Week 5 Tute: Home and share houses

Week 5, the unwritten rulebook that runs a shared home, and who enforces it

22 March 2027

Every shared household runs on rules nobody voted on: who does the dishes, whose food is communal, how loud is too loud after 11pm. They’re rarely written down because writing them down would mean admitting they’re negotiable, and most households would rather not have that conversation. Enforcement, when it happens, rarely looks like a direct request; it’s a pointed sigh over a sink full of dishes, or someone loudly re-washing a pan that was already “clean.” That’s a remedial interchange running at low volume: a breach, a signal that it was noticed, and an implicit invitation to fix it without either party having to name what happened.

Before the session#

Identify one unwritten rule in your own living situation. Watch what happens the next time someone breaks it: who says something, what they say, and what changes afterward (if anything).

In the session#

We build a taxonomy of household rules (chores, noise, food, guests, shared costs) and talk about which ones survive a change in the household’s membership and which ones quietly die.

Afterwards#

Keep this rule in mind for Week 11, when the course looks at how these same rules shift as a household’s relationships change or age.