It was supposed to be just a temporary thing. Christina posed it this way: If you get this new job, you’re gonna have to move back to San Francisco in a hurry and it’s obviously a shit show finding housing here, so if you want, you and Duster (the cat) can come live with me for a bit—six months?—while you figure out your next move.

Chad wasn’t the first person she had invited to live with her in her two-bedroom in the Lower Haight. In the last decade, the Victorian flat, with its high ceilings and its black and white checkerboard kitchen floors, had seen lots of different roommates, including a girlfriend. Christina, or Chris, could afford it on her own—it was that glorious thing: rent-controlled—but it never sat right with her not to offer up a room, or sometimes a couch, if she had one available in such an expensive city.

Chad ended up getting the job. And the apartment became theirs.

“He kept checking in with me every six months, and I was like, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine,” Chris told me, nearly twelve years after Chad first moved in. “And finally, I was like, obviously you live here, quit asking. I’m not gonna kick you out.”

“Like the one-night-stand who just never went away,” Chad said. “The six-month stand.”

Chris laughed. “The platonic six-month-stand that never went away.”

I heard about Chris and Chad through my friend Kayla. (Chad was writer friends with Kayla’s mom and likes to call himself her gay uncle.) Last winter, Kayla and her brother were visitors to the Hotel 221, as Chris and Chad call their apartment, because they love hosting and do it often.

They had met at work in the early 2010s and, now in their 50s, were engaged in a committed, longterm partnership built around their shared home. Kayla knew I’d be into it. (A kind of love, that—when someone knows to share a detail you’ll be excited about.) Because something I’m trying to do with this newsletter, and all of my writing, is explore the whole range of relationships, of partnerships. You know, death to the primacy.

(It’s not that I’m anti-romantic love…it’s just that it gets so much shine, narratively, culturally, and otherwise, and I’m interested in all of it, especially the relationships that exist outside of the scripts that feel second nature. But yeah, fuck, a good love story will absolutely get me, if a hair begrudgingly. Anyone read Elaine Castillo’s latest??)

So of course I wanted to talk to Chris and Chad. We spoke over Zoom earlier this month. They from their living room couch, in front of the bay windows, across from their newly installed floor to ceiling bookshelves. Me from the outskirts of Valencia, Spain, where I was visiting my brother’s family, all the kids finally fast asleep.

Our conversation was periodically interrupted by two dark gray kittens, new members of the family, attempting to get into Chris’s coffee, scaling Chris’s chest to curl around her neck. (Duster has passed, though his memory lives on in a shrine in the living room.)

To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest it’s completely unique that two friends would choose to live together longterm (my trad journalism brain always asking, is it MAN BITES DOG?). Nearly 10 million people in the U.S. told the 2024 Census they lived with one or more people who weren’t romantic partners or relatives. It’s definitely more common in queer circles, and in places where it’s hard to find affordable housing.

As Chris put it: “This is one of the places in the United States, where people don't think it's weird that you have a roommate, when you're full-grown, making a livable wage amount of money.”

There’s a growing canon of books that feature friends living together: Rhaina Cohen’s deeply reported nonfiction book The Other Significant Others, Lola Milholland’s essay collection Group Living and Other Recipes, Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo’s Two Women Living Together, the bestselling Korean memoir that just got released in English.

And yet I still want to hear so many more stories from people who have chosen this way of living.

Chad remembers reading Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World in his twenties, a novel about three friends, two of whom are in a romantic relationship, and the home they build together.

“I just thought, wow. That’s what I want, you know?"

(And then Chris: “Now I feel bad because you gave me that book before we even lived together, and I still haven't read it.”)

Below, edited excerpts from our conversation, where we discuss:

• the politics of friends living together

• how dating has affected their relationship

• disappointing one’s parents, as one does

‘Roommates? That’s not adequate at all’

Do you think of each other as partners of a sort?

Chris: This last census, which was what, two years ago? Three years ago? We were filling out the census, and it's all this stuff like, how many people live at your address? And how many of them were children? And what's the relationship? “Roommates” was one of the options, and we were like, that's not adequate at all. [laughs] So we listed each other as life partners, which felt a little bit to me like an act of political resistance in its own way, but I also feel like it's absolutely true.

The person I rented this apartment with, way back, 22 years ago, was a close friend and a gay guy, and he is from Mexico, and he was here at the time on a work visa, and the company was not doing what they needed to be doing to get him his green card. They were just dragging their heels. And he was very, very unhappy in his job as well. And I was like, I could marry you. You know, not to say that I have this kind of relationship all the time, but we were, we are very close as well. And he was like, you would do that? And I said, I think I would.

And I said to him, and he remembers this better than I do, because he's told the story since. I said, we have a closer relationship than a lot of traditionally married people, right? Like we live together, we care about each other, we take care of each other. We don't have sex. And that sounds like a lot of marriages to me.

I think I've always been in some way modeling that this is a legitimate choice—to not get married to a man and have children and buy a house and have two cars and whatever.

I said, who's to say what constitutes a relationship that is valid in that way, you know? And I feel that way much, much more so with you. Yeah, it is platonic, but I feel like it's very much a partnership, and I'd be very sad if he moved out.

