The New Millennial Retirement Concept — 'We're Calling It The Golden Girls Arrangement'
In lieu of marriage, alternative families and collectives are now growing in popularity.
Polina Tankilevitch | Canva Let’s get one thing right here: Golden Girls is an iconic TV show filled with amazing moments. It wasn’t just iconic because of the amazing Betty White, either. It was one of the first TV shows to feature a bunch of older women who had fun living together.
In recent years, there have been a couple of major trends I’ve noticed taking hold in America: For starters, marriage is down. Women and men are both avoiding marriage, often for similar reasons. Dating and marriage are risky. For many of them, the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.
Secondly, having kids is increasingly undesirable. Between the risk of becoming a single parent, the lack of social safety nets, the extreme cost of childcare, and the horrible way we treat parents, it’s not surprising that people are saying no to parenthood.
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Thirdly, friendship is the new status symbol. Being able to say you actually hang out with friends and even have friends IRL is a big deal these days.
Fourth, loneliness is becoming a serious problem. Financially speaking, most people can’t live on their own. They need to band together just to make ends meet. If you’re lonely, that’s bad news for your wallet.
Finally, roommates are becoming common for people well into their 30s and 40s. A lot of people don’t have a choice in the matter.
All of these factors point to a major millennial retirement concept that people are starting to confront: traditional nuclear families are struggling.
The whole “dating, marriage, kids” script isn’t working for a lot of us. Some of us cannot afford a home of our own in any sense of the word. So, what’s going to end up happening?
Well, I may have already lived it — or rather, a real rough form of it. In certain scenes I was in during my twenties, it was commonplace for us not to have good ties with our families. So, we’d often pool our funds together. We would rotate places to squat, sometimes packing as many as six to 15 to a room.
My first apartment was a studio apartment. There were three of us there until that went to the garbage with one bad squatter. The total square footage was under 200 square feet. Think about that.
Living packed like that was difficult. You often would see your roommates without clothes. Or you’d have to deal with them smoking or injecting various substances while you’re trying to work. But the rent was cheap.
There was no real phrase that stuck for these types of housing arrangements.
Some of us called them “covenant houses” because the blood of the covenant was thicker than the water of the womb. Others called it “squats,” “chosen family,” “tribes,” “traps,” or “sets.”
When we’d be “out” (homeless), someone would tell us, “Hey, I know a covenant house nearby. You can squat with them for the night. Then, keep it moving to the next.”
It kept us warm, bathed, and sheltered in a world that often didn’t care if we lived or died. If you’ve ever been in a similar situation, you already know how important your social ties can be. Truthfully, those weren’t sustainable — but a much more wholesome version is.
Lately, I’ve been noticing more and more people talking about having a Golden Girls-style living arrangement.
My friends are talking about buying houses or even investing in full, tiny home developments together so that they can pool money, do chores, and more. So far, I’ve seen my friends and acquaintances choose (or work toward choosing) the solutions below:
- Having a “faux Boston” marriage or a civil union to a best friend so they can share health insurance and pool resources like a married couple. They will live together, but it’s platonic.
- Having “mom houses” where single moms raise their kids together under one roof, buy property, and even go into business together. Once again, these are platonic. Because so many single moms have been burned by dating men and because of the growing risks that come with dating in this political sphere, we’ll likely see more of this.
- Multiple friends/couples pooling money together to buy a single multi-family unit. This often works by getting more down payment for the loan, then having each family own a section. I’m not quite sure how they’re doing the financials, but it seems to be better than having a landlord.
- Multiple friends buy a large mansion together. I feel like this is how most frat houses started. But hey, it’s a nice way to have 10 people living under one roof in a good neighborhood.
- Multiple friends buying a plot of land and putting tiny homes on it. It happened with a close family friend of mine. She became a “tiny home landlord.” It works for her and her crowd is currently working on creating a central amenity house for laundry, dining, entertainment, and work.
- People moving in with extended families. A friend of mine grew up like this in Brooklyn. His grandpa bought the house. His grandparents lived on the bottom floor. He and his parents were on the next floor, and then his aunts, uncles, and cousins were on the top floor. They all paid toward the house as soon as they could.
- People trying to create their collective farm. A friend of mine is also trying to buy a ranch that he will turn into a farm with his friends who live on-site. That’s a bit too ambitious for me and I think he’s off his gourd for it, but if he succeeds, it’ll be a wonderful community.
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In a word, friends are starting to truly act as the new family units.
With the shrinking size of family units, having an extended family living together is becoming a rarity. Friends, though? That’s becoming more commonplace — especially when it comes to multi-family units.
Something is refreshing and comforting knowing that you have friends who don’t judge, can pull their weight, and also will act like family when romance isn’t in the cards. And honestly? It’s a smart move to stave off loneliness.
I’ve heard more than one friend of mine say, “You know how they had all those old ladies hanging out together in retirement? That’s a life goal, right there.”
Blood and genetics do not a family make, and we’re going to see homes reflect that soon.
Growing up, I always found it so strange that families always seemed to have to be blood-related. Around me, everyone had the same last names. The goal was to get married so you’d find “your person” and then have the family you want.
Though that’s a nice thought, it didn’t match up to my reality. I saw plenty of dysfunctional families — from parents who hated their kids with a passion to relatives who abused everyone around them to kids who were genuine dangers to their parents.
It made no sense to me that people would stay around these situations willingly. When I’d ask people why they stuck with those people, they’d always shrug and say, “Well, you can’t choose your family. I have to stay with them. They’re my family.”
Can’t you choose them? I thought that’s what dating and marriage were. It’s not like you’re going to marry your uncle or something, right? So, why can’t we decide that our friends are family members too?
And if a family can’t be chosen, then what’s adoption? Because I can tell you, that my adopted family is just as real as my blood family. I care about them. I love them. They love me too.
Humans are social creatures and that means that survivors will learn to evolve their concept of a family home.
The old vanguard of American values is killing itself off. Marriage is dropping. Dating is an increasingly rare and unenjoyable experience. Having a mom, dad, and two kids with a Golden Retriever is going to be the exception, not the rule.
Yet, we are going to need people to survive, perhaps more than ever before. When family and romance fail us, it’s often our friends who end up being our saviors. And from there? Well, they can be family — even if they aren’t related to us.
I, for one, can’t wait to see more friends banding together as family units. It might be what saves our country.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.