My friend Shawn Linehan, a great photographer who I share an office with, asked me to give her some “group living advice.” She was planning a trip with five high school friends. They were going to rent a house together. “That’s kind of like group living, isn’t it?” she mused.
What advice could I give? Although I’m writing a book on group living, I don’t think of myself as someone with universal advice. Ironically, although my book is called Group Living and Other Recipes, I’ve been very loathe to give precise instructions because human experiences are so diverse. And yet, I did have advice! Advice I’d learned unconsciously by living in a group house and then enacted in my life on other occasions. My mind jumped to exactly one year before, when my dear friend Joanna invited her closest friends to join her in New Orleans to celebrate her 40th birthday. She’d rented a big house with a pool in the backyard in the Central City District, and for four days, a group of 12 of us, give or take, partied together. I had the literal time of my life! TIME OF MY LIFE! And I had rules for myself that I held fast to from the first day. This proved key for me. The rules were pretty simple—about healthy personal boundaries—but they remain vivid for me. And so I found myself telling Shawn about this trip, which was not so different from the one she was planning, and I thought I’d recount the experience here.
Rule 1:
Be specific about which group activities you’ll join. And when you are on the party train, you are on the party train. No complaining on the train or demanding other stops.
When you’re with a group of friends, you don’t have to join all the group activities, so if and when you choose to join, go for it. It’s one night of your life. Chill out and experience the ride! At any station, you can disembark. In fact, you should have a plan for how to leave if you want to or if you feel unsafe or unwell. But as long as you’re game, for whatever length of time you determine—I recommend a handful of hours—put your trust in the captain and take the ride.
Why: When a large group is together, not everyone can be in charge. In fact, it’s disastrous when they try. People often spend so much time bickering about plans that they cut into the time they could be enjoying themselves. What’s more, when people are in-fighting, it changes the mood and can spoil someone else’s fun or your own.
If one person is hogging the role of planner throughout a many-day trip in a way that feels exhausting, that’s a separate matter. Address it. Generally, I like when someone with a vision takes the reins and then, when the time is right, gives them up and someone else steps in. With a larger group, it can be nice to divvy up planning responsibilities. And if someone made the decision about, say, where to eat one afternoon, go for it! Not every meal has to be delicious. Not every club has to be hopping. Don’t bicker, complain, or otherwise derail their plans (unless they ask for feedback.) It will give you freedom to notice things and enjoy other people’s company.
Example: Joanna had decided that Saturday, one day before her official birthday, would be the party day. I was excited to join and experience her New Orleans, since she’d lived there during college, afterwards through Katrina, and loved the city.
Our time together started in the afternoon. She’d heard about a second line for extraordinary tuba player Bennie Pete.
It was the most ecstatic celebration of a life and death I’d ever experienced. From the start everyone was friendly, offering puffs of their joint, asking who we were. A truck pulled up and set up a whole bar on a folding table, plug-in slushy machines and all. One man and one woman took drink orders. The women took the orders but never made a drink. She was like a trickster bartender. I liked how surreal that was. So after you placed your nonexistent order with her, you placed another one with him. Everyone in line told me to drink Courvoisier and orange juice, and so I did. Then we marched and danced through the street while people played music, and I felt like we were rousing the dead from their sleep, letting everyone who knew Bennie Pete feel their love rattling in their bones, and reminding ourselves that memorials don’t have to be so depressing and staid—that each life is insane and special and irreplaceable, and that’s a solid reason to party.
Later, we went back to the house, changed clothes, and Joanna took us to Antoine’s Restaurant, birthplace of Oysters Rockefeller (which my parents both love, and make every year on a holiday they invented called Oyster Day, renaming it Oysters Reed for John Reed, a communist born in Portland). And after that, the night was fuzzier. The club she’d wanted to go to was closed, so someone suggested a gay club on Bourbon Street, and she was game. One of Joanna’s friends was incensed. Bourbon Street? On a Saturday night? What are we, some naive tourists? She was whining to me as we made our way through the warm night, and I stopped her in her tracks: “We are on this train. You can get off now, but if you stay on the train, no use complaining.”
