This article was originally published in Tiny House Magazine in February 2018. I’ve made a few minor edits for grammar since writing is a skill that constantly improves with experience.

I am often asked how two people in a relationship can live together in a tiny home. I hear things like:

• I could never be that close to someone 24 hours a day.
• I need doors.
• I need my alone time.
• What if someone passes gas?
• Where do you go if you get in a fight?

Well, for me, it’s all pretty simple.

I never imagined we couldn’t make it work, so we made it work.

Matt and I didn’t meet because of the tiny house movement. We met in 1993 when I started college as a freshman, and he was a sophomore. We were literal kids, dating other people, and I’m not sure we liked each other that first year. But over time, as we continued to hang out with the same friend group, things changed with our former high school relationships and each other. Our first date was Valentine’s Day, 1995, and we have been together since.

There have been a lot of changes in our lives. We bought our first home together in suburban Detroit in 1999. We then had an opportunity to sell that home and move to Atlanta, Georgia, in 2003, where we lived for nearly 10 years. And somewhere in all of that, we got his crazy idea to build our own 120-square-foot home in the mountains of Western North Carolina. 

We love each other and share our lives because we embrace the same values, qualities, and philosophies. It just so happens they are the same values couples need to share to be comfortable with one another in a small space. We aren’t a tiny house couple in the sense that a tiny home brought us together, but we are by default since we so publicly built our own home and shared our story.

It’s Not About the House

Looking back, it’s possible we always were a “tiny house” couple. When we started getting to know one another, we bonded over a love of architecture, specifically Frank Lloyd Wright. While Wright didn’t specialize in tiny homes, he understood how to use space. We both have a passion for this gorgeous and groundbreaking architecture, and we’ve visited dozens of FLW buildings all over the country.

Frank Lloyd Wright isn’t the only reason we make a good tiny house couple. I remember devising plans to buy an RV and travel the country while we were still in our 20s. Then, for a while, we wanted a sailboat. We dreamed of all these things but kept thinking we would get to it “later.”

Finally, after living the conventional life and working jobs that didn’t fulfill us for far too long, we realized we couldn’t wait until “later.” That was when we discovered tiny houses. This was something we felt confident we could actually build and a way we could change our lives and live more deliberately.

So when people ask how we can live in a small space with one another, my only answer is that we never thought we couldn’t.

For us, the tiny house isn’t a place or a thing; it’s a lifestyle. It is a philosophy. Couples don’t have to share a 120-square-foot house to live the philosophy of tiny. So don’t think a tiny home will make or break a relationship. The only thing that can do that is the two people involved.

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