You Don't Need A Third Space

What you really need is affordable housing

Photo by Valiant Made on Unsplash

I don’t know where all this sudden talk of third spaces came from, but I think the idea is that you should pay for a place to socialize because nobody makes a profit if you just hang out with your friends at home.

Plus, lots of people can no longer afford to buy houses and end up living in tiny spaces that feel too small to host gatherings. But unless you live in a literal tiny house or van, you surely have room for a few people to join you.

The idea is that your home is your first space and your work is your second space. The third space is everywhere else you might meet people and, supposedly, build community. That’s fine, but I think we need to bring back the old idea of having people over. That means being able to afford a home and truly living in it.

I have one space — I live, work and socialize in my house.

Last week a friend of mine mentioned how expensive it’s become to go out for even a simple meal with friends, and we agreed to have each other over to our homes more often.

I’m lucky to live where I do

I live where you can still buy a decent house for under $100,000. My house payment is much less than many people pay in rent, which is the only reason I can afford to write full-time.

It’s an old house — a fixer-upper we’ll likely never finish fixing up — but it has plenty of room for socializing. I actually use my formal dining room. We also have a great backyard, which we’ve customized with a covered deck, a treehouse, a goldfish pond, a pergola and a patio. (We built it all with free scrap wood). Why would I ever want to go anywhere else?

Yes, I made soup on the patio for friends! (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

I don’t. I prefer for people to come here. I might open a bottle of wine by the pond or make soup on the patio. I might serve snacks in the treehouse. There’s no telling what I might do. But whatever I do, it will be an inexpensive do-it-yourself evening.

This is what people did routinely back in the day. My mother’s family had bluegrass jams in their dining room. My father’s family used to bring out the card tables and play pinochle.

We have informal get-togethers on our deck all the time in summer. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

As a young mom, I didn’t suffer from the isolation some women talk about, because a group of us got together at each other’s houses once a week. Sometimes we did meet somewhere like a park, but usually we packed up some food to share and got together at one of our homes. Our babies nursed, our toddlers played and we talked about everything under the sun.

It’s become fashionable to dread the very idea of doing things. People joke about how relieved they feel when someone cancels plans at the last moment. Some of those same people talk about their loneliness. Dare I suggest there’s a connection there?

Nobody seems to throw parties anymore, someone mentioned on social media last week. I think we have been sold the idea that to have people over, we need to be able to throw the kind of fancy soiree portrayed in movies and on social media. But if you have the right kind of friends, they don’t care if you have an Instagram-worthy living room. (Plus, learn to pick your background and crop the evidence of poverty out of your photos. It’s not that hard.)

You don’t need to wait until you have a beautiful home

Or a fancy backyard. These are optional.

I hope you had (or are having) the kind of young adulthood that involved building a fire in somebody’s unlandscaped backyard and everyone bringing ratty old lawn chairs and a cooler of cheap beer. Or just ordering pizza (from a chain, not from the celebrated local place that makes it in a brick oven) and sitting right on the floor by the second-hand coffee table to eat it.

You remember the kind of thing I’m talking about, right? Boxed white wine in the fridge and bottom-shelf hard liquor on the kitchen table with several 2-liter bottles of off-brand soda. Half-finished red plastic cups misplaced everywhere.

You can still do this even if you’re not a young adult anymore. Probably, when people talk about being glad their plans fell through, they are not talking about this kind of relaxed gathering. They’re talking about the more tiresome events for which they feel like they need to dress up and perform.

Bring back potlucks

Nobody spends more, or not much more, than they’d spend just eating at home. Everyone gets to try something new and those of us who like to cook get to show off if we want to or we can bring something simple if we’ve had a tough week. You can even bring a bag of chips you bought on the way sometimes and everyone will forgive you for it.

Invite friends who are in a band or that one guy who always brings his guitar. Or bust out the old vinyl. Or play your favorite Pandora station over a smart speaker. It honestly does not matter that much. The point is building genuine connections with other people.

I’m not joking when I say doing this isn’t just fun, but vital. If you haven’t noticed we’re racing as fast as we can toward a dystopian future, you aren’t paying attention. Having people you trust and who trust you matters a lot when dark days come. Even if you think I’m wrong about that (I’m not) and that the next decade is going to be all sunshine, there’s no downside to deepening your relationships with friends.

And you can do that in any space you choose.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules. Tips accepted here at Ko-fi.

All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.

Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.

A version of this piece ran on Medium on Feb. 13, 2025.