And then we got there, and it was perfect. A gay strip club with a quiet upstairs where you could drink and lean along the balcony watching the havoc below; a thumping dance floor where they played all the hits, mostly hip hop but some contemporary pop and some old disco and just a lot of loud dance beats that made the whole room jiggle and throb in sync. There were male strippers standing on the bar in the next room who all seemed exceedingly bubbly.
I didn’t leave the dance floor, and spent much of the night dancing ecstatically on the edge of the crowd near a garbage can, which sounds sad except I was so happy (this was during the second year of COVID, during a moment before Delta, when showing your vaccine card seemed like armor to me). At 3 am, when those of us who remained at the club decided it was time to head home, walking west along Bourbon Street for a mile to unwind, not towards where we were staying exactly, but just away from where we’d been, I realized that Joanna had given us this gift, which we had to cash in ourselves: a chance to feel free. Free of decision making. Free of worries. Free of our routines. The only way to experience it was a kind of submission, but it wasn’t passive because you actively chose to go along, live it up, see where the fun was lying. I’d never have created this day for myself, and that’s one of the gifts of friendship: showing each other new worlds.
Rule 2:
Take a lot of time to yourself. Do not let the group pressure you into doing everything together.
Every day, make space and time for your own thoughts and the things that make you feel good. Give others that same courtesy. Don’t feel guilty, let others guilt trip you, or pile up guilt on anyone else for choosing time alone.
Why: The only way to have enough energy to really show up for group activities is to have time to yourself. It creates a contrast that can be refreshing. For me, being alone can create a very small well of longing for company, which like hunger makes the satiation all the more satisfying. And most of all, time to myself keeps me sane!
Example: Every morning in New Orleans, I would wake up and walk to the backyard, where everyone would be sitting around drinking coffee. People would be making plans and recruiting others to join them, and I’d always drink some coffee and wave them off. “Lola, come have a burger with us,” someone might say, and I’d nod and thank them and go my own way. I knew that I wanted to spend the days by myself, walking and looking at things, seeing the city without destinations or agendas. In the past, in other cities, when people invited themselves to join me, they’d get annoyed at how long I like to walk. They couldn’t understand the pleasure I take in wandering. I’ve discovered that I prefer to do this alone or with one friend, if they like the same kind of way of seeing a city.
In New Orleans, I either walked alone or with my friend Peter. While I walked, I didn’t intentionally see any sights exactly, although I fell in love with the live oak trees, came upon many statues in the botanical gardens by Enrique Alfrérez (with these very muscular, masculine women) that I found astonishing, marveled at the scale of some lily pads, stole some limes from trees, went into a grocery store where they had a display of uncured Oscar Meyer wieners 12 feet long!, ate a Po’Boy from Verti Marte, saw real estate signs for houses that advertised that they were haunted, and felt the cool air after the rains. At night, I’d join the group and do whatever we were doing, and after we came home, each night, I would skinny dip in the pool, sometimes with my friends, sometimes alone. There was something about washing after all that newness that felt like coming home to myself.
Rule 3:
Break into small groups. Not everyone has to do everything together.
Small groups create different kinds of opportunities. Don’t feel annoyed if groups break off without you or try to make others feel bad if they didn’t join you. It’s natural to come together, break apart, and come together again.
Why: I find intimacy with others is easiest to build in small groups of two to three.
Example: The day I arrived, a Friday, happened to be my friend Amrita’s last night in New Orleans after a season there. It was my one chance to see her, so I told the party crew I wouldn’t join them for dinner. Amrita and her closest person took me to the nearest bayou, which turned out to be an aqueduct with grassy slopes. They’d bought strawberry daiquiri in a plastic bag from a convenience store and brought their own cups. After we sat on the grass and drank our hypnotic pink slushies, we went to eat Thai food with a Southern influence at an insane place called Marjie’s Grill, so that when I saw my larger group of friends, I felt filled with sweetness and pork knuckles and buzz.
