractive option for the middle class and binds reproductive temporalities together with temporalities of accumulating wealth (Halberstam, 2005: 4–5; see also Kubala and Hoření Samec, 2021). In Finland, home ownership is the numerically and ideologically dominant form of housing, while renting is seen as a less valued option for those who cannot access home ownership (Bengtsson et al., 2017). Owning directs people towards home ownership either alone or as a couple, as communal living and other less frequent options are practically absent from the discussion concerning owner-occupied housing in Finland.

As the couple normative structure so widely incorporates questions ranging from relational arrangements and reproduction to housing, doing things differently could become an arduous task for those individuals who try it. Kaarina wondered whether it was worth going through the trouble of looking for more people to live with a child, as they worried that it might not even be possible to find anyone who would be willing to stick together through the burdensome aspects of living together. Kaarina and Meri found the idea of not being solely dependent on each other attractive, but including other people would have required extra determination, which might not pay off in the end. Flaherty's (2013: 248) idea of time work as a form of agency, which emerges through ‘self-regulation of temporal desires’ to match the constraints set by social structures, is a useful concept for understanding Kaarina's reflection. Although they wish to deviate from the family-centred model of adulthood, they suppress these desires because they seem unattainable.

The connection between coupledom and adulthood is strong, which causes communal living to deviate from the normative life course trajectory as communal dwellers age beyond youth. The connection works in reciprocal ways: coupledom simultaneously opens up a way to adulthood, while aging beyond the socially understood period of youth requires centering coupledom in one's relational life. The transition to adulthood is personally experienced and as such includes much personal variation, but 30 years is an important normative and social landmark against which people measure their experience. As the examples discussed above show, communal dwellers’ temporal reflexivity is sophisticated, but it is socially bound and as such encounters restrictions revolving around questions such as whether other people understand their choices, whether they will find others to share their life with, or whether housing structures enable living beyond coupledom.

Personal autonomy at odds with communal futures

In principle, all sorts of relational models are possible: people can have children with their friends, live with roommates in mid-life, or combine their household economy with their neighbours. Yet it is rare for people to do so. In fact, the cultural and legal changes in Euro-American societies within the past few decades that have increasingly opened up marriage and nuclear family models for homosexuals have raised concerns among queer theorists that the variety in ways of organizing intimate relations is diminishing as the nuclear family model is becoming stronger (Edelman, 2004; Halberstam, 2005, 2011; Muñoz, 2009).

On the other hand, couple and family cultures are opening up and heterosexuals are also increasingly searching for novel models of relating, for instance around friendship and roommate relations, although it is also debatable how profound this change is (Jamieson et al., 2006; Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004). Communal living is often approached as a flexible option to suit housing needs in a world where couple relations come and go, and jobs and places of residency change (Druta et al., 2021). However, is it possible to build adult life centred on friendship and roommate relationships, instead of understanding them simply as a recourse for situations where coupledom fails? Imagining and enacting such an alternative course of life in adulthood is a relational, interpersonal act, which itself sets in motion the customary and normative practices within friendship and roommate relations (Holmes et al., 2021).

Inga, 35, wanted to settle down with her co-residing friends. Her previous roommates and close friends Kaisa and Jonna had, however, moved away to live with their spouses, and her current roommates Viivi and Alina were moving out for health-related reasons, which made Inga feel insecure and distressed:

Anna: […] I get the feeling that you’re really upset about the fact that this place, which is your home, [might split up] … is this interpretation way off the mark?

Inga: No. I am upset, but at the same time, I’m thinking that the people with whom […] I originally lived here have all moved away. So that makes you feel like, is it because life goes forward? Should I do the same? Like, is it weird that I live in this same room where I lived with [my ex-girlfriend] Suvi […]? Or I was kind of annoyed already about Kaisa moving away, […] and this is interesting. Like, what do I really think about Viivi? Since I really live happily with her, but she can’t live here, and she doesn’t know exactly what she wants, but like if I’m really committed to living with my friend, how much hassle am I willing to go through for that to happen? Or am I, like my mom and my brother said to me, like could you grow up and buy a place (laughs)?

