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What motivated two families to engage in the organized chaos of shared living, and how did they learn to talk through, and shape, new expectations for their family life at home?

In this episode of How to Talk to People, we hear from Deborah Tepley and Luke Jackson, who remember when they first asked their best friends to buy a house with them. The Flemings—soon to be expecting their first child—didn’t hesitate to say yes. Their real-estate agent and extended families warned against the decision, but the families shared a vision of a home where the values of community could flourish in practice.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid; the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

Be part of the How to Talk to People family. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”), Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), Bomull (“Latte”), and Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Julie Beck: What are some common misconceptions about your home life that you find yourself having to explain to people?

Deborah Tepley: We’re not swingers. [Laughter.]

Bethany Fleming: I think a lot of people when we say like, “Oh yeah, we live with another couple,” they’re like, Oh, like they live in the basement.

Beck: No one’s banished to the basement.

Bethany: And then there’s like a whole slew of questions about “How does that work?”

—

Beck: Hi. I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rebecca Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Beck: Deborah Tepley, Luke Jackson, and Bethany and TJ Fleming kindly invited us into their home on a Monday afternoon.

I first reported on their shared living setup back in 2019 in an article called “The Case for Buying a House With Friends.” But this was the first time we’d met in person.

Rashid: When Julie and I walked into their house, I felt a sort of ease and playfulness in their shared living setup. Their decor was simple and airy, with cream walls and dark accents. And two light-gray couches, where we recorded for the next few hours.

Beck: It was really cozy and honestly amazingly clean, considering two young kids lived there: one named Mary Hayley and the other named Pax. But as down to earth as they are, their home life is actually kind of quietly radical.

Rashid: It’s all well and good to live with friends when you’re young, but the concept of “settling down” can be a strong motivator in adulthood. And “single-family homes” are called that name for a reason because the expectation is a single family will live in them. As limiting as that may be.

Beck: So this all started a few years ago at a New Year’s brunch. The four friends who had met at church were enjoying some champagne, having some laughs. And then kind of out of nowhere: Luke proposed that they should all buy a house together. And all four of them were down. They were excited to try a more communal way of living.

Deborah: We are currently in our shared home, which is in Petworth in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C.

Luke Jackson: And this is Luke. We are in our living room, which is great.

TJ Fleming: And this is TJ, and I would just add that it’s a bright, sunny day outside, and we can see many of the plants we’ve planted.

Bethany: I don’t have anything to add.

Beck: Okay, great. [Laughter.]

Beck: So after many logistical conversations and plenty of financial spreadsheets, they now have a group mortgage and split the costs of their home 50/50 between the two couples.

Rashid: While visiting with these families, I found myself wondering whether how we define what makes a house a home may be what limits us. I feel like our culture can pressure adults to orient family life exclusively around a romantic partner and children. But it’s not always immediately clear to me how to build community in a different way and what that looks like.

Luke: Yeah; it’s always like, “Oh, so you’re renting together?” and I’m like, “No, no, no. We bought a house with other people.” People assume that we regret it.

Deborah: I think people are very curious about the logistics of the arrangement. They’re curious about the kids and how that works. Before offering that information to someone, I do think about it: Do I want to have this conversation? And so that is something I actually do consider before sharing about our shared living situation.

Beck: How much energy do you have to explain yourself today?

Deborah: That’s right. Yeah.

Beck: Do you think it’s just that our sort of American ideal of “one family, one home,” “my home is my castle” vibes is so strong that they’re like, They must be in the basement. They couldn’t possibly be upstairs.

Luke: That’s what I think. Yeah—that people think about what their life at home looks like, and they assume that ours must be some recognizable version of that.

TJ: The message of the American dream of  “Buy your own house” ... the National Association of Realtors has been really successful in making sure everyone believes that’s for them. [Laughter.] You know, we still get most of those benefits. It’s just, we share it..

Deborah: And I think that is a difference, from either renting together or one household renting to another. There is not the same sense of shared ownership. There’s also, I think, maybe a power differential if one household owns a house and one is renting.

