Raina Cohen

We had a really good deal on this one bedroom.

And he was like, do we actually care about buying?

Is that important to us?

Like, what do we value here?

And it was immediately clear, like, oh, okay, community is this thing that we've been talking about that we value, our friends.

And

I had just put this, the idea of buying a home, this kind of adult stepping stone in front of a value that that was the one thing that stood in the way.

And I can go on and on about living with or near friends.

I'm currently in the process with, there are a group of us who are trying to buy property together and we'll have some people like living, even more people living in my house at the moment to start testing out, do we actually want to be in such close proximity for the long haul?

And for me, I love like coming home to having more people in the house who are playing piano and, you know, can run and like spontaneously sing some songs with or coming home after a long day and having my housemate, you know, having cooked a meal.

I wish the structures around it were easier.

We're kind of having to figure out a lot of things as we go.

I think the trade that you make is that you put a lot of work in the front end to get the support and the ease and friendship on the back end.

You have to coordinate with more people to find the right kind of house, for instance, or the right neighborhood or so on.

But then it means that you are able to have these spontaneous interactions and you don't have to schedule three weeks out a one hour coffee with somebody and then you won't see them for three more months because you can't fit them into your schedule.

The first thing I want to say is that you are not alone in this.

I've come to expect now when I do any kind of book-related event that someone will come up to me afterward and will cry because they will tell me about a friendship that they lost because of falling out or the person passed away.

And the sense of isolation that people feel

because nobody took them seriously adds this extra layer of suffering that I think is completely unnecessary and is really imposed by our society not treating this form of grief as legitimate.

And there's a term for this, it's called disenfranchised grief, that there's some forms of grieving that we do not recognize as legitimate.