Ruth Institute Blog

Home should be a place of personal intimacy, but more and more it is not.

Deep in the human heart is the desire to be together with people that we love. Human happiness is always a shared happiness: shared especially with a small number of people. For most of us a fulfilled life will only be found in walking its hills and valleys in communion with family, and a few friends.

We don’t need the latest study to show us that we are losing the ability to live in communion, even with those closest to us. And not only does this problem start in our homes, it grows there. Home—the very word should resonate with feelings of warmth, belonging, togetherness. It should be the most reliable place of real personal intimacy, the surest antidote to the great bane of human existence: loneliness. But more and more, it is not.

Perhaps the central reason that we are not really living-together in our homes is that we are hardly living there at all. For starters, most of us spend very few hours of the day within, or near, our homes. But even more to the point, how do we spend those hours that we are at home?

Writing about the shared life of true friends, Aristotle says, “This will be realized in their…sharing in discussion and thought; for this is what living together would seem to mean in the case of man, and not as in the case of cattle, feeding in the same place.” I don’t think Aristotle intended a critique of Greek dining practices, but I wonder whether “feeding in the same place” would describe meal times in many of our contemporary homes. Of course meals in the home can and should be a primary context for “sharing in discussion and thought.” Such mealtime conversation is surely what Aristotle has in mind in quoting the proverb about eating salt together. One version of the proverb has it as eating a peck of salt together.

Some quick math shows that, barring an alarmingly saline diet, eating a peck of salt together will require several thousand meals. So the proverb seems to imply that deep human relationships grow only from consistent quality conversation, like what should be found at household meals.

If Aristotle is correct that the truest human intimacy takes place in good conversation, then here we have a prism through which to consider our customs of home life, beginning with meal times. Though cows usually feed in the vicinity of other cows, they are not particular about eating together. Household meals, on the other hand, can be configured to be regular occasions for communion between family members. But given the various pressures on home life today, such a configuration will need to be a conscious object of intention. Otherwise our meal practices might tend toward the bovine.

Outside of meal times there are two other main household contexts that can be suited to rational and personal communion: work and leisure. But both of these have been largely removed to venues outside the home, while what is left behind has taken forms less conducive to communion.

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