But we’re all in it. So if something breaks or if something needs to be repaired, we’re all invested. We all really care about the outcome. And I think that actually helps us to avoid conflict, because we’re all so invested in this property and we love this house.

Beck: And whose idea was it first to buy a house together?

Deborah: I had been pitching Luke on living in community for a couple of years. I grew up in a big family, and I really love living with other people. I loved living with roommates. And so I kept sending him different articles or podcasts about different people who are in group-house situations. And Luke had never had a roommate other than a family member before he married me. And so he said, “Absolutely not.”

And then one day he came home after listening to a podcast or a sermon that I had sent to him and said, “I think I might be open to this.” That being said, no one was more surprised than me when Luke popped the question at New Year’s brunch to TJ and Bethany.

Beck: So you were both married at the time of the New Year’s brunch.

TJ: Yeah.

Beck: And did you feel any pressure, as married couples, for your home life to look a certain way?

Luke: I think culturally, you just assume: You get married, you buy a home. You know, have a family and live like an independent, nuclear kind of family unit.

And so I think that had always been my assumption of what our married life would look like. But as Deborah and I were sort of talking about buying a home and what might that look like, and this was definitely not one of the default options. [Chuckles.]

Beck: What would people say when you told them that you were thinking of doing this? What kind of pushback would you get?

Deborah: When we talked about it with other people, everyone thought it was a bad idea, including our real-estate agent. I think most people were worried about the worst-case scenarios. What if it doesn’t work? You’re all on the mortgage. What happens when someone has kids? If it doesn’t work, how are you guys going to be able to split amicably?

Bethany: I got a lot of questions about what discipline looks like. And, do they even like kids? What if they don’t like your kids? But I felt like, you know, it’s Luke and Deborah: They’re going to love our kids. And if I am going to parent for the first time in front of anyone, I would want it to be Luke and Deborah, you know?

Beck: What was it that you wanted from your home life that wouldn’t be met by the traditional single-family-home arrangement? And what did you hope that this would provide instead?

Bethany: You know, all four of us have full-time jobs. And so when you’re living in community, we split groceries; we divide up who’s cooking and when. And, you know, there’s a lot of talk out there about how the domestic labor falls on one partner in a relationship. And so we divide that among four people.

TJ: Neither of us on our own would have purchased this house, financially speaking. We got to buy a larger property in a neighborhood that we were more excited about living in.

Luke: Yeah; I maybe approached it least practically of any of us. [Laughter.] So living even with just a spouse, right, is challenging. But it also encouraged me to grow, to be gentler, to be kinder. To be less self-centered.

And so I was sort of thinking, Wow, if living with just Deborah has done that, imagine adding more people to the mix. I don’t know if that’s panned out quite the way that I thought it would.

Bethany: Doubled in size!

Luke: Tripled in size!

TJ: Luke, you’ve become gentler and softer.

Luke: Thank you.That’s reassuring to hear. I actually think it makes us better people, and encourages us to grow less self-centered to live in community like this.

Deborah: I think that people often assume that we made this decision for financial reasons. I think it was more of a missional kind of—the desire to live in community, and to live with TJ and Bethany.

And I thought I would be a bigger person, like you imagine I’ll be really altruistic. And I think a lot of times I’m not, and I really have appreciated their grace and forgiveness toward me when I’m not a big person, or when my behavior is very poor. And so there’s a lot of opportunities for grace and forgiveness. And I’ve been the recipient of that time and time again.

Bethany: Yeah; I also just think it’s a lot of fun. I really feel like we’re not communicating how much fun we have together. Someone’s always around to talk to or hang out with.

Rashid: You know, Julie, I’m at an age where many of my friends have serious romantic partners and many even have kids. So the time for casual hangouts is understandably limited. But there has been a noticeable shift in the ease of just meeting up and hanging out spontaneously.

Beck: Yeah; that is something that I worry about a little bit—being in a long-term relationship. We’ve also been through a pandemic and just only hanging out with each other for a few years.

I don’t want us to be super-insular in our relationship. And that does happen—married people are a lot less likely than single people to hang out with their friends and neighbors. And research shows that holds true across race, age, and socioeconomic status.

