My sister and I have been saying the same thing for years (like 10 years). A big house. Us in it. Maybe a few other women we love too. We’ll do the last years of our lives together and it will be our version of Golden Girls, except with better haircuts and outfits.
We say it like a joke, but there is some truth behind it. Two women who watched a lot of Practical Magic and a lot of Betty White, now grown, now with kids and mortgages and a shared understanding that the ending most people are quietly planning (The Notebook. duh.) likely isn’t the realistic one.
Because here is what we know for sure:
Statistically speaking, we (us women) are going to outlive our husbands.
I said a version of this on Instagram last week and a lot of you came running, which tells me something. Everyone I know is talking about their 401(k) and savings. The number, the age, the market, the plan. Nobody is saying the thing underneath it, which is that they don’t want to be old and alone.
I fact-checked myself before I said this to you
American women live about 4.9 years longer than American men.
In 2024 it was 81.4 for women, 76.5 for men, per the CDC. Not a huge number until you really think about it and say it in front of your husband at dinner, and then it becomes a very large number. My son just turned 5, and A LOT happened in the last 5 years.
The one that gets me is this. After 75, 43% of women live alone. For men it’s only 24%.
There are 9 million widows in this country and 2.9 million widowers (so 3x). And by the time you hit 100, 78% of the people in the room are women.
Side note: I should be fair to the numbers, because they’re moving. Men’s mortality has been improving faster than women’s, and the gap is closing. In 2001 there were about 51 men for every 100 women over 80. By 2025 it was 68. So the room is filling back in.
Good. I’m rooting for that.
But I’m still planning the house with my sister and friends.
Because the thing about the Golden Girls plan is that it was never about being 80 (they are actually in their 50’s in the show). It’s about right now, and about a mistake I already made once, at 27, in a beautiful loft in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Atlanta.
Not One Friend in the neighborhood
Before Serenbe, we lived in Inman Park.
If you’re not from Atlanta, know this: it’s the one with Victorian houses, giant porches, the kind of street people pin to a board. We had a beautiful little loft on a beautiful block and I would have told you, with a straight face, that it was the best place to live.
However… we did not have one friend who lived there. Not one.
In five years I had a glass of wine on a neighbor’s porch exactly once, and I could not tell you their name.
So it was Greg and me most nights in our loft, or it was the car. Get in the car, drive across town, park, see our friends, drive home. Which meant, if I’m being accurate about it, that we mostly did not do that. It was too much effort, and effort is what kills a Tuesday. This was before kids, by the way. We had nothing but time, and we still couldn’t be bothered.
And I told myself the thing everyone tells themselves (or maybe it’s just us?). When we have kids, we’ll make friends here. The playground will do it. The school will do it. It’ll happen to us the way it seems to happen to everybody else.
I left before I found out.
An ordinary Tuesday
Now I live on a street where two (and as of last week three!) of my closest friends are within seven houses of me.
Last week one of them returned my fish, her boys had been watching him while we were out of town, and nipped some parsley from my garden on the way out. I borrowed another one’s minivan, because we’re a one-car household and she was gone, and when I grabbed her keys I noticed the tank was on E so I filled it up. I made bread that afternoon with fancy milled flour she buys in bulk and splits with me. (First loaf in six months, so please do not picture me as the kind of woman who makes sourdough every week).
Then my kids and I walked down to the third one’s house, which is still a wall of boxes because she just moved in, and we helped her unpack and the kids built forts out of the boxes and we ate pizza and drank a beer standing up in the middle of it.
And most Tuesdays, when it isn’t 90 degrees, we’re eating dinner on the front porch and someone walks by and just sits down. There probably isn’t enough food. We combine what we have, it is not a beautiful meal, the kids are thrilled. Nobody planned it, nobody sent a calendar invite, and by 6:15 there are four extra people on my porch.
This was not an unusual week. And I pinch myself about once a week. How did I get so lucky? What are the odds?
The odds were excellent, because I engineered it. (errr I guess the founder of Serenbe did and I took notice and moved to the place). But I did some work too. When houses come up for sale on my street, I call my friends. When I notice someone refinishing their floors, or painting their house – I snoop and ask if they are getting ready to sell (don’t laugh, it’s worked!) I make the case. I apply a small amount of pressure.
