In the years to come, it will be increasingly common for friends, rather than family members, to take on more important caring responsibilities for each other. Might we even share homes? Bad Friend author Tiffany Watt Smith discusses this, and the idea of drawing up a ‘civil contract’ between friends who share their lives.
Tiffany, you did so much for your former next-door neighbour Jan, who had Parkinson’s, well before she was admitted to hospital then referred to social services. As her ‘friend/neighbour’, you emailed back and forth with her social worker. I was helping a friend recently and had the same thought you did with Jan – ‘am I a good friend or do I want to be seen as a good friend?’.
Everyone I’ve talked to about friendship has had that thought! It’s very common for people to doubt their own motivations, maybe because we don’t know what other women are doing. I’m very interested in research which shows that, in different cultures, there are potentially different styles of friendships –some favour a more intervening style and some favour a more independent style. Sociologists say there’s more of an independent, rather than intervening, style of friendship in Britain, and certainly in America. That may be the case in New Zealand. Plus each of us has to navigate our own personal style of friendship. And it can be uncomfortable or awkward when you’re getting more involved in someone’s life than perhaps you were expecting to, and might worry you’re doing it wrong or overstepping.
It’s also harder to ask for time off work to help care for a sick friend than it is to ask for time off to care for a sick family member, right?
Certainly in terms of getting carers’ leave or carers’ allowances. And it’s very hard to say to an employer, ‘I’m heading off now to take my friend to the hospital’. It’s an invisible form of caring, and when a friend dies, it’s disenfranchised grief. Also, say you’ve been caring for your friend and need to access them in hospital or another setting – it’s very hard if you’re a friend rather than a relative. Family members can feel quite threatened about how much you’re doing for a friend, even worrying you might be exploiting the situation. But why assume we should trust family members more than we’d trust friends? We’ve got this ageing population, where friends may have more important caring responsibilities for each other in the future, but we don’t have the right mechanisms in place for that.
You write that, for at least a decade, sociologists have argued that friends will overtake family members as the main caregivers. That surprised me!
It’s something we need to think and talk about more. It’s very important for us to understand collectively how to do this. To be more prepared to understand what is at stake and where things can go wrong. Some legal philosophers have even suggested friendship ‘contracts’: a non-romantic version of a ‘civil partnership’, to help friends who have chosen to be one another’s primary support navigate institutions like hospitals and family courts.The idea of civil friendship contracts is really intriguing. Most of what such a pact might cover is already possible in ad hoc ways. Friends can already leave their possessions to each other in wills, give each other power of attorney, buy houses together or enter into other joint financial liabilities. In theory, they should also be able to access employers’ support and allowances if they are a primary carer for a friend. A civil friendship contract would streamline and simplify this process, and make friendship more visible as an organising principle.
I imagine that not everyone feels comfortable with the idea of a civil friendship contract?
I think people see civil friendship contracts as a peculiar counterintuitive concept, because friendships sit outside the more public, ritualised aspects of life. There’s a sense that what makes friendship special is that we can choose to be in a friendship or not. But in many other times and places, formal friendship pacts have been encouraged. In fifteenth-century France, friends could go up before a notary and enter into a legally binding contract called an affrèrement to combine their households.
You found that increasing numbers of women are living together as friends?
Yes, for the book I talked to women who are either formally in co-housing communities or informally choosing to have a friendship as their main supportive relationship. It doesn’t mean they won’t have romantic or sexual relationships with other people. But the spine of their life is a friendship – as in, that’s who you’re going to buy property with and organise caregiving with. In those situations, or any situation where you’re caring for a friend, I think it’s very useful to have a mechanism like a civil friendship contract that makes it possible to talk about your expectations, rights and obligations – especially when people are ill or ageing.
CoAbode in the U.S. matches single moms – some coming out of abusive situations – for home-sharing and friendship – with the recommendation to create a contract that is explicit about the terms of a shared life and an exit road map. It’s wonderful that these women can almost form their own family while easing some of those financial pressures?
Yeah, financial pressures and the enormous cost of isolation on the mental health of, in CoAbode’s case, single parents and their children. It’s critical that you have support and that’s also true of older women I spoke to who had decided to live with friends in various configurations, because the cost of the isolation can be greater than any physical illness.
The Australian group, Older Women in Cohousing, also sounds great.
Yeah, the group has now secured mixed-tenure planning permission for a community of around thirty older women in rural southwest Australia. They meet each month, with subgroups meeting more regularly, designing their shared life in working groups focusing on land care, media, legal and wellness, to name a few, with decisions taken using consensus-based techniques to ensure everyone’s voice can be heard. They actually pointed out something I’d never really thought about – that older women are the group most at risk of homelessness, of being in financially perilous situations. There’s the gender pay gap and they might have taken time off paid work for caring responsibilities. They may have had a marriage end and not have the financial resources to draw on. It’s a very serious issue, actually, and it’s also been the case across centuries that women, including older women, have chosen to live together to make life more manageable, practical and enjoyable. In the Netherlands, Scandinavia and America, where co-housing models are gaining popularity, elder co-housing has become an important tool in the fight against loneliness in old age. The model is spreading to other parts of the world.
You also wrote about female friends Holly’s and Herrin’s merging of their lives in the States. They have a clear plan about addressing problems?
Yeah, they’re in their 40s, both divorced, with kids around the same age. They realised during the pandemic that it made more sense for them to live together than apart. They created not quite contracts, but intentions. They talked about ‘how will we deal with a kind of disagreement?’. They talked about that way more than any couple I’ve come across. They were out ahead of the potential difficulties and trying to be transparent about how they’d fix them.
My friends from uni and I used to talk about living in a shared home after we retired, joking, drinking and getting around on our walkers.
All the women I’ve spoken to have had that conversation! I think where it gets difficult is working out how can we manage to do that? My dog-walking friend said ‘I’d love to live with my friends, but I’m worried we’ll just end up hating each other then lose the friendship’. So I think there’s significant hunger for it, but also anxieties and fears about what we’ll do if it goes wrong and how would we extricate ourselves from it? That’s another reason to share stories about women who are doing and navigating this because of course sometimes it goes wrong and is difficult and you just have to figure out a way through it. We wouldn’t expect to get married to someone and for it not to be complicated, annoying and difficult sometimes. At different times across centuries women have chosen to live together in order to make life more manageable, practical and enjoyable. Look at The Golden Girls. The reason they all end up living together at first is because they’re broke and can’t afford to live on their own, and they become really close friends as a result. Lots of women really benefit from living together, so it’s something we should closely consider.
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