So even though I don’t think we’re going to necessarily invite another couple to move in with us right now, I am trying to be more deliberate about spending more time with my friends regularly. As much as we love each other, I don’t want our love for each other to pull us away from our friendships.

Rashid: Culturally, sometimes it feels like it’s not very adult to want to live with your friends forever. So although that is my ideal scenario—to have a huge, L-shaped IKEA sectional couch where my partner along with 10 friends can all sit together—it doesn’t always feel the most realistic when it comes to a long-term living situation, where I can actually live with those sort of chosen family members of mine and make a home with them.

Beck: I mean, especially once you reach certain milestones—like if you do choose to get married or if you do choose to have kids—the expectation kind of gets even stronger that you’re going to live with just your nuclear family: just your partner and your kids.

Rashid: And the cultural and social pressures are just one part of the equation. In the case of these two families, they had to lay out and untangle their individual expectations—and fears—too.

Beck: So going into this, that’s what you were hoping for from it. What were you afraid of?

Bethany: Oh, that’s a good question. We wrote all those things down. This was a suggestion from our realtor. He was like, “Before you guys start on this process, write down all your fears, fold them up on pieces of paper, put them in a bowl, and just pull them out one by one and talk about it.” And so that’s what we did.

Beck: What else do you all remember about the bowl conversation?

Deborah: Well, we all cried. One of my responses was that they would regret having bought a house with us in a year or two years. And I just thought about how bad that would feel.

Luke: I mean, I think fundamentally, it was about rejection, right? Like, wow: They’re going to live with me, and they’re going to figure out what I’m really like. And they’re going to be like “Wish we had done a hard pass, like six months ago” kind of thing.

TJ: Similar to any relationship where, you know, something is going to change, you worry about, like, Will I lose this friend? Or Will things not be as fine? Or Will they be way different? And you know, that was, I guess, one of my fears.

Luke: One other thing we talked about—I think we talked a lot about—what happens if somebody really goes off the rails? I think several of us have had mental illness in the family, and had family members suddenly go through a mental-health crisis and change.

What if God forbid, one of us gets divorced or whatever? I remember the mental-health one being one that we all cried about.

Beck: What do you remember about move-in day and the sort of weeks and months following that?

Bethany: Oh, my gosh. I was seven months pregnant. But I do remember during that time we would all take family walks late at night. And you know, nothing fit so I looked ridiculous. And Luke and Deborah walk really fast, so they were just really walking very, very slowly. We all walked at my pace so that we could talk. We did it every night.

Luke: We all had something that we were anticipating kind of together. Getting the nursery ready. And talking through: “When is Bethany’s mom coming?” “When is TJ’s mom coming?” “When they go to the hospital, what are we going to do?” Just being a really fun period when we all were kind of looking forward to Mary Hayley’s arrival and waiting with bated breath.

Beck: How did you both decide the role that you wanted Luke and Deborah to play in your children’s lives?

Bethany: Aw, what a really sweet question. I mean, well, Luke and Deborah are the godparents to our children. That felt like a really obvious one. We want our children to experience Luke and Deborah, and just the kindness and the love that they bring to our family. I mean, we’re a family.

Deborah: I mean, we’re just part of their normal life. And they’ve never asked, “Why do you live here?”

Beck: What were the discussions about parenting in this shared environment like?

TJ: I mean, I think we’re all just on the same page. Bethany and I, we’re going to parent our children how we thought was right. I think it’s really hard to do this if you don’t have some kind of shared value system with another couple. I think you need at least some kind of shared faith system or shared non-faith system to do that.

Bethany: I mean, I think it’s helpful for people to know, “Hey, this is a strategy we’re using when this happens.” We decided early on: TJ and I will discipline our kids, and Deborah and Luke are like their aunt and uncle. They uphold the rules. They don’t encourage the kids to break the rules, right? But TJ and I provide the discipline or consequences. I think that has also helped: just that boundary.

