Welcome to Roommates Week, an exploration of the highs and lows of cohabitation.

While many older adults find themselves blindsided by the realities of aging, Sue Ronnenkamp has long been prepared for life’s autumn. The 66-year-old has had a successful career in aging services and health care, educating and coaching older adults on all aspects of their post-retirement lives. Ronnenkamp even started a business to help adults downsize their belongings as they transition to senior living. She was adroit at lightening her load years before she moved into her suite in Sue Larsen’s house on the outskirts of Denver.

Silvernest, the service Ronnenkamp and Larsen used to find each other, is a website where senior homeowners can list spare rooms in their homes to find like-minded renters, often peers. The basic service is free to use, but homeowners can pay $25 per month (and home-seekers $15) for Silvernest Plus, which includes unlimited messages and the ability for homeowners to initiate conversations, as opposed to only message replies with the free service. The paid option also comes with the choice to request and take background checks, as well as access to a legally binding lease alternative for defining expectations and setting ground rules between housemates.

Larsen, a retired school teacher, has owned her two-level home for almost 40 years. She’s been with her partner Jim for most of that time, but the couple have always kept separate residences. The two were colleagues, so at first they did so to maintain some distance between their shared personal and professional lives. Decades into their relationship, they’re still pleased with the arrangement. “We get to spend the time we want to together when we want, and that works for us,” she says.

In 2019, Larsen started thinking about advertising her spare twin suite on the upper level, which is separated from her bedroom by a long hallway. The main floor has a kitchen, dining area, and living room, and there’s an unfinished basement with a washer/dryer and Larsen’s office. “I had this big, beautiful space,” she says. She didn’t want it to go to waste. Then, she discovered Silvernest, and subsequently Ronnenkamp, who now rents the room for $900 a month.

The women have been at each other’s sides through hip surgery recovery and illness, and because their personalities and politics are aligned, they enjoy the ability to chat and vent. At the same time, Ronnenkamp says they’re each able to retreat to their separate spaces if and when they want to. “And I’m included on all family dinners, so I feel like I’m fully part of the family, their friends,” she adds.

“We do feel like it was sort of destined,” Larsen says.

Ronnenkamp, who has never married, and spent much of her life moving for various jobs, always wanted to live in Colorado. She knew she wanted to home-share in some form so she could move with less stuff into an established place, for more flexibility. The other boon of this arrangement is the built-in pet care: Ronnenkamp takes care of Larsen’s dog when she’s on vacation. She plans to keep living in arrangements like this for the rest of her life.

She’s not the only one.

A 2021 AARP survey found that 69 percent of older adults were open to sharing their home with a relative other than a spouse, 54 percent were willing to live with a friend, and six percent would be okay sharing their home with a stranger. These arrangements are on the rise, especially among women. According to a report by the Center for American Progress, the gender wage gap costs women $1.6 million in potential retirement savings over the course of their careers. Retirement insecurity and rising housing costs are large drivers for older adults to move in together. Besides Silvernest, there are services like Senior Homeshares, which connects homeowners with older adults looking for affordable housing. There are also intergenerational roommate sites like Nesterly, and the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens nonprofit offers a free home-sharing program for older adult hosts and renters in New York City.

“She became my mom even though I’m older than her.”

Though 63-year-old Rose Squire never married (by choice), the Atlanta native recently got engaged to her boyfriend, and the couple hopes to build a house outside the city where they can grow a garden. She’s owned her three-bedroom house for 30 years, and long before she began renting one of her rooms to Annie Williams via Silvernest, her home has been a refuge for family and friends. When some of her loved ones lost their homes during the 2008 recession, she offered hers as a place for them to land while they got back on their feet. When she read about Silvernest online, she thought it would be the perfect tool for safely continuing to share her residence.

The now 67-year-old Williams was renting to own before she moved in with Squire. She was tired of the rigamarole of apartment living with rent increases, hiked up electric bills, and the like, but didn’t want the responsibility of homeownership. She found Squire and her home to be a safe haven. “When I met Rose,” she says, “I don’t know—me and her are just two peas in a pod. She became my mom even though I’m older than her.” Williams pays $600 a month for her upstairs room, which has a private bathroom as well as a refrigerator and hot plate for cooking. On the main floor, there’s a living room, kitchen, and dining area, but Williams, Squire, and another woman who rents the basement-level suite all keep to themselves, so the common areas are usually unoccupied.

Williams is particular about her nutrition; she meal-preps for the week and has a daily routine of drinking four glasses of water and eating a banana with nuts before taking a long walk on a nearby nature trail. The women mostly keep their day-to-day activities separate; Squire and Williams both value their solitude. “We clicked so well together that, you know, I could live with her probably the rest of my life and be happy with that,” Williams says.

For Susan MacKay, a 68-year-old widow who has owned her Denver area home for 25 years and mostly lived alone in the 22 years since her husband died, offsetting costs was the impetus for finding a housemate. A few years ago, she began looking into options for renting out a room in her three-bedroom house to help pay off debt—so far she’s repaid $20,000—but when she welcomed Heidi Zimmer into her upstairs loft for $650 a month, she didn’t expect they’d become such easy companions. Zimmer, who was born deaf, is an avid mountain climber who’s reached three of the Seven Summits and is saving money for her mountaineering adventures by living with MacKay. She aspires to be the first deaf person to reach all seven.

Seniors, especially those who are single, widowed, or have never married, are often treated with pity, but all of these women spoke resoundingly of their freedom, independence, joy, and self-sufficiency. They take pride in looking after each other when contending with illness or injury, rather than being dependent on institutional care. They all made the distinction between having a housemate and sharing a home with a romantic partner, too. “It’s completely different from a marriage, and different from having a [temporary] roommate,” says Larsen, who was previously married for 14 years. “It is truly sharing the house and the house responsibilities.”

To sort out said responsibilities, boundaries, and preferences, Silvernest gives users questionnaires about smoking, work schedules, and other lifestyle markers. But it can still be difficult to establish ground rules for living with another person. All three duos I spoke with appreciated that there’s no expectation or neediness in their dynamic, despite enjoying the company of the other.

In MacKay and Zimmer’s case, their schedules are reversed so that while MacKay has a full-time weekday job leading a prison work crew, Zimmer has the house to herself—as well as the garage, where she practices woodworking—and when Zimmer is teaching American Sign Language on the weekends, MacKay has her alone time. No living arrangement is perfect, however. MacKay and Zimmer find it difficult to share one bathroom. When Williams moved in with Squire, the homeowner built a new bathroom and gave her new housemate the one they would have shared to avoid a similar predicament.

At a time when senior populations are often treated like a problem to be solved, and there’s concern over who will take care of aging baby boomers, who in the U.S. are predicted will outnumber children for the first time by 2035, it’s notable that these women are creating their own communities of care. Larsen and Ronnenkamp think of two different neighbors who recently died in their homes and weren’t found for weeks. They consider those women to be a warning—they’d become isolated and didn’t get the help they needed in the end. The alternative that’s typically offered is assisted living, but choosing peer support is another option.

Zimmer points out that there’s something noteworthy about the intention behind these kinds of arrangements. “Just a regular roommate situation, it’s easily like, oh, okay, I’ll leave, and then you have a revolving door of different roommates,” she says. “I think this provides the opportunity for it to be a little longer-term.”

Top photo by Oliver Rossi / Getty.

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