Joanna and friends were at a bar where one of our group was performing, and after their show, everyone headed to get late night food, but two friends who are a couple and I weren’t hungry so we split off. They wanted to go to a gay bar (a different one than where we would party the next day). Inside, it was too brightly lit with posters of muscular men in idiotic dress up like police and firemen, but we discovered by chance that if you walked through the bar towards the back, there was a hidden staircase with its own bouncer. We asked him if we could go up the stairs, and he nodded solemnly. In this secret bar above, it was dimly lit, hard to see, with a few red lights making the room glow like we were near heaters. The room looked almost empty. In front of us, I could make out a large swing being held aloft by a kind of metal contraption. The bartender was wearing only underwear. The music was so quiet it make me want to whisper or not speak at all. Slowly, my eyes adjusted, and I could see that there were actually a dozen or more men in the back of the bar, along the far wall. One man was on his knees giving another a blow job. I couldn’t tell what else was happening back there, but I suddenly felt very self-conscious that I was a woman in the space. This was a safe space for gay men. I whispered to Gary (we were already drunk), “should I be here?” and he told me with strange confidence to pretend “you’re my little boy.” Manu bought us drinks, and whenever Manu approached the bar, someone would appear from the darkest part of the room and talk to him for ten or fifteen minutes. When he returned, he’d simply tell me, “I was conversing with my elders.”
I kept my back to the dark area where the men gathered so as not to make them feel my eyes. At some point, I leaned back in giggles about something Gary had said and hit the constriction cage I’d unknowingly been leaning against, which slowly wheeled open, the door hinges creaking thunderously. Eventually, we decided to leave, and outside in the night, Gary, Manu, and I described what we’d each experienced. We were all in a trance. We named the secret bar the Sex Attic. It was like nothing I’d ever witnessed before. I will never forget what it felt like to lean into that constriction cage and hear the creaky door wheel open. I’m making it sound scary but actually it was wonderful, a place fighting to be free from the Puritanism that courses through my blood even though I want to expel it, a place where new rules are being formed, new ideas of sexiness and intimacy and anonymity and belonging. Throughout, I felt self-conscious about being an intruder and voyeur, but reminded myself that there is more than one way to be in other people’s spaces—that I could try to soak up something without taking anything away.
Other people in our group had an amazing time that night, too. Not everyone wanted to end up in the sex attic. If we’d been a larger group, if there had been more women there, it would have felt different, still. Maybe the bouncer wouldn’t have let us go upstairs. Overall, some people had a harder time on this trip than I did—they did fight, get frustrated at each other, treat each other in ways they later regretted. It wasn’t all easy because group dynamics never are. But I found it easier to navigate in part because I followed these rules and maybe because I was totally under the spell of the city!
These stories aren’t perfect illustrations of these basic rules about boundaries, but they exist alongside them for me as I think about the trips I want to take, people I want to spend time with, and secret places only other people can show me.
How does this relate to the larger experience of group living? I think it gets at something Adrian Shirk was expressing in our conversation, and also that I’ve found very true from my experience of my home: one of the keys to collectivity is striking the balance between togetherness and aloneness. You need both. You need to prioritize and make space for both. One creates the pleasure of the other. Another related key, on a similar teeter-totter, is the balance between power and surrender. It’s not easy to know when to wield one or the other, and you have to remain open to both.
I buy into the idea that sometimes there are leaders—say the person cooking dinner or orchestrating a party—and you go along with their vision. You don’t demand consensus. You’ll have a chance to take charge in the future because our intimate relationships shouldn’t be dictatorships. In this case, Joanna’s birthday was brief. It was incredible to let her make most of the group decisions. And my balance was spending my days alone or in the company of only a few others. I look back on this trip with such intense fondness and gratitude. And here we are, one year later, which means it’s time to say happy birthday to Joanna! Happy birthday, Jo!
This is great! I'll send to my friends! Plus I love hearing about the New Orleans stories again. I love that city.
I loved the ways you brought me with you on the trip. Helpful guide, too.