The Metamorphosis of Relationships at Dunmire Hollow

by Harvey Baker

Communities are often seen as laboratories for possible social and cultural change. Over time, the same community may experiment with several different--even opposite--ideals for the same aspect of life. Over the length of Dunmire Hollow Community's more than 20-year history, the prevailing attitudes about relationships and commitment have changed several times. Harvey Baker has watched dramatic and sometimes sudden changes in the dominant community ideology about ideal relationships.

A S OUR COMMUNITY BEGAN TO COALESCE in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in the early '70s, the social norm was for couples to live together without being legally married. Legal marriage was rare, and usually was chosen because of some economic practicality or to avoid intense family harassment. Many relationships were fluid, and a number of people experimented with multiple-partner relationships. The community of people at this time was also quite fluid, with undefined boundaries. Our first attempt at defining our membership produced two criteria: (1) You wanted to be a member; and 2) everybody else already knew that you were a member. This actually worked quite well in the early days of the community.

As our community got tighter, we realized that we had something of value. We also realized that a university town surrounded by expensive and inhospitable corn fields was not a suitable long-term home. To give our community a better chance of a long life, we needed to transplant it somewhere more permanent than rental housing in town and a dome on two acres surrounded by unenthusiastic neighbors. If we didn't do something with this community we had lucked into, it would dissipate, one person or couple at a time, as people wandered off looking for better places to live.

With some sense of urgency, we started a national land search for our community's permanent home. As moving to our own land grew more likely, people got excited about the idea of settling down, building houses, and having babies. For many of the couples, settling down on the land encouraged settling down as a couple; few people were interested in moving to a remote piece of land without a mate. As a consequence, many of the couples explicitly increased their level of commitment to each other. About the time our community was purchasing its 163-acre valley in Tennessee in early 1974, many of our group became interested in the teachings of Stephen Gaskin, spiritual leader of The Farm community 35 miles away. Many people in our community visited The Farm and read Stephen's books. Three of our couples lived at The Farm to have their babies with the Farm midwives; one couple stayed there permanently. Stephen married couples on The Farm in public ceremonies at the community's Sunday morning services, and stated that when he married people, they stayed married. Living together outside of marriage was discouraged.

This encouragement of marriage from folks seen as similar to us added its weight to the existing family pressures and worries about local attitudes in a small town/rural area of the Bible Belt. Most of the couples in our group who had been living together got legally married, and publicly espoused monogamy and "staying married forever."

A similar attitude was prevalent about the community itself, often seen as virtually a second marriage: we had found the perfect place to create the perfect community, and would all be living here together in perfect harmony forever.

After a couple years of reality, the strains began to show. Some of the marriages showed their weaknesses, and the idea of "open marriage" began to float around, complete with a study group on the then-popular book Open Marriage  by George and Nena O'Neill. Stale marriages made fresh romance look more attractive. People began to have affairs, usually within the community or with friends in our "extended community" around the county. Unlike normal practice in the U.S., many couples attempted to be very open about the outside relationships, both with their spouses and with the community. Unfortunately, they were rarely prepared for the emotional turmoils the affairs created.

At times I noticed uncharacteristic and seemingly unexplainable friction between two people, only to discover later that one had started an as yet unpublic romance with the other's spouse. Several friends--who had originally persuaded reluctant spouses to accept the idea of "open marriage"--got very upset when their spouses then developed romances with others. The new prevailing attitude that "jealousy is unnecessary, and open marriages are easy" proved just as difficult to accomplish as the previous attitude that "monogamy and staying married forever is easy."

The increasing dissonance between people's visions about how community life would be and its reality began to have its effects as well. We were all still humans, with our foibles and shortcomings still intact. And the world outside was not cutting us any slack, either, with economic struggles added to the internal tensions. Yet leaving Dunmire Hollow Community was nearly unthinkable. The first person who became desperate to leave our little utopia saw no way out; when the pressures finally built high enough, he rode out in an ambulance, with four self-inflicted knife wounds in his chest. He and his wife never came back to our land again. For the rest of us, normal activities screeched to a halt. We sat together in shock, trying to recover from this drastic rip in our community's fabric, for which we were so unprepared.

The second couple to leave said that they would be back in a few months, after they made a little money helping their parents build their retirement cottage. I believed them (as they seemed to believe themselves.) Another community member perceptively--and correctly--read their burned-out state, and said, "They'll never be back." It took a while before there was a departure both friendly and honest, where the couple and the community both recognized that it was okay that they just had other things to do and another life to lead elsewhere.

As preparation for their departure, some couples would create an estrangement from the community, by generating extra conflict with other community members and being resistant to resolving it, in spite of our community agreements to do so. This added conflict would help overcome the inertia of staying, and, by overwhelming the good features of life here, make the old dream seem shattered, worthless, and hence, possible to abandon.

When couples split up, the departures did not follow this pattern; instead, one partner simply left. Sometimes the splitting up and the leaving were simultaneous, part of an overall need for divorce from both spouse and community. The departing spouse rarely felt the need to create further estrangement from the community, as the disrupted primary relationship generally provided enough.

After consisting of seven married couples, one unmarried couple, and one single person in its early days, Dunmire Hollow Community shifted over the years to being a community with a majority of singles. Now the talk was of open relationships, since marriage was rarer. "You do your thing, and I'll do mine, and if they happen to coincide, that's groovy!"

Not surprisingly, the same sort of attitude became more common about Dunmire Hollow. The level of commitment to the community lessened, especially among the newcomers, who seemed to say, "I'll do this community thing as long as it is:

These attitudes do not create either a strong, deep relationship, or a strong, deep community; both need the energy, attention, and hard work that only comes with commitment.

The open relationships often turned out to be painful or brief or both; they could end abruptly with no agreement to discuss what had happened or why. As with the open marriages, jealousy was often a problem, in spite of the wishes to be rid of it. And eventually AIDS reared its head. Over time, individuals tired of the transience and uncertainty, and decided to look for and work for committed relationships.

Our community as a whole also began to see the need for commitment. We initiated a process of clarifying and writing down our social agreements, membership process, consensus process, residency rights, etc. It was valuable for the community to spend time together focusing on building agreement, defining our core beliefs and our processes to keep the community alive and healthy. Just starting this agreement-building process was enough to cause some fence-sitters to leave, as they finally realized that they would have to deal with the other people here.

As I write, we are a community of five couples (three legally married). Two of the couples include young adults who grew up here; their life directions are not yet clear. The other six adults are seriously committed to this community and its future. After 20 years, we have learned more about what we need  to do in order to maintain healthy relationships and a healthy community. Sometimes we are daunted by the size of the task. With all the personal activities of daily living that occupy us, actually taking the time to do  this maintenance remains our challenge.

Harvey Baker, a co-founder of Dunmire Hollow Community, does custom woodworking. He has been a board member of the Fellowship for Intentional Community since 1989. He is happily married to Barbara Lee.