‘When you entwine your life with your friends, you begin to take off your mask'

Welcome back to Mate Investigations. For the month of April, I'm exploring platonic proximity - or why having friends in your neighbourhood, on your street or in your home represents a potent source of connection. In week one, I traced the roots of this aspiration back to my childhood, before looking at the social, political and cultural influences on platonic proximity from the nineties to now. This week, I hear from a woman who - during one of the loneliest moments of her life - found connection by moving into an intentional community. I first interviewed Louise Doherty more than a year ago, so it was a pleasure to catch up with her again while fact-checking this newsletter - and hear about the community she’s creating now. I hope you enjoy reading her story. Let me know - and help others find my work - by clicking 'like' or leaving a comment.

If the pandemic gave loneliness a new language, Louise Doherty was already fluent. ‘I was talking about it before it was cool,’ the 38-year-old executive coach tells me, over a Zoom call from her apartment in Paris, tongue firmly in her cheek (‘It will never be cool, of course’).

Originally from the UK, Louise was living in London and working in tech in her late twenties when she landed on a word for the full-body feeling that was haunting her days: disconnection.

‘Back then, connection to me meant: time. I felt connected to my friends when we were together, which for us was doing high-energy, outdoor activities. But coordinating everyone’s diaries was so hard that meeting up just became a series of messages that went nowhere.’

Recognising a problem to be solved, Louise set about developing the technology to distil messages into a plan. Called Yoller, its USP was getting groups together in real life. ‘The tech worked by taking a WhatsApp thread of hundreds of messages and using AI to summarise it into a plan,’ she explains. ‘So, three people are available on this day and here’s a restaurant equidistant from the four people who’ve been invited.’

In the years that followed, Yoller would take Louise to San Francisco; she would have a team of 10 people and win funding from the US Government for the innovative combination of group psychology and AI. And after raising more than a million pounds in venture capital, she would build the product built on iOS, Android and the web.

In 2019, she was preparing to sign a contract with AEG Europe - the entertainment conglomerate who own the O2 - in a deal that would revolutionise cart-abandonment software (‘hey, did you mean to forget those tickets?’) when along came a global pandemic.

Socialising became illegal, the events industry collapsed - and with a visa tied to her fundraising campaign, Louise had to leave the country. By the time she was back in Europe - processing the pain of losing her business - she realised that wasn’t the only pain she was processing. Because as she was building an app premised on connection, Louise found it.

While living in San Francisco, Louise was part of an intentional community. The term is a broad church, spanning communes and co-ops to monasteries and ashrams, but the common thread that binds them lies in that word: intention.

‘A group of people who have chosen to live together with a common purpose,’ writes Geoph Kozeny, a communitarian who visited more than 350 of them during his life, in his 1996 essay on the topic.

‘Although quite diverse in philosophy and lifestyle, each of these groups places a high priority on fostering a sense of community – a feeling of belonging and mutual support that’s increasingly hard to find in mainstream Western society’.

For Louise, that support felt forever out of reach; as a child, she was bullied - and felt uneasy around groups of people well into her adulthood. But while living at The Embassy - a community of 13 members, established in 2012 - she found friends who she would come to think of as ‘her people’, along with a new way to live.

Back in Europe, this time in Berlin, Louise was feeling bereft. But while she didn’t know it then, the seeds for a new intentional community had already been sown. A fellow former resident of The Embassy, Jess, had been running a wedding business from a château in France - a business model no longer feasible under the French confinement laws.

An architect by trade - passionate about the configurations of people and places - Jess saw an opportunity to build her own intentional community. As France was preparing for lockdown, Jess invited 11 of her friends to come to the château; when the country opened up again over the summer, they were joined by 20 more, including Louise. By the autumn, France would be under lockdown once again. But Feytopia was alive and well.

‘There was all this hope and possibility and optimism,’ Louise recalls, of those early days of building the community. ‘But that was obviously juxtaposed with challenging circumstances in the wider world and in my own.

‘I was shutting down my company, I hadn’t seen my family in months and the news was death and horror. And yet, somehow, I was surrounded by friends, in a château. We felt immensely privileged to be there - partly because of the space, but also because of each other.’

In the nine months that followed, they curated a world of their own. Communal dinners would be followed by Disco Dishwashing, in which pans were rinsed beneath a disco ball, soundtracked by somebody DJ-ing.

Residents would take it in turns to deliver talks on the subjects they cared about; some weeks, a smaller group would create an immersive experience in one of the rooms, then surprise the rest of the group at the weekend.

In the years that followed, Fey - as it’s affectionately known - operated in seasons. Between October and March, it would be home to whoever wished to be there; then, come the summer, it would operate as a wedding business once again.

Seasons were shaped by the people who lived there, as well as the mood of the moment. The music season featured jam sessions which ran into the early hours, while the arrival of several athletically-minded residents led to the creation of the Greek Gods and Goddesses Gym.

‘We did something called Room Service, which were immersive, theatrical parties with a purpose,’ Louise recalls. ‘People would turn up and be stunned: they thought it was the best party they’d ever been to. But they didn’t see the thing that sits beneath it all.’

What sits beneath it all, for Louise, is a foundation of deep trust. When I ask her what it is about living at Feytopia that’s made her feel more connected to the people she lives with, she takes a long time to answer.

‘I used to think connection was about presence and the amount of time that you’re able to spend with your friends,’ she begins. ‘But despite running a company that wanted to create more connected groups, it wasn’t until I lived that experience day to day that I really understood it.’

And now? ‘I think when you entwine your life with your friends you very quickly realise that the mask you hold up to the world can’t be held up the whole time, so you go through a process of learning to take it off, safely. Doing that together builds trust over time - and living together gifts you that time. That trust also opens you up to new ways of connecting.’

Those ways are as unique as the people who live there. One resident introduced the group to her concept of ‘horizontal hangs’ - a term she coined after losing patience with the conversation that ensued when face time with friends was squashed into coffee dates and dinners; hanging out horizontally, she theorised, creates the conditions for connecting in a deeper way.

There’s power in rituals, too. Louise refers me back to Disco Dishwashing. Besides turning a task that’s dull as the proverbial into something that reliably delivers dopamine, it creates an opportunity for a conversation that’s free from expectations. ‘Those moments of low-stakes connection aren’t always accessible, even when you’re living under the same roof.’

Five years on from the first lockdown, Feytopia is thriving - but Louise is no longer living there. ‘I’m not starting a co-living community or even an intentional community, but just intentionally getting extra space to share it with people in my life,’ she tells me, of the lease she’s just signed on a mountain lodge in Briançon, part of the Serre Chevalier ski region in France, which she’s moving into in May.

The idea was inspired by Gillian Morris, founder of the platform Supernuclear. ‘Gillian experienced something like this with her parents when she was growing up, always inviting people for medium-term stays and co-creating events and activities.’ Briançon will be Louise’ main home, while also representing an opportunity for those who want to come and stay for a few weeks, months or more.

‘There's almost not a word for it, but it's a lighter version of intentional community rooted in more traditional living. And I guess you could say I'm trying to create proximity - I’m so far away from my friends and family, who have all pledged to come visit in a way that they didn't when I was in Paris…’ There may not be a word yet, but there is a WhatsApp group.