Verified by 
Relationships
How to Find Belonging and Enhance the Satisfactions of Home
Finding our way home: Going out is also going home.
Posted March 16, 2021 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
- "Home" extends beyond a physical dwelling and requires both safety and a feeling of belonging.
- During the pandemic, many people are missing the relationships they once enjoyed with servers, shopkeepers, baristas, and other casual acquaintances in their community.
- We can take steps to enhance the satisfaction of home by safely talking with our neighbors, getting outdoors, and making small changes in our living space.
Home is more than our dwelling. It is more than our house or apartment or room. Home extends in widening circles beyond the place where we sleep and perform our domestic rituals—out into our neighborhood and larger community.
One way to think about home is by applying Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Home integrates two middle levels of Maslow’s hierarchy: the second level of Safety and the third level of Love and Belonging. Home requires both: safety and a feeling of belonging.
Why do we enjoy going out, even when it can be risky? One answer is that going out fulfills our basic need for belonging—primarily through social ties, which include our many casual acquaintances in the community.
Weak Ties
The concept of weak ties informs our feeling of home and explains the absence many of us feel when staying at home. Weak ties are the casual relationships or low-stakes relationships outside our circle of close friends and family.
These are relationships with the people we meet in specific places for specific reasons: acquaintances in particular settings who add meaning to our lives in distinctive ways. The person at the wine store who gives advice, the teller at the bank, the pharmacist who dispenses medicine along with friendly conversation. This network of casual relationships is essential for integrating us into our community.
These casual, low-stakes relationships keep us connected to different social groups and enhance our well-being.
We are happier after talking to the checkout person we like, the friendly server who is always happy to see us, the regulars at the park we walk in. One reason people are advised not to move out of town after retirement is that moving away severs all the weak ties in one’s life.
Every six weeks for 40 minutes, I see the person who cuts my hair. We talk about anything, and it’s always spirited and supportive and fun. I’ve been doing this for a quarter of a century. We’ve seen each other through the deaths of our parents, through health difficulties, through national tragedies and local celebrations. She knows my hair and cuts it skillfully, and every six weeks we are close friends. Weak ties are not necessarily superficial ties.
Weak Ties and the COVID Pandemic
During the pandemic and the stay-at-home orders, many of our weak ties were put on hold.
We Zoom with family members and close friends but not with the many people who enrich our lives through casual relationships.
We don’t Zoom with our baristas or hair stylists or friends in the park.
Home means safety and belonging. During this pandemic, however, instead of working together, these two levels of need have worked against each other, creating a conflict. For many of us, staying home provided safety but prevented us from satisfying our need for belonging. We do not achieve belonging with Netflix.
How to Enhance the Satisfactions of Home
1. Know our neighbors and talk to them.
During this time, I’ve found myself uplifted by brief, almost daily talks with a next-door neighbor. Initially, he stood on his front porch while I stayed on the sidewalk, a normal distance that’s also safely social. Our physical distance decreased as the frequency of our interactions increased, with both of us eventually standing and talking about 8 feet apart in his driveway.
2. Spend time in the interface between the indoors and the outdoors.
In Walden, Thoreau emphasized the outdoors as part of his house, with no profound separation between the two. He would sit in his “sunny doorway” for the full morning, feeling a sense of fulfillment. Loosely defined, we can spend more time in our sunny doorways—on a porch or balcony, in front of a living room window. We can open windows, we can let in more light.
3. Make changes in our living space.
Rearrange art or furniture. Introduce new rituals. Clear out clutter.
4. Follow official guidance, but also identify self-imposed restrictions and remove those restrictions that are unnecessary.
5. Be less efficient when engaging in low-stakes interactions.
At the grocery store or in the park or on a walk, we should take time to safely enjoy the interactions with people we encounter. It’s normal for the number of close friendships to decrease as we grow older. People move farther away, lives grow complicated, we lose touch. At the same time, however, our casual relationships can continue to grow.