Inga had engaged in a subversive action of prioritizing her friendships over coupledom, which had also played a part in ending her previous couple relationship. Kaisa and Jonna had nonetheless left to live with their spouses, a change of course that seemed bewildering to Inga. She explained her thoughts: ‘Why don’t you do what I did? Like, didn’t you really want this after all? Was this only a temporary stage for you?’ The temporariness of her friends’ interest in the friendship-centred relational arrangement disrupted Inga's perspective of a long-lasting commitment, the ‘settling down’ she desired after she felt that ‘time starts running at a different tempo’ once you turn 30.

In the couple normative structure, friends are expected to allow each other to make their life decisions autonomously of each other, thereby positioning friendship outside of the sphere of decisive elements of life: work, coupledom and family, and place of residency (Martinussen, 2019). Within the structure, sidelining a friend for these reasons is regarded as normal, which makes smoothing over the situation the friend's responsibility, as expressing the hurt caused by the sidelining is rendered insignificant (Martinussen, 2019: 308–309). In this vein, in Inga's account, expressions of hurt and disbelief also alternated with refraining from such expressions after her friends had ignored her commitment. The friends’ actions are depicted as ‘life going forward’ through the couple normative logic, which makes Inga feel responsible for her situation and wonder whether she should aim to move on herself, instead of staying in the room where she had lived with her ex-girlfriend, which now came to symbolize her being stuck in time.

After Kaisa and Jonna had left, the situation had stabilized through the close friendship with Viivi, but now she was also moving out. Inga wondered whether she would be willing to ‘go through the hassle’ of committing to living with Viivi elsewhere. Viivi, however, was undecided about what she wanted in the future. Again, building a future is a relationally reflexive process whereby a person navigates their own and other people's emotions in order to weigh the possibilities and constraints of future trajectories (Holmes et al., 2021). Inga needed Viivi to make a similar commitment to pursue a future trajectory that she desired, but she also needed to take Viivi's indecisiveness into account when weighing the possible outcomes of different decisions. If Viivi retained her autonomy, ‘the hassle’ might be in vain. Simultaneously, the relational reflection extended beyond the immediate relationship with Viivi, as Inga also considered whether she should follow her mother and brother's appeal for her to grow up by buying a place of her own.

Laila, 37, perceived change, people moving in and out, as an inevitable part of communal living. She was seeking a couple relationship at the time of the interview but also wanted to live communally in the future, which made finding such a relationship more difficult. I asked Laila whether she needed longevity in her living arrangement:

Laila: Yeah, that's a good question. Well maybe for me, the longevity, as I hope to find a couple relationship that would last […], but then I hope that communality could somehow continue with a possible life in coupledom […]. So if you have one person by your side who stays, then you could possibly stand the unpredictability of the other parts. […]

Anna: Do you think that it would be possible to make such a deal with a roommate, that you’ll live together forever or something like that?

Laila: [laughs in astonishment] Well, that hasn’t occurred to me yet, since everyone is clearly an independent individual, and you want to allow everyone their freedom – you can’t bind anyone. But as […] many of us, for instance, have dreams of living in more of a subsistence economy, then that would already require more commitment.

When I asked Laila if longevity could be built into a roommate relationship through mutual agreement, Laila reacted to the question with astonished laughter. The reaction and Laila's response reveal the unexpectedness of the question in the couple normative structure and the related value given to personal autonomy in friendship and roommate relationships. Laila refers to the suggested contract between roommates as ‘binding’ the other person, a violation of the other person's autonomy, which would be something that should not be done even if the unpredictability of communal living were difficult to stand. This shows how highly valued personal autonomy is in friendship and roommate relationships, and how this aspect differentiates them from couple relationships. In the context of coupledom, restricting the other person's autonomy for the sake of a shared future is understood as a commitment that promises – and which it is legitimate to seek – love, belonging and safety, for instance (Roseneil et al., 2020: 227–280).

