Can You Have a Sex Life While Living with Your Parents?
Illustration by Alessandra Olanow for Yahoo Style
More young adults are hanging around the family nest than they have in decades. That’s good for the budget…but not so great for Netflix and chill!
Chelsea Briche had never been more mortified. Two years ago, after moving back in with her parents in Ft. Lauderdale in the wake of a bad breakup, the Millennial Miss blogger— who is now 26 and has her own place in Santa Monica— was returning to her folks’ home one morning, hungover, after a hookup the night before.
“I was scrambling around looking for the key we hide outside, looking like a mess and reeking of alcohol, and my dad answered the door,” she recalls, laughing now. “There was nothing we could say. We just gave each other a look and I went to my room and jumped in the shower and hid out in my room. When you think you’re an adult and you feel like you have to explain why Daddy’s little girl didn’t come home last night…” She trails off, laughing again.
She learned a valuable lesson for twentysomethings still living with mom and/or dad. “Always have a little morning-after kit in your car,” she says. “Toothbrush, toothpaste, a water bottle, gum, makeup remover, sunglasses and deodorant.” Or perhaps, workout clothes, she suggest. “It’s better to come home looking like you hit the gym early than in your little black dress and stilettos.”
Few millennials, of course, want to be in Briche’s shoes, still living with the folks in the very prime of their social and sex lives. But the truth is–because of factors including a tough job market, jobs that don’t pay enough to get one’s own place, more women than ever in college and women getting married later in life–the rate of millennials still shacking up with the parents is higher than its been in decades. According to U.S. Census data analyzed by the Pew Research Center, 36.4 percent of women between 18 and 34 were living with parents or relatives in 2014— topping a record high of 36.2 percent in 1940!
Male millennial rates of parental cohabitation are even higher—42.8 percent. That means some of the very best dating prospects— including those on a tight budget because they’re pursuing higher education— may still be getting their underwear cleaned and folded by mom. Says J. Maureen Henderson, who writes the Generation Meh blog, “Depending on the area of the country you live in and your social circle, refusing to consider those who live at home eliminates a significant chunk of the dating pool.”
True enough. But actually being someone who lives with Mom or Dad, or dating someone who does, can add significant challenges to the time-honored pursuit of Netflix-and-chill. “Where things get tricky,” says Henderson, “is that the nature of the parent-child relationship and social mores around dating while living at home haven’t yet caught up to new realities. Live-at-home twentysomethings, their potential partners and their parents have to make things up as they go along.”
That’s exactly what Dani and her husband, John, both 29, had to do a few years back while they were dating but both still living with their parents in New Jersey. “We both had young siblings at home,” Dani says, “so our parents maintained strict rules. We never slept over each other’s parents’ places.”
That meant, of course, getting creative about where to get intimate: “Some of the most embarrassing places! Cars…or in the house, but not overnight. It wasn’t that different from when we were in high school.” But she says she’d never have thought of asking her parents if she could have John stay over. “Even growing up, we weren’t allowed to have boys in our bedrooms, ever.”
Dani recalls at least a few desperate times when they got intimate at her grandfather’s beach house— while he was home!
Others couldn’t get away with quite as much. Anu, 28, a corporate recruiter in Austin, TX, remembers dating a guy, from a traditional South Asian family like hers, who’d dropped out of college and returned home to his parents. “It was one step above dating someone in India where you have to live with your parents until you get married,” she recalls. “His dad was very conservative and intense and made me sleep in a separate bedroom,” she says. “But once he caught me in my boyfriend’s room and I had to skulk back to my own bedroom. I always had a feeling he would erupt in anger at any moment.”
Add to that the fact that her boyfriend’s mother, whom she otherwise liked, stayed up late playing World of Warcraft and it all made for, in Anu’s words, “a complete buzzkill.” The relationship didn’t last.
Then there’s the insanity of trying to find accommodations other than your parents for those “special moments.” Jessie Rosen, 31, who writes the blog 20-Nothings, remembers what it was like a few years back when she was working in New York City but still living with her parents in Jersey. “I’d meet guys in the city and then awkwardly have to either stay with them if I was trying to make a relationship work or crash on a friend’s couch. It wasn’t cute.”
Ultimately, Rosen decided to focus on her career while living with her parents and save the heavy dating until once she had her own place. And she gave that same advice to a guy she later dated who was still living with his parents in Jersey. “I said to him, ‘Let’s take a pause, Friend, until you’re living in the city.’”
But for others, the whole dating-while-living-with-the-'rents thing isn’t so bad. “I didn’t have a problem with it,” says Amanda Abella, a millennial business coach. “I actually ended up attracting men who have a close relationship with their families like I do and also lived at home, and that was a very good thing. Culture could play a role. My friends and I are mostly Hispanic and in our culture it’s pretty normal to do that. I have friends that, if they had their choice, would move back in with their parents.”
But not all Latinas would agree with her. “I lived with my parents when I first met my husband,” says Kayla Cruz, who does the blog Gen Y Girl. “Coming from a Cuban and Catholic upbringing, it was expected that any guy I would date would come see me at my house where my parents could closely supervise us. That made our sex life impossible, since being in my bedroom with him was off-limits. Date nights at my house consisted of watching movies in the family room with the parentals swinging by every once in a while. I could deal with that in high school, but at 23, I was a little over it.”
So Cruz stood up to her parents and told them she’d be spending nights at her boyfriend’s (own) apartment. He lived almost an hour away and she lived out of a bag but it was worth it. Eventually, Cruz moved in with him and today they’re married.
But all this isn’t to say that living with the folks–at least for a while–doesn’t have its upsides. “My parents are great cooks and my clothes were always clean and folded on my bed,” says Briche. “You’re being babied again, which can cripple you if you’re not careful.”
Her— and others’ advice— for making it work, for as long as you have to? “You have to mentally prepare yourself,” she says. “You’ve been Miss Independent and suddenly you’re lugging your bags into your childhood bedroom.” Advises Rosen: “You have to have some very up-front conversations with your parents about the expectations. It’s their house and they have a right to set boundaries. We were in different places. They were like, What a gift to have me back, and I felt like, College was just torn from me and I can’t get a job. So we were in very different emotional places.”
She lives in L.A. with her husband now. “But I don’t think my relationship with my parents would be as strong as it is now if we hadn’t lived together in my twenties.” In that time, she says, she helped her mother mourn her own mother’s death. “I got to know my parents as adults and not just as my parents.”
But she notes that today’s parentally-housed millennials have some technological perks she didn’t have ten years ago: “You can always Tinder your way into a bedroom for a night!”
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