Beck: I wanted to ask Luke and Deborah: How did you feel about committing not to live just with another couple, but with someone else’s kids? I think a lot of us who play the sort of aunt or uncle role to our friends’ kids—at least myself—I know I dip in, I dip out. You know: I show up, I show ’em a movie, I pump ’em full of sugar, and I send them on their way to their parents. But you sign on to be there for all of it, all the time.

Luke: TJ and Bethany were upfront that they were planning on having kids, from our very first conversation about this. We always knew going in, you know, that this was what we were signing up for. But it is humbling that we actually do still have the option of dipping out.

Maybe not quite to the same degree. You know, you can still hear the screaming from the bedroom. But we can actually step away and have some privacy or let TJ and Bethany deal with whatever is happening.

Deborah: I think we thought it would be a great adventure. And on the one hand, we did know we were getting ourselves into. We’d been around kids enough. But I don’t think we had an idealized or romanticized view of what it would be like to live with kids. We were not planning to have kids. We knew that. But I think we felt like this would be a good way to participate in the life of kids.

TJ: And our kids love them.

Deborah: We love their kids. We are crazy about them.

Luke: They’re very sweet.

Bethany: I think that has been one of the great joys of living together. Getting to parent with a community that I think we wouldn’t have otherwise. I think a lot of people feel isolated in their house with their kids. And on the one hand, it is hard parenting in front of the audience, you know. And on the other, I’m so glad that we’re doing it together. And so that has made a big difference.

Luke: We have a two-to-one adult-to-child ratio in the house. And I think a lot of people would hear that and be pretty envious, because it does provide more adults. Not just in terms of safety and keeping an eye on things, but just ... kids are attention sponges. And it’s nice to have more people in the house who can help, you know, kind of nurture them.

And it’s also really fun to hear the kids starting to use crazy words that I use and that Deborah uses. It’s a privilege to get to be playing a role in raising children without actually having had them.

Beck: Do you eat together every night?

Deborah: We do. Whoever is here eats together.

Beck: And the kids, too?

Bethany: Yep.

Beck: What are some of the rituals and rhythms that you’ve established in your house? Kind of week to week.

Deborah: Initially, we did a weekly house meeting. And we still do house meetings, not quite weekly. And I think part of that is just we don’t have the need for them as frequently as we did at first.

We got this idea from another group house in D.C. They said that they do a meeting every week, and they ask, first of all, what’s working and what’s not working. Everyone goes around and has to respond to both questions.

Just the little things that really can grate on you, or things that might be upsetting to you that might just fester for a long time. And so I think that’s been a good practice for us: just sort of getting things out in the open. It provides a forum for that.

Beck: What are some conflict-management strategies in your house? Do you have specific ways that you go about it?

Bethany: Having a structure for regular communication is really helpful, because you don’t feel this pressure to bring something up in the moment when you may or may not be ready to talk about it. Like, Oh, I know we’re having a meeting, and so I can just bring it up there.

Luke: Many of the lessons from marriage also apply, things like “You can’t hold someone accountable to it if you didn’t say it out loud.” You also have to say what’s working, right?

Deborah: Honestly, that question—“What’s working? What’s not working?”—is a really hard question to answer, in part because you don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. And, you know, it just really forces you to talk about things that you wouldn’t talk about otherwise. So I think that has forced me to be a better communicator.

I think that’s an added benefit of living with people: You see their life so close up and personal, and you see the way that they resolve conflict and the way that they parent their kids, and all of those things. And so I feel like I’ve learned a lot. And I think I’m a better communicator because I’ve lived with TJ and Bethany.

Luke: Yeah; I would second that. Living in a community challenges you to just be emotionally intelligent, right? Is this a me problem, or is this actually, you know, maybe somebody said something that was hurtful, or they were just not thinking about it? How am I feeling and why? And is it something that I need other people to help me deal with, or is it something that I can, you know, process on my own?

Deborah: Yeah. And I think living in a community forces you to work out your own kind of marriage in the community. And there’s this infamous night where we all sat down to dinner. We sat down, and I said, “You know, Luke and I are fighting, and we need some time. And so we’re going to go work this out, and we’ll be back in 15 minutes.”

