Can you date your roommate?

Romance in coliving houses

A few weeks after we moved into Casa Chironja, my roommate Sarah (names changed) found me in the kitchen making morning coffee.

‘I did a bad thing,’ she said. ‘I swear I’m not trying to make this house into the Real World. But I made out with Alex last night.’

Sarah, being the conscientious person she is, was worried that getting romantically involved with a housemate could bring unwanted drama to our little community.

I told Sarah I was touched that she was concerned, but she and Alex were both kind, wonderful humans who could choose who they wanted to make out with. Four years later, they are engaged.

When in the course of human events a group of open minded, similarly aged people choose to live together, it’s natural that some will end up falling in love. In my ten years of communal living, I’ve seen eight (!) pairs of people who started as roommates end up getting engaged or married.

But thoughtful people like Sarah will also realize that hooking up with your housemates carries the risk of drama. In the best of situations, breakups suck. Now imagine you and your ex partner are living with a bunch of your best friends. Who gets to ‘keep the house’ takes on a whole different level of complexity when a larger community is involved.

If you need to ask chatGPT to understand the Real World reference, you’re making me feel old.

So, can you date your roommate? The answer is probably yes, but it’s best to approach dating with a bit more intention when someone already shares your address.

We’ll cover the three most common scenarios:

A. When a couple moves into a community house together

B. When a person invites their significant other to move in to their community

C. When two people already in a community decide to start dating

(We know there are a lot of ways to love, including polyamorous relationships with more than two people. For the sake of simplicity we’ll discuss two person relationships here but most of this advice will apply for other relationship types as well).

The DTB talk

When a significant other or couple is moving into a house (scenario A and B), we recommend both people in the couple sit down and establish expectations for what you’d do if things go south: the Define The Breakup (DTB) talk.

Almost no one does this. A conversation about breaking up is a real buzzkill! But it’s so important to do this - and to write it down - when everyone is happy and optimistic about the future. We recommend a Google Doc that you share with each other. For added accountability you could also share it with the house. At a minimum, it should cover three things:

1. If we were to break up, X partner would move out of the house within Y timeline.
   If you can’t decide which partner would voluntarily move out of the house, the fair thing to agree is that both partners will. We strongly advise against having existing housemates decide who gets to stay. Forcing the entire house to take sides with one or other person in a couple can lead to entire houses breaking up.
   
   You could also agree that both ex-partners plan to continue to live at the house. This is actually fairly common: we’ve seen a lot of couples who break up peacefully transition into being roommates. But in almost all cases this entailed a little bit of time away from each other to process first. Consider building in an expectation that each person will go somewhere else - stay with friends, visit family, go on a trip, swap rooms with someone at another coliving house - for a period of time to cool off.

2. If both ex-partners remain in the house, we ask that they refrain from X behavior for Y amount of time.
   Even if your breakup is mature and peaceful, it can be useful to have a bit of privacy from each other’s private lives for a period of time. You may want to agree that no one brings a new partner home in the first month (or whatever period of time feels right to you). If you’ve already found new love but your ex-partner hasn’t, the kind thing might be to enjoy time with your new partner in other places and let the old partner have the warmth and support of the community. Ultimately, if you’re both going to continue to see this community as your home, you should be able to share it with new partners - but it doesn’t have to be right away.

3. Mutual non-disparagement.
   If the breakup isn’t completely harmonious, you might be tempted to vent about the things you feel your partner did wrong to your community. Your ex will likely have their own side of the story. No one benefits from a feuding couple trying to get the entire community on one or the other’s side - and if you’ve done steps one and two, there’s no reason the community will have to take sides. You can have a few close confidants to help you process the difficult stuff that led to your breakup, but it shouldn’t be something that more distant members of the community get roped into.

Timing the DTB talk

Sometimes a partner ‘moving in’ happens gradually, or unexpectedly. One person’s lease is up and they’re going to crash with their partner until they find their next place - then never do. Or a couple are on a short term sublet and they end up becoming permanent housemates.

The best time to have the DTB talk is before you’ve moved into a coliving house. The second best time to have the DTB talk is now.

Scenario C: when two housemates start dating

Nick and Jess are here to tell you it’s complicated

So what happens if you have *vibes* with one of your roommates?

Thankfully, we have a precedent for this: people fall in love in the workplace - another place where, if things don’t work out, you are going to continue seeing the other person - all the time. A lot of the best practices here can be translated to communal homes.

A few things worth discussing with your house:

• Do we want to have a policy on dating housemates? I have generally lived in houses where housemates are trusted to figure out their personal dynamics without any explicit rules. The one exception was a sublet where housemates were strongly discouraged from getting entangled with housemates unless, per house policy, ‘you think there is a good chance you will enter into a long term committed monogamous relationship.’ This rule was set after two early members of the house casually hooked up and disagreed on how the relationship should progress.
  
  Love can make us act irrationally: there’s a reason ‘crimes of passion’ are a legally defined category. If there is any concern about individuals in the house not being able to handle dating and breaking up maturely, it might make sense to just take it off the table. And if you decide to do this, you’ll also need to decide on any enforcement mechanisms: if a pair of housemates violate the rule, will they (at an extreme) be asked to move out?

• How do we think about power dynamics if an established housemate hooks up with a subletter? If the subletter is in a ‘trial period’ and interested in a long term place in the house, the established housemate will probably be one of the people deciding whether they get to live in the house. It’s a bit like a manager dating an intern: very strongly discouraged.

This film about a boss who forces her assistant to marry her so she doesn’t get deported is actually not cute

In conclusion

We’ve discussed a lot of the complexities of dating while living in community, but there are so many upsides.

For people already in a relationship, moving into a community can help you develop ‘other significant others’ - a wider network of support that takes some pressure off your romantic partner, which we’ve talked about in more depth here and here.

For those looking for love: while we hope it’s clear from this article that we recommend extreme caution when dating your roommates, you’re also going to meet a lot of friends of your roommates, who are a wonderful vetted pool of potential matches.

And if you end up having kids while living with your friends, you will have a built in network of extra adults to help with the all-consuming task of raising your children. But that’s a topic for another post….

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