Friendship at home: everyday in domestic space shaping friendship intimacies in Finnish small-scale communes

Abstract

In this article, I examine intimacy in friendship through spatio-temporalities of everyday in Finnish communal living. Based on 31 semi-structured interviews with residents of Finnish small-scale communes, I argue that the everyday in domestic space reshapes intimacies in friendship by enhancing embodied knowledge of others gathered through continuous, routine co-presence in close spatial proximity. This phenomenon, which I call domestic density, introduces intensified negotiations of affective responsibility and personal boundaries to friendship due to the increase and diversification of intimate knowledge. Although the domestic everyday has long been central in feminist discussions of personal relations, it has yet not been examined in detail how domestic space shapes friendship intimacies when friends share a common home. Domestic space entails generative particularities of its own and needs to be included in the analysis of geographies of friendship. For the research participants, the experience of intimacy in domestic space was ambivalent. Reshaping both embodied and verbal practices, the routine everyday in domestic space created novel closeness but also an experience of emotional distance. Moreover, the interviewees utilized a variety of strategies to negotiate questions of affective responsibility and personal boundaries ranging from managing one’s emotions to definitions they gave to the roommate-friendship relation.