You’ve heard me say this before: human beings are social creatures. We’re happier when we have meaningful relationships. We’re happier when we hang out with people. We’re happier if we go to a concert and sit beside someone.

When I purchased my house eighteen years ago, I was pretty limited on cash. I rented out my spare room and even my dining room. That was the only way that I could make it work. It was a total struggle. Months after I bought the house, I met my husband and fell head over heel. A few more months later, he moved in while I still had other roommates living with me. A friend of my to-be-husband expressed to him that it was weird that I wasn’t getting rid of my roommates.

When we solidify a relationship or gain more success in life, we kind of move away from living cooperatively to living more privately. I thought about this many years before when I was travelling in Europe on a very tight budget: $20 per day. Because of this budget, I had to stay in accommodations with little private space. But because of this, I ended up having a vibrant experience. Sightseeing was cool, but what I really remember from Europe is the connections that I made. I know people who have travelled to Europe on much higher budgets, and because of this, they didn’t really connect with other travellers.

I’ve really tried to get my friends to move into my neighborhood, and to a certain extent, it’s worked. I had a business life coach once, and I was telling her about my neighborhood. She really wished that she had a similar living situation in her life. I am now friends with her on Facebook, and I noticed recently that she has built her family’s dream home. I see that it’s in a suburban neighborhood where there is little chance to run into each other because there is nowhere to walk to. They have a large garage whereas my family parks on the street, partly because it allows us to say hello to anyone who is around when we go to our car. What I see is that my old business coach has made it financially, and yet, her structure of what “making it” is, is about getting that suburban-type home. I wonder if that’s really what is going to make her and her family happy.

What if we spent more time focusing on what was great about being a student, or great about not having a lot of money? In my adult life, though money is less of an issue, I still really gravitate towards living with other people. My brother-in-law lives in our spare room now. We’ve recreated our extended family even though it’s not a financial piece; it’s about human connection.

If we lived more communally with people, I think there’d be less pressure on the spousal relationship and the other relationships. Just having my brother-in-law around makes our home brighter. Sometimes when we’re too tried to cook or to deal with our daughter, he picks up the slack. Everything is a little easier.

I know that my experience in Europe would not have been nearly as rich if I had waited until I had more money and could afford a private hotel. The fact that I was hanging out with other people made that experience so memorable. We can do this in our own lives, even if we’re older.