Chad: Yeah, I feel the same way. I do consider Chris a life partner. And I am queer and I would love to have a male romantic partner too that would be a life partner. But to me, those two things are mutually exclusive, and I definitely don't have any plans to move out anytime soon, and if that day ever came, I would want to incorporate that in a way that—

Chris: You’re allowed to fall in love and move out if you want to.

Chad: [laughs] But I definitely consider Chris a life partner.

Do you ever feel like people don’t recognize your relationship as a partnership and wish that they would?

Chris: I feel less that way now. When I say my family doesn't get it, a lot of my family has passed away too, but my father and my brother are still around, and we're very close.

My brother never gave a shit, one way or the other, but my dad spent many years, I think, being quietly disappointed that I wasn't getting married and having kids and I wasn't showing any interest in doing either of those things, which I had never, ever really felt—I never wanted to have kids. I probably would have been a good mom, but that's not something I ever wanted to do.

I wanted to move to a big city and have my own apartment and get a job that I don’t hate. That was, from a very young age, this Mary Tyler Moore thing in my head, and, you know, I'm 52 now. My dad is no longer holding out hope that I'm going to get married and have children, right? Like he's realized that that won't happen. And he loves Chad.

Who's to say what constitutes a relationship that is valid?

Chad: Our friends and chosen family, I think absolutely see [us as partners]. It's an interesting point, though, because we never had a wedding, or a big event—

Chris: A registry.

Chad: —where we got recognized, you know, sanctioned, and, yeah, maybe we should do that for the kittens.

‘Gotta get a rich boyfriend’

Chad: I haven't been in a romantic relationship for a while, but I am thinking more about that. I do feel that that's kind of a part of my life that's missing and I'd like to explore. But now that I'm older, I have much more defined qualities that I would be looking for in a romantic partner, whereas in the past, I wasn't quite as discriminating. [laughs]

I see Chris is making a face.

Chris: Yeah, sorry, I’m not commenting.

Chad: Yeah, I think I phrased that quite well. But like I said, for me, it doesn't mean I'd be spending less time with Chris or other friends. It would be nice to have that as an integration into my life.

Have romantic relationships ever gotten in the way of your relationship or living together?

Chris: I never really wanted to be in a romantic relationship. I have been, but it's never been at all a priority. I really love being single. So I think I mean for all that I've said, if you got into a serious relationship with someone, I would not be threatened by that.

Chad: Good, yeah. Nor should you.

Chris: If you ended up reaching a point where you were like, I think we want to live together, which I think would mean you moving out, I probably wouldn't move out. Or maybe someone would move in. This might be small for three people, but that would be fine. It would change our relationship, but it wouldn’t upend it in any way.

We live together, we care about each other, we take care of each other. We don't have sex. And that sounds like a lot of marriages to me.

Chad: I read that when Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter were married, or if not, they were in a very long partnership, that they had houses next to each other. I just thought, that's so cool. I love that because then you have your own space, but also a communal space. And I always thought that would, I mean, who knows what will happen? But when I have a boyfriend and we decide to live together—getting a house next door, it's not quite as easy to say and do that in the Bay Area, where things are so expensive.

Chris: Gotta get a rich boyfriend.

Chad: Yeah, exactly. Working on it.

‘If Chris hears Lana Del Rey one more time from my room…’

How do you deal with conflict?

Chad: She beats me, berates me verbally in front of all of our friends.

Chris: It’s true. We don't really have a lot of conflict, but we just talk about it. It's very benign. Feel free to disagree.

Chad: At this point, several of our friends have commented that we basically act like a couple that's been married forever. We bicker. “Bicker”—I haven't heard that word since my parents said it.

In the almost 12 years we've lived together, I don't think we've ever really had a serious fight. Maybe we should try. We should try to do that in front of, like, Susan and Todd.

I think a lot of that is, again, we've chosen this life and this partnership, and we both recognize how unique it is, and we just try to work things out.

I would say, really, if there are any disagreements or what I would describe as petty grievances, like, I'm sure if Chris hears Lana Del Rey one more time from my room, she's gonna bludgeon me with a hammer.

Chris: Such violent metaphors.

‘An inherent resistance’

Is there a politic behind your living situation?

Chad: I would say, not a conscious politic, but it is queer, you know? In the traditional sense of the word. I imagine for probably many people in this country, they wouldn't understand. I don't really think about that too much, nor do I care, but I think the type of living situation we've created is probably threatening to some people in ways I wouldn't understand. And so I think there is an inherent resistance and politics there.

Chris: We didn't move in together to make some sort of political statement. … I think I've always been in some way modeling that this is a legitimate choice—to not get married to a man and have children and buy a house and have two cars and whatever. Nothing’s wrong with that. But there's nothing wrong with this either.

That’s it from me this week. Thank you to Chris and Chad, and Kayla and her mom, Katherine, for helping make this happen.

As always, I love hearing what you think and if you have any ideas for who to feature. And if the piece made you think of someone, you should absolutely forward it to them.

Til Sunday again,

Juliana