Laila, however, brought up the dream of living in more of a subsistence economy, which was common to her and many of her roommates and could create a stronger need for commitment to the group. This approach echoes the communal culture that Abrams et al. (1976) have defined as an attempt to institutionalize friendship through dwelling. However, they also point out how the housing structure per se does not liberate people from gendered or sexual social mores but illustrates instead how their roots burrow much deeper (Abrams et al., 1976: 145). Thus, the commitment to building an eco-commune could create a more far-reaching future vision for the relational structure, but could simultaneously leave the autonomy norm intact, which could, in turn, affect the durability of the commune. Creating temporal durability through dwelling could thus maintain a ‘healthy level of autonomy’ for individuals in the couple normative structure, where too much dependency on friends is deemed unhealthy or immature (Martinussen, 2019: 307). But on the other hand, housing can also bring external support to relations in which imagining common futures does not come as a default feature.

Teemu, 31, also figured that a stable physical environment would be essential in order to centralize friendships and communal relations in their life. Teemu ‘had all sorts of ideas’ for a future arrangement, but was simultaneously struggling with competing desires for commitment and freedom:

Because somehow, yeah, I need that kind of stability, but somehow, I also dread it. In a way, I want both the kind of physical and then, like, stability and security connected to relationships, but then I’d want to have the freedom to do whatever I feel like doing. I have a kind of a conflict, an inner conflict with these things, and I’m not sure how to arrange that yet … for instance, I have this dream of life companionship with someone, but at the same time, I detest that thought. […] And then I want my friends to be there all the time, so that I can turn to them if I need to, but then I want to have the option of leaving for a world tour myself or something. […]

Teemu had lived with the same evolving group of friends for several years. Their account sheds light on the importance of autonomy as an internalized value, which conflicts with their need for stability and commitment. Their account reflects a psychological conflict in a world where flexibility is both a value and an obligation for persons struggling with an unstable job market, housing, and relationships (Roseneil, 2007: 91). Teemu felt that the world was precarious and housing arrangements temporary as, in their experience, landlords were unpredictable and indifferent to people's needs. However, at the same time, they enjoyed the freedom because it allowed them to ‘do whatever [they felt] like doing’.

Teemu was critical towards the couple normative model of relationships. This stance was informed in part by their anarchist and queer/feminist views, and stemmed in part from the experience of feeling left out of the circle of care at home: ‘If I don’t want that nuclear family thing […], am I condemned to not getting any emotional support because other people use all of their capacity for their spouses?’ At the time of the interview, Teemu was enjoying time with their roommate, Petteri, as Petteri's girlfriend was abroad, and they had more time for Teemu. The situation allowed them to seek support and care from the friendship, but it was still conditioned by the friendship's subsidiary status: Teemu got to enjoy time with their friend when the couple relationship permitted (Budgeon, 2008: 320; Martinussen, 2019; Roseneil, 2007: 95). Thus, a friendship-centred lifestyle could allow for alternative forms of care and closeness, but it could also lead to disappointments, insufficient contact and loneliness.

Negative experiences of isolation among couples made Teemu question whether they themself should avoid such a ‘problematic’ relational structure. However, duly resisting the couple-norm could lead to negative consequences in not being able to seek the life companionship they longed for. At the same time, they risked missing out on satisfactory means of closeness in friendship conditioned by the couple normative structure, unless their friends stopped prioritizing their couple relationships. Their own desire for personal autonomy further complicated the situation. Thus, the autonomy norm functioned relationally, but also as a complex internal desire, which was difficult to reconcile with the desire for life companionships. Teemu sought an alternative to the ‘atomized’ society based on the nuclear family model, but without tackling the question of autonomy and commitment there was a risk of paradoxically ending up in a more individualized life situation.

