On Personal Space

If there is one thing I took away from my experience of living abroad it is that the notion of personal space is a peculiarly modern (and post-modern) notion, and that Americans in particular have an overdeveloped sense of it. While I don’t want to parse out all the reasons why Americans have such a need for personal space, I do think that it is somewhat unhealthy, at least on a spiritual level, because it allows us to live in unconnected bubbles of our own making, even within our families.

One only need board a subway in Moscow, or a minibus in Central Asia to discover that personal space as we Americans think of it simply does not exist. People are crammed in cheek by jowl, and no one is much bothered by the closeness of strangers in public places. There is always room for one more person. (By way of example, I once spent a 45 minute bus ride with a man’s hand pressed intimately against my rear end not because he was getting fresh but because he had no where else to go with it on the crowded bus). I’ve not been to China or Japan, but have seen enough photos and read enough articles to know that the sense of personal space is even less an issue there. Scientists who study these things have found that Americans require an arm length in all directions around them in order to feel comfortable. I find that most of the rest of the world requires much less. The lack of personal space in the public arena also translates to less personal space for the private home as well. Children are placed all in one room together, or sometimes the whole family shares a common living space. The life of the family revolves around the kitchen, where much is discussed and the inner life is nurtured.

The average size of a family home in much of the rest of the world is much smaller than the average American home (currently 2400 square feet in most of the country, up from just under 1000 in 1950). This is to say that some homes in America are much smaller, and some are much bigger. Naturally, homes built in the earliest part of the 20^th century, or before tend to be smaller in size. Many homes on the East Coast date to the Revolution or the decades shortly after. Philadelphia is stocked with row homes, many of which are around 1000 square feet, and believe me, you pay for the privilege of owning one of the nicer ones. I won’t even begin to address the many space challenges of the rabbit hutches that many New Yorkers inhabit. While we would love to live in New York City some day, I can address only the space challenges I’ve faced thus far. When my husband was in seminary, we lived in a 500 square foot detached home with exactly one closet, and had to get creative with our stuff. (Being a dual academic family had necessitated a lot of books over the years). Yet, we were happy in that little house. It was cozy, and intelligently laid out. We lived with much less "stuff" and it was mentally liberating. We even managed to hold a few social gatherings in that house, cramming 15-20 people into our front room and kitchen for fellowship and games. No one seemed to mind, as the housing situation was the same for all seminarians—small, cramped, and in ill-repair.

After seminary, we moved to Philadelphia and bought a row home that needed a lot of TLC. Our house is 1656 square feet, with three floors, and an unfinished basement that is pretty tolerable by most Philly row home standards. We skim coated the walls and floor of the basement with cement to clean it up a bit. Our washer and dryer live down there, as does food pantry overflow, suitcases, children’s clothing that isn’t currently in use, Christmas decorations (currently in two bins), canning equipment, leftover lumber from the big renovation we did on the house when we bought it, plus all the things one keeps around for home repairs and the like. Our basement is approximately 400 square feet plus a 100 square foot crawl space that is unusable, so we use it to store the left over lumber. There are technically five bedrooms, but one room is a pass through room unsuitable for long term bedroom use and neither of the two full size closets in the house are in rooms currently used as bedrooms.

When we first decided how we wanted to allocate space in our new home, we chose to put our bedroom on the third floor in the front room, and the baby in the back room, making it into a nursery. There is a pass-through door between the master bedroom and nursery, so sometimes it feels like one oddly shaped room. Thus, for the first few years in the house, the third floor was reserved primarily for sleeping and the rest of the house for other things.

The second floor has three rooms that all connect to one another. The front room we made into a guest room (it is one of the rooms with a full size closet). The guest room is directly below the master, and there is no ceiling insulation between the two rooms, so we are learning to navigate the murky privacy arena. The back room was originally my office plus an extra playspace for the baby. The middle room we gave over to our family icon corner, plus my husband’s desk, so he would have a place to work at home as necessary. The middle room, which is entirely a pass-through room, being open to the back room entirely, and cut off from the front room by only a glass-panel door, is the other room with a full size closet. In short, my husband and I swelled our personal spaces to include nearly all the house. I had my office, the kitchen, and sometimes the living room as space to call my own. My husband had his office, the living room and the sometimes mancave of the basement to call his own, in addition to the spacious office he occupies while at work. We could put our arms out and turn around in a circle and never hit anything else. I am a person who craves lots of alone time and I loved having a whole room to myself in which to retreat and work.

There is a monastery that we love in northern California. Whenever we go there, I’m struck by how the monks live in small spaces, without modern conveniences, and yet are content. There are always people around, and the spaces are small, but it never feels cramped. The community functions around you, and there is always some quiet corner to go and recharge, but there is also much loving fellowship, communal work, and daily worship. There is much emulate there, and I want to somehow recreate that in my own home. While I know we fall very short in this regard, I hope that by re-envisioning the use of space in our home, we may begin to create our own family community that is unbothered by lack of personal space. I hope to further outgrow my own need for personal space. I miss the closeness of living in a culture without it, but have struggled to know how to recreate it here.

As our children have grown in number and size, we have had to compress the amount of space we each use. My original dream of having each space have a clearly defined purpose is gone, and I no longer think it necessary. That is a good thing, I think. The living room is now the primary play area for my sons, and the guest room also doubles as an office for my husband and me now. I do most of my creative work in a small corner of the room. I’ve given up the idea of having a whole room to myself, and have started to think that perhaps I shouldn’t have it in any case. Perhaps part of my journey of salvation is learning to live in community with people without needing to “recharge.”