We don’t think about it often, but the idea of family is in constant evolution.

Despite new definitions of family proliferating and becoming dominant models, we continue to live in a built environment that was largely designed for a single specific model: the traditional mononuclear family.

In this edition of Unfold, we explore how new definitions of family could drive us to reinvent our conception of home and our relationships to ownership and inheritance.

Today, single people represent 28% of all US households, which makes this group more common than any other domestic unit, including the nuclear family.¹ Since the 1950’s, the mononuclear family model has been engraved in our minds: a married couple living with two and a half kids in a standardized home that the husband buys and the wife maintains. Yet today, we are witnessing the end of this traditional model. For example in Paris, the proportion of children living in single-parent homes is 28%.² In Munich, mononuclear families fell below 14% in 2015; and more and more major cities are falling below that rate each year.³

With ever-changing social and demographic conditions comes new forms of relationships. Divorce rates are hitting all-time highs: almost 50% on average across Europe and 89% in Luxembourg.⁴ In the US, more than 40% of new mothers are unmarried.⁵ Back in the 1950s, only 27% of marriages ended in divorce; now we have a 50% divorce rate for first marriages and 65% the second time around.⁶ In France, the proportion of women married at 25 dropped from 78% to 10% in the last half century. For men, that rate fell from 63% to 5%.⁷ For relationship specialist and psychotherapist Esther Perel, “Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?”⁸

In place of the traditional models, we are seeing an explosion of new kinds of relationships and experimental bonds. We are shifting from a pre-packaged, static definition of relationships into dynamic territories of co-created new models of relationships. Standard monogamous frameworks are still in play, but for example in the US, over 20% of people have attempted some form of non-monogamy at some point in their lives.⁹ New bonds like step-parenting, blended families, long-distance, polyamory, open relationships, etc... are being pioneered. “Our partner's sexuality does not belong to us. It isn't just for and about us, and we should not assume that it rightfully falls within our jurisdiction,” Perel notes. This even goes beyond traditional understandings of heterosexual and homosexual couples to explore a multiplicity of gender and relationship dynamisms. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman synthesized it all: “We are opening an era of Liquid Love.”¹⁰

Most of our history, we have structured into groups as Extended Families. As sociologist David Brooks describes, “There were uncles, nieces, nephews around. If a relationship failed or if someone died, there was plenty of other people to pick up the slack. During the Victorian era, the numbers of members was higher than ever before and ever since. The world that people knew was falling apart and they felt economically threatened.”¹¹ In the industrial era, people left their big family farms for cities. Entire households could be supported by the lone income of a father in a factory, creating perfect conditions for nuclear families to thrive. This model is still clear in our minds today, yet these conditions have fundamentally changed.

So what is the family today? We are seeing the emergence of the Chosen Family. These kinds of non-blood-related bonds first appeared in gay communities in San Fransisco in the eighties.¹² Individuals who were cast out by their biological parents came together and chose to function as a unified family. This ‘chosen’ quality quickly expanding beyond the gay community as well; economic conditions are increasingly threatening to more and more people. It appears we are trying to reinvent a modern version of the extended family, only more dynamic and increasingly networked: One’s ‘family' is no longer exclusive to bloodlines. The way a family is formed is more by individual choices, economic constraints, and life accidents than affiliation or genealogy. As Brooks points, “tragedy and suffering have pushed people together in a way that goes deeper than just a convenient living arrangement. They become Fictive Kin.”¹¹

The traditional family has been the place of transmission of beliefs, culture, knowledge, but also social status, money and privileges. Inherent to our traditional understanding of home is that fact that it is a place transmitted by our parents. What if we realized that the underlying principles and mechanisms of cohabitation and shared spaces could also be applied to our understanding of inheritance? There is a lot of inertia in this inherited transmission of economic power, and it is fueling systemic inequality, as children of wealthy parents can build on that inheritance and children of poorer parents are often in greater debt to begin with. Western society is very proud to have replaced kings and monarchies with democracy – to place political power and choice in the hands of the collective, rather than it being privileged and exclusive to bloodlines. Yet, we still enable economic power and wealth to pass and consolidate through descendant’s inheritance.

The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.¹¹

— David Brooks
Sociologist, Author