Deborah: And Bethany said, “TJ and I are fighting, too!” And I think that TJ and Luke were both like, “we’re fighting?” So we split up into separate areas of the house. And we came back after 15 minutes and finished dinner together.

TJ: I have no recollection of that; that’s hilarious.

Luke: We love each other and that love actually is based on a commitment. Right? And I think that commitment predates a mortgage, but a mortgage is a useful symbol of that as well. And so, yeah: Out of that commitment comes a desire to “Well, let’s make this work.” We want to make this work. And so how do we do that in a way that’s best for everybody?

Beck: I think what’s kind of remarkable to me about the commitment is that friendship culture in the U.S. and maybe elsewhere today is very anti-commitment, I think. And not always in a bad way, necessarily—but I think friendship is defined in some ways by its voluntary nature. You don’t have those formal commitments that you have in marriage, that you have in a nuclear family.

And so there can become this sort of sense of, you know, “I love you and you’re my friend.” But the highest truth is everybody needs to do what’s best for themselves. And I think it is rare that you would put an obligation onto your friend or accept an obligation from your friend.

Luke: Yeah, definitely. I think I’m setting healthy boundaries. Like “I need to do some self-care”—that kind of language. I think we have a kind of shared moral framework that’s based on our faith.

And, at least to my reading, at the heart of Christianity is actually “other-centered love”—that I’m choosing what’s best for you, not for me. And so I think that informs our shared living and our commitment to one another as well. And there are benefits for me. But I also want to love, and I want to serve you and your kids and Deborah, and I think that really is our starting place as a house.

TJ: Yeah; again there has to be a shared vision outside of yourself. Or why else would you be doing it? There’s many days or weeks where you want to be somewhere else; this happens to me all the time just because of my personality. “I want to move to Florida because it’s cold.” I can’t tell you how many times I say that in the winter.

But without that shared vision of something bigger outside of you, it’s not going to last more than a year or two, because you’re going to find a reason to escape. I think it’s really easy to make “community” a theoretical concept. What I’ve learned about community through living with others, including Luke and Deborah, is that community is a real granular thing in real life.

It’s the people you’re with on a daily basis, how you interact with them. It’s how intentional you are with them, and it doesn’t actually come naturally. Building real community is not an ideology. It’s a practice.

And that goes for our house. But that also goes with my other friendships. I want to have lifelong friendships outside of this house, and I have to spend time with those people, or else we’re not actually close.

Beck: Can you all still imagine any scenarios where one of you would want to move out, or two of you would want to move out?

Luke: I mean, I guess if somebody’s got a job—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—somewhere else. And then, something that we have talked about is that the kids are sharing a room right now. At some point they’ll need to not share a room together. And so, would we buy a different house? Would we maybe need to go our separate ways?

Deborah: Initially when we decided to do this together, we signed a three-year contract. And now we’re past that three-year mark, and we have a retreat every year in May where we talk about the future and sort of what the next year looks like, and what our timeline is. And so I think we just have this opportunity to revisit that every year.

TJ: There’s kind of a running clock on a couple of our careers. And so we’ve talked about that openly. It’s not like an elephant in the room or something.

Beck: Yeah. And how do you think you guys would approach it if somebody did want to move out?

Luke: So this was one of the things that we made sure that we really ironed out before we actually bought the house together. We would have the house independently appraised. If there’s one couple that wants to stay in the house, they would have an opportunity to actually buy the other couple out.

If that’s not possible or the other couple didn’t want to, then we would either sell the house and just split the [proceeds]—I think right now our equity would just be 50-50—or we could also rent the house out and split the proceeds from the rent as well. So one of those options.

Beck: Would you recommend your choice to other people?

Luke: Absolutely.

TJ: Yeah; I think they need to go through the process. [Laughter.]

Deborah: Yeah; I think so too. I think you really want to, you know, count the cost. You need to make sure you’re doing it with the right people. But as long as you can trust them in general and trust them financially, I think that’s a big part of it.

