Due to my work which can be fulfilled remotely, I've spent a lot of time in a domestic environment. Coupled with my limited experience trying to live in a denser cooperative living environment - which failed miserably, though it was my first try - I learned a thing or two about the way people interact in a domestic environment. To say the least, it is very different from public or professional environments.
One of the long-running feminist insights is that capitalism - with its patriarchal cultural structure - refuses to compensate women (and men) for their domestic work, work that is actually critical to the proper functioning of capitalist production. Children have to be raised properly to be good students, and relations in the family and in the immediate neighborhood have to be kept stable while the students go on to high school and college and eventually start their careers, or you get unproductive workers. It is well documented that many students having trouble in school and eventually finding jobs are those who have grown up in broken homes. Domestic labor is partially paid from measly maternity leave packages (which had to be fought for tooth and nail) but overall none of the work is considered to be within the sphere of the market.
This injustice is built into the ideology itself. This is a system that rewards self-interested market actors and their labor, not altruism (biological or social) and non-economic relationship cultivation, though there are exceptions. This is partially remedied by giving a living wage to the breadwinner which is high enough to provide for a whole family, though pretty much everyone has to work now due to squeezed wages and benefits. Besides, choosing not to recognize and reward domestic labor alienates a large portion of the population.
You can also say that the very process of grooming individuals for capitalist production warps them as human beings, but that's an argument I can't get into right now, because the whole thing would go in another direction.
Anyways, culturally we are simply not equipped for dealing with each other on an intimate basis. If you choose not to recognize and reward domestic labor, that labor will eventually suffer, less of it will get done, and people won't think about it or discuss it very much. A lot of our daily activity is relegated to a 9-5, where our social relations are decided for us, we are told what to do, and if we deviate (though of course personalities can clash and people can fight for power within this regime) we don't get to work, which is bad.
This pattern can be seen in other areas as well. In public places, people follow certain guidelines for interacting with each other: usually they are carrying out the roles of buyer and seller or other such roles. Different behaviors can arise in different cultural and political contexts of course.
At school, students are not supposed to bring up emotional issues: they must sit and be quiet, learn, and do what they are told. In the schoolyard, children separate into cliques which follow their respective social codes, and they behave as they should behave and are ridiculed and ostracized if they fall outside the lines.
With the limited time adults and children spend time with each other at length, it is usually mediated by games, TV, movies, or what have you. If people become upset with each other, they avoid the problems, blow up at each other, isolate themselves, or just part ways altogether. Everything but deal internally with one's feelings and attempt to connect with the Other.
Of course some mediation and separation is always alright and probably a natural human inclination, but problems do arise when we ignore our emotions and relations completely. Couples do have to get to know each other more intimately to sustain their relationship. Also, some families do communicate with each other more thoroughly and express their feelings, but these are usually fringe occurrences that are regularly denounced by the mainstream as "hippie shit" and "weird" and "touchie feelie crap." There is this great fear among many Americans of their own natural feelings. Me included. It is hard to tell which came first: the fear or the institutions that reproduce the fear, though of course these things usually grow together.
All this worked out okay when everyone had their own space and their things and their relative independence, but with this economic contraction and increasing exploitation, more and more people are finding themselves together under one roof: people are moving back in with their families, or moving in together, etc. More and more people are also depending on each other for more things: sharing possessions, asking favors, helping each other with work, sharing food, and other resources. So now those relational skills that were so neglected are beginning to rise in importance.
Within the domestic environment, there are a lot of different fascinating things happening. Human beings are wonderfully complex and diverse in their private daily social interactions. Different personalities fit into each other in different ways, and due to their differing natures, clash in different ways too. People tend to view all of their conflicts through the lens of their own projected personality, which oftentimes leads to a prolonging of the conflict until the two frustrated parties begin to communicate.
It takes a whole lot of work and experience to get people living in harmony without the narcotic effects of mediation. The larger cooperatives have devised entire systems of guidelines and even governing procedures to facilitate these harmonies. Even animals have their different personalities: they develop rivalries and bonds, they respond to human interactions and social states, and they all have to be held together in a certain way for it to all work.
You have to figure in external factors as well: the state of the surrounding environment, availability of resources, work to be done, required rent, etc. It determines how much people have to do, the moods they are in, what kind of money they have to bring in, and more. Many cooperatives simply collapse after a short period of time because the relationships can no longer be managed and some sort of fatal rupture occurs. It is a lost art that will have to be attended to again.
