JAM: "I have two husbands. And a boyfriend."

This post was first published in Cosmopolitan Australia magazine.

“I’m going home to my husbands,” I call out to the team at Mamamia, as I frantically dash out the office door. “It’s family dinner night.”

Now before you jump to any Big Love style conclusions, let me promise you – I’m no polygamist. Nor am I living in some sort of free-loving hippy commune of shared partners. In fact, I’m not even married.

My husbands are my housemates. Two wonderfully caring, funny and clever blokes who I’ve lived with for a couple of years now.

Calling them my husbands shouldn’t imply any sort of romantic relationship between either of them and me. I say “husbands” because housemates just doesn’t cut it. The term doesn’t convey the requisite closeness, familiarity and, dare I say it, love that I have for them and (I think!) they have for me.

We’re not just people who share living quarters and we’re not just mates. We’re family. They’re the people I go home to at night and cook dinner with. They’re the people I call if my car breaks down or I need a lift home from the airport. They’re the ones I unload to about a bad day at work, or a fight with my sister or yet another gendered miscommunication with my boyfriend.

They’re my confidantes and my carers. Just like I am for them.

They’re my Generation Y  family.

So many of my friends are spending the years between, roughly, 21 and 28 living with their Generation Y family. When those share houses eventually come to an end, it’s not just a matter of ‘thanks for letting me use your cheese grater for half a decade, catchya later,’ it’s heralded as the end of an era. It’s as significant as leaving home for the first time.

Gone are the days when a girl moved from the family home directly into her marital one. And as the gap in between those points in time continues to widen, we’re not leaving the loving family gap empty – we’re finding people to fill it with.

But why? Well, the answer is a simple one – it’s nice to be looked after.

I don’t say that in a ‘girls need to be protected and defended’ kind of way. We can look after ourselves thanks very much. But it is nice to be looked after, whether you’re male or female.

To have people around you who will go out of their way to help you, who will disrupt their day to come to your aid and who always have your back.

While I’m still close to my mum and dad, and my boyfriend is an amazing support – they don’t live in the same house as me anymore, actually they don’t live in the same city. And while you’re searching for the right person to spend the rest of your life with but you’ve grown out of being mum and dad’s ‘little girl’ – you need people who’ll be there for you in that in-between stage.

And that family – that generation Y family as I like to call them – are just as special as the family we were born into and the one we intend to create for ourselves.

Do you have experience with living with housemates?