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Here's the thing.

It shouldn't be stigmatized, and it shouldn't be something that's any of anyone else's business beyond being an interesting fact about a person. Just one more nugget to find.

There's no single right answer for everyone.

Families are fucking complicated. Some of them, you could happily live together your entire life. Others, you might need a giant house and you'd still have friction. Some, you don't even want to be in the same state, much less share a house.

It is, however, true that as the number of people in a group increases, the work required to maintain healthy relationships increases exponentially.

If there is not parity between those relationships, it multiplies the effect. Which means that everyone involved has to be willing to adapt and change over time for things to stay hair and healthy. When that isn't the case, the household is going to split in some way or another, and that usually means someone leaving is essentially necessary.

Think about it. Two people that love each other have work to do to maintain their relationship, be it romantic, friendship, parent/child, siblings, whatever. You add a third person to that, and instead of one relationship you have 4, not three. Because each individual relationship exists, and now the three way one does.

Now, think about two people starting a family. Say they only have one kid. The kid becomes an adult, with adult needs, responsibilities, wants, and habits. If the parents keep treating them like a child, dissonance will occur in most situations.

Now, have that child get married too. You've now got 4 individual relationships to maintain, the original triplet, the new triplet with the spouse and parents, plus a triplet with each parent, the child, and the child's spouse, then the quartet.

That's a shit ton of work. You've got all those people having to compromise, adjust their habits and remember boundaries. That's not something where everyone is going to major the optimum decision every single time. It's impossible almost, though if everyone puts in the effort roughly equally, it can be maintained for a lifetime.

Now, the second couple have a kid. Map out those connections and the level of difficulty spikes hard.

But, as hard as it is, if you find someone that's living in shared space, people still assume there's something wrong with the younger adults involved. And there may be, but it isn't a certainty the way people assume it will be.

There's benefits and drawbacks to every option when it comes to how a family lives, be it centralized, spread out, or fully disconnected.

Now, I've done all of that. At various points, I've lived with my sibling and parents as an adult; we've all lived apart as individuals, we've lived as duos (though not in every combination), and I've had two partners that lived with me during all of that, and a best friend that was there through damn near all of it, and his husband for a while, plus my kid in the mix.

At various points, different people owned the house, even though it's been the same house that I grew up in for most of that. It was originally my dad as owner, with my mom having her share of that as a spouse. Then they divorced, and my dad got the house and my mom got a big check. She still lived here, but that's a separate thing. Then my dad fucked up, and me and my best friend bought it. Now, I'm the only one on the mortgage.

The dynamics of that meant that the "power" shifted as ownership did because at the end of the day, whoever is on the mortgage/deed has final legal responsibility, financial responsibility, and that means having final say on some matters, no matter how democratic everything else is. That creates an extra dynamic on top of all the others.

I can tell you for sure that it takes work, hard emotional work, to navigate every iteration of that. When that work isn't being done by everyone, shit can get bad fast.

But it's also amazing. The amount of good in it is mind boggling if you take each family unit being apart as the goal that is the only measure of success. When everyone is clicking along, and there's equity between everyone, gods it's beautiful.

Just on a practical level, everyone with income had more left over than they otherwise would have, and none of us have ever had to face the bad times alone. We've had each others back more times than I can even count (I tried, and I kept remembering more until I gave up, and I was creeping on triple digits where the level of support was part of at least one of us making it through).

And on the emotional level? It can be chaotic, yeah, but if you don't know the goodness of being able to just hug your dad any time you want to because he's just in the other room, I'm sorry. Right now, I can go hug my dad, and don't have to leave the house. He'll laugh, and ask what's up. I'll say "nothing, I just love you", and then we'll get teary eyed and he'll say it back, and then we go about our days.

It isn't for everyone. But gods damn, it sure as hell isn't a bad thing to try either