Personal autonomy, therefore, poses an obstacle to imagining and enacting shared futures in friendship and roommate relationships. In the interviewees’ accounts, autonomy takes the form of an interpersonal norm, a moral value and an internal desire. Within the couple normative structure, advancing in the life course structure is strongly associated with coupledom during the transitory period towards adulthood, and challenging the given order is difficult. However, at the same time, the accounts show how the bond between coupledom and future building is contingent and subject to change, as the interviewees question and tweak the hierarchical order with their wishes to commit to their friends, and imagining futures in communal households.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that the close link between coupledom and adult status sidelines communal living as a relational arrangement when persons age beyond the socially shared understanding of youth. Based on the interviewees’ experiences, it is evident that there is an expectation to centre coupledom in a person's relational life once they age beyond their youth, and that centering coupledom ostensibly grants one the status of a ‘proper adult’. Moreover, I have shown how resisting the temporal order led communal dwellers into a complex, socially structured negotiation of their future trajectories. Personal autonomy in friendship and roommate relations posed an intra-relational obstacle to building a communal future. As privileging coupledom is expected in adulthood in particular, friends and roommates are not supposed to hinder each other's chances of doing so within the normative structure. Communal dwellers’ temporal agency is thus socially structured: they consider their possibilities in relation to their intimate others and the wider society. Even with strong personal temporal reflexivity, they run into problems such as whether other people understand their choices, whether they will find others to share their life with, or whether they can expect commitment from their friends and roommates.

The analysis supports the notion that increasing variety in life situations does not mean that the cultural or normative significance of the life course structure would have shifted per se, although people increasingly do not follow the temporal structure at the same pace, either by chance or willingly. For those interviewees who actively resisted the temporal norm, the normative force of the structure still appeared through the confusion or loss of the meaning of communal living, or the (possible) splitting up of the small-scale communes as their roommates moved away. The social conditions shaped the interviewees’ temporal agency, and besides resisting the temporal structure, they also considered accepting it, as resisting seemed too difficult or impracticable.

The analysis further shows how coupledom cannot simply be replaced by friendship because the temporal order of the life course structures the relationships differently. The norm of personal autonomy in friendship and roommate relations makes imagining and building future trajectories more difficult because there is no promise of sharing a future. Alternatively, one might make such a promise oneself, but expecting it from others is difficult because of respect for their autonomy. In couple relationships, on the other hand, such a promise, and the expectation of it, is integral to the relationship. In contemporary serial monogamies, the promise is made repeatedly, one relationship after another.

However, the interviewees’ accounts also vividly illustrate that the connection between temporal longevity and coupledom is contingent and prone to alterations. Futures can be imagined in other relationships as well. There are no grounds for believing that temporal longevity in relationships would always have to reproduce hetero or couple normative models, as is sometimes suggested in queer theory (Edelman, 2004; see Muñoz, 2009 for a counter argument). Instead, the interviewees’ accounts show that long-lasting care, intimacy and trust are attributes that people might seek and actively forge in a variety of relationships.

Thus, my analysis underscores that we must analyze in more detail the spatio-temporal forms that friendship-centred arrangements take and the promises they hold, if we take seriously the suggestion that people will indeed increasingly centre their relational life on friendship. A major shift from the couple-centred model towards a more varied relational organizing would necessarily entail a shift in various relational temporalities from the life course structure to everyday temporalities and rhythms. Here, I have concentrated on living together, but a similar problematic can be analyzed in various arrangements where friends live near to or far from each other, and where their friendships are organized according to different temporal rhythms. The central question deals with what can be expected from friendship relations in the present and in the future. For instance, what kinds of care do people expect to have at hand if they need it, and who are they responsible for? Do these commitments and responsibilities somehow limit the choices that people can make in their own life, for instance regarding their place of residence? Alternatively, will people understand themselves as self-reliant individuals who enjoy their friends’ company when they happen to be present?

Asking questions about relationship changes and time is crucial because they are both central to and connected to working life, wealth, reproduction, and housing, for instance. In contemporary societies, where marriage and reproduction rates are indisputably decreasing and the nuclear family model is no longer the self-evident unit for people's intimate relations, all the above-mentioned structures are changing. Questions such as where people will live and with whom, whether they will have children and with whom, and who they will have to support financially all entail temporal projections. In order to support novel, emerging ways of relating in contemporary societies, the nodes of time and relationships beyond coupledom need to be studied further.