An outsider looking at my street would say it appears I recruited my friends onto it, and to that outsider I would say: correct. 🙂
I’ve been piloting the Golden Girls thing for five years. We are just in separate houses on the same street. And I just didn’t know that’s what I was doing.
Which, fine, cuts both ways.
Because I’ve built something that would be terrible to lose. What happens when one of us has a real fight, the kind that doesn’t blow over. What happens when one of them takes a job in Denver. There are small rifts already, the way there are in any life. Nothing that matters. But I notice I can’t sit with the bigger version of that question for more than about eight seconds before I get up and do something else.
I’ll take it. I’d rather have something worth losing than a very nice house with nobody in it.
And yes, I apply the same pressure to my sister, obviously. Her business is rooted in Texas, so the odds of Ellen moving to Georgia are somewhere around zero. Which is a funny thing to sit with, that the person the whole plan started with is the one person I can’t recruit.
Nobody asks the one question that matters
Here’s what nobody asks you.
We spend a year buying a house. We tour twenty of them. We learn what a soffit is. We pay a man $500 to crawl under the house and report back on moisture. We pull the school ratings, we pull the comps, we ask about the roof, we ask about resale, we drive by at night to see if it’s loud.
Not once in that entire process does anyone ask the question that will decide whether we’re happy there.
Who lives on the street.
I was thinking this was just my opinion, and then I found the Framingham Heart Study, which followed 4,739 people for twenty years and is not, to be clear, a study about real estate. It’s a study about happiness. What it found is that when a person gets happier, a friend who lives within a mile has a 25% higher chance of getting happier too. A next-door neighbor, 34%.
Friends who live far away: no measurable effect. Zero. The love is real, the effect is not.
Distance is doing the work. Not affection, not intention, not the group chat. Distance.
We optimize for the countertops and then we’re surprised by the loneliness. We sit in our fancy chairs, alone, with our excellent countertops, driving thirty minutes each way to see the people who make our lives feel like lives.
And it’s not just me being dramatic. Only about a quarter of American adults say they know most of their neighbors. Twelve percent don’t know a single one. Errr That was me five years ago! We are all living next to strangers and then wondering why we’re so damn lonely.
So here’s the petition. Buy the worst house on the better street, and by better street I mean the one your people are already on, or the one where your odds are good of finding them, or the one you’re willing to recruit them to. That’s the whole petition. I’ve been running it for five years, and last week I saw three of my closest friends without texting a single one of them.
I know how this sounds. I moved to a place with trails and horses and a farm, so of course I have friends, and that has nothing to do with your subdivision or your apartment building or your cul-de-sac. Except I had the beautiful-neighborhood version already, in Inman Park, and I was lonely in it for five years, because the thing that works here is not the scenery. It’s that I stopped driving to my life and started living where I already was.
And if you can’t move, which is most of us most of the time, the smaller version still counts. Pick the one neighbor you don’t hate and invite them over. Be the person to reach out first.
The confession
I’ve never watched anyone do this. As in, a modern day Golden Girls house.
I have never once seen a group of women choose each other on purpose and build the last chapter together under one roof. I’ve watched people move closer to family. I have never watched them move in.
Everything I know about the life I want, I learned from television, which is either extremely silly or a sign that we stopped modeling something we badly need to see.
I’m almost 37. There’s a lot of life between here and there, and I could be wrong about myself. Maybe I turn 75 and discover I want a stone cottage, a stack of books, and zero visitors. It has happened to better women than me.
But I don’t think so. I think I want a porch, and too many chairs on it, and not enough food, and someone walking by who sits down anyway.
Women 70 and up, am I missing something? You’ve seen a version of this I haven’t. Tell me in the comments.
And if you’re house hunting right now, or thinking about a move, or quietly wondering why your very nice life feels like it’s happening in a vacuum, look at the street before you look at the kitchen.
Then report back.
xx, Gina
P.S. I’m hosting a free thing with my psychic and intuition coach, , on July 30 at 10am ET, for anyone who’s been quietly wondering whether they’re in the right work (more on her here). Nothing to buy, come be nosy. Save Your Seat
And the first Play by Play lands this Sunday. All the receipts from this month, including the ones I’m not proud of.