Luke: Yeah. Ninety percent of what goes on, right, is very day-to-day and very mundane, and the big questions only come up so often.

Beck: When someone puts microphones in your house and asks them to you?

Luke: Right. [Laughter.]

Deborah: You know, I married a strong introvert who would like to be in his man cave most of the time. Luke is not the only one bearing the burden of my social needs; there’s like a whole house of people to share that.

Beck: Becca, I agree with Deborah. I do think you need different people to fill different roles in your life. It reminds me of a concept called the All-or-Nothing Marriage, which comes from the psychologist Eli Finkel. And he’s kind of theorizing that people just expect even more from their marriages than they used to.

Way back when, you know, it was basically a financial arrangement. Right? And then we wanted love on top of that. And now we even want self-actualization on top of that, and to become our best selves through this relationship. And it could be very isolating if that one person is your sort of be-all end-all.

Rashid: Yeah, you know, I grew up in a multigenerational house as a kid, and my aunt and uncle would come over every weekend. And there were lots of people meeting my emotional needs as a kid, not just my parents. So whenever I saw just two parents and a kid at the dinner table at my friends’ houses, I was always interested in this sort of stark difference with my family that was sort of a chaotic, buffet-style mess of a dinner every weekend.

Beck: Sounds fun.

Rashid: It was. But I realized it’s just a totally different setup when one person or just two people are expected to fill in the gaps of what an extended family, or an extended network of people, can do. It is interesting to me that in mainstream American culture, the romantic partner is expected to be your everything.

Beck: Yeah. Like, help raise your kids and hear all of your work stories that they don’t understand and help you around the house. And they’re your go-to person for every concert and movie and anything that you do. It’s just a lot for one relationship to hold. It’s a lot of weight to ask for from anybody.

Rashid: And actually it’s been shown that relying on a variety of people to meet different emotional needs can be better for people’s well-being.

TJ: To get back to your earlier question, just on our block on this side, there’s three or four shared intergenerational arrangements, whether it’s family or otherwise. It’s actually not that weird, you know?

Beck: Yeah. If I want to suss out a friend to see if they’d be down for this, how should I broach the conversation?

Luke: I think you want to make it a compliment: “I’ve been thinking about living in community and wanting to do that intentionally. And when I thought about that, you were someone that I thought, Wow, you would be a great person to live in community with.”

I would suggest that people talk to your spouse first. “This is what I’m thinking; what do you think about that? How do you think that would impact our relationship? What would be great about it?” Not just: “What are you afraid of?”

Beck: What have you all learned about each other along the way?

Deborah: When you live together, you learn who is coming down the stairs before you see them. You learn kind of their footfall. You learn that TJ lets out a large sigh every morning as he comes down the stairs first thing. So you have that level of intimacy with people.

Luke: I’ll take the more depressing approach.

TJ: Whoa, right on cue.

Deborah: Are you sure?

Luke: Everybody in the house is shocked. Even when you change your living situation, you’re still the same person, right? All of the same things that I struggled with, living with Deborah—like, Hey, whoa, they’re still true. I’m still me. I think there’s always that temptation, like TJ said—to escape, to move somewhere else, to like, enter a new situation—and then I’ll be a new person. No; you’re going to enter in your situation, and you’re going to be the same you that you always have been. And so is that the right situation to move into or not?

TJ: I think I’ve just learned that Luke and Deborah are better people than I even thought. I can appreciate them at a deeper level than I could before we lived together. And even though yeah, we’ve had arguments or disagreements, I still think they’re some of the best, most generous people that I know. It amplifies the good.

Bethany: I like the idea of “We got to choose our family.” I don’t know; it’s just brought a lot of joy.

Rashid: And Julie, there are signs that other models of living, other than single-family homes are also becoming more normalized in our culture.

Beck: Yeah; because there’s something about the nuclear-family household that encourages people to turn inward away from the possibility of that broader community. But if you want to have those other layers of support in your life, then it takes some really intentional planning to resist the pull of that model of home life that is really held up as the building block of society.

Rashid: And maybe even a hint of rebellion.

Beck: Just a hint.

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