Posted on 09/28/2025 10:35:48 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
As a small child in the 1980s, I tuned in weekly to see the hilarious antics of the Golden Girls. I loved seeing the friendship and support between the three 50-something housemates of Blanche (Rue McClanahan), Rose (Betty White), and Dorothy (Bea Arthur), while the affectionate bickering between Dorothy and her unfiltered 80-something mother Sophia (Estelle Getty) always struck me as mother-daughter relationship goals.
While the show was ahead of its time in myriad ways, one important legacy it has given Generation X is a blueprint for adult communal living. Our generation understands what a “Golden Girls retirement” means, and we have all likely spent some happy hours daydreaming about our ideal cast of friends and family to share a wicker-and-pastel Miami home with.
But co-living situations like those shared by the Golden Girls aren’t just the stuff of TV and daydreams. They can offer excellent benefits to adults both before and after retirement and are well worth exploring, no matter where you currently are in your career.
Here’s how embracing the Golden Girls lifestyle can offer you more stability and happiness.
Housing costs
In the world of The Golden Girls, the Miami house belongs to Blanche, and she initially advertises for two roommates–Dorothy and Rose–to help pay the mortgage. (Sophia comes to live with them after her retirement home burned down.)
When the show debuted in September, 1985, the median home price in the United States was $84,700, and the median income for a single woman householder was $13,660. That median income for an individual was about 16% of the median home price. Considering these numbers, it’s understandable why Blanche, Dorothy, and Rose all needed each other’s help affording housing and other costs to live in Miami.
As of the second quarter of 2025, the median home price in the U.S. is a staggering $512,800, while the median income for a single woman householder is $60,440–or about 11.8% of the median home price. (The median income for a single man is significantly higher at $83,260).
This sad reality of our current housing situation highlights one of the most obvious benefits of living like the Golden Girls. Pooling your resources can help you all better afford high housing costs and let your money go farther.
Social support
Whenever Dorothy gets frustrated with her mother, she jokingly threatens to send Sophia back to the Shady Pines retirement home. The audience knows that Dorothy’s threat has no teeth because Sophia was miserable at Shady Pines. The older woman was lonely there and did not have the social and emotional outlet among the other patients that she finds with her daughter and their friends in the Miami house.
There’s a profound truth behind the jokes about Shady Pines. Human beings crave connection and companionship with each other, and we get pretty down when we don’t have it. This is why loneliness and social isolation are serious problems for aging adults.
More social interaction, recreation, and improved social supports have all been found to improve the mental health of lonely seniors.
Health benefits
The four Golden Girls experience various illnesses and health scares (including a truly groundbreaking episode where Rose must get tested for AIDS) throughout the series, and not every health problem can be fixed in a 22 minute episode. But the bond between these four friends is helpful when they are in poor health, since whoever is ill does not feel alone.
Research has found that loneliness can exacerbate health problems, while a lack of social support can lead to self-medicating behavior or further self-isolation. Specifically, social isolation is linked to the following health problems:
Anxiety Depression Heart disease Memory problems Cognitive decline Weakened immune function High blood pressure Dementia Death
A living situation where you share space with people you like and want to spend time with can help protect your mental and physical health. That’s because you and your housemates can offer each other social and physical support when needed–helping you feel like part of a community. And if that includes the occasional midnight slice of cheesecake on the lanai, all the better.
Thank you for being a friend
Adopting a Golden Girls lifestyle has so much to recommend it, whether you wait to do so after you retire or gather your friends together right now. Sharing housing expenses will make your cost of living much cheaper and could also reduce other important expenses, such as food, transportation, and childcare. The social support offered by a Golden Girls style living situation can help improve both your mental and physical health, and be fun and rewarding, to boot.
Now you just need to perfect your St. Olaf stories.
Thank you.
Yeah. You and I have talked. My sister is a headcase too, and getting worse as she ages.
I could never live with her, let alone be around her any more than I absolutely have to, when (oblivious to this) Mom throws us together.
You and I can live together in our Golden Years, LOL!
Actually, it's the guys that get a little on the outside and then bring in the infection to the facility and spread it among the ladies ... who compete for the men because they are in the minority.
Sounds like a plan!
I like the quote: "Live your life in such a way that you can take as much comfort in the enemies you make as in the friends that surround you."
Getty is the only one of those women I could stand.
The sad truth is that we don’t live in a moral or responsible time period and families are divided, thereby largely (although not entirely) negating a Golden Girls or multi generational future.
For those who can achieve this I am jealous. Personally, I have no such friends or family although I have spent my life attempting to cultivate them.
I will not bore you with the betrayals, but I have learned that tv and movies are fiction and rarely if ever appear in real life.
Nevertheless, we have cared for both family and friends in their time of need and are planning/building a multi generational dwelling ... Just in case ... For our children.
Praying that all who can find this truly appreciate how blessed they are.
Archie wasn’t wrong.
I gotta admit, I love my Golden Girls!
Ideal....
Not necessarily..you live close to your kids amap...
Not necessarily..you live close to your kids amap...
We all are too attached to our stuff and having things our way.
Yep. That, ‘One cup, one bowl, one spoon’ lifestyle is incredibly hard to master for some reason. ;)
Like a lot of TV sitcoms they partray an ideal situation. The implication in the show and also in the article is that a joint living arragement is better than a retirement home.
I beg to differ. Engineering a group home with enough people to cover the cost of the residence and the taxes and expenses is not something that is easily done. A good retirement place for imdependent living is much better and easier to find. Anyone in their 70’s is going to need one of these eventually anyway.
I looked at a LOT of Independent Living places for my Dad back in the day and they were all depressing as heck! He was in two different homes and while I didn’t like either of them all that much, they were clean and the staff was nice and he wasn’t being beaten on a regular basis, so there was that! Also, I made a pest of myself so they KNEW I was keeping an eye on things. ;)
But my nearly 80 year old Aunt lives in Assisted Living and she’s never been happier! Of course, she was living in a condemned home with no electricity or running water when she finally had the ‘medical issue’ (triple by-pass) we were waiting for to jackknife her out of there!
But, you’re right - it’s a necessary evil. People ARE going to need those kinds of services one day.
That’s a choice you make to pay higher prices to get what you want.
I am currently 86 and living in a very comfortable independent living community. My wife is bedridden but I have 24/7 self paid caregivers for her which is cheaper and better than a skilled nursing home, and I have here with me.
I was glad to leave our 3,500 ft2 2 story home of 40 years and didn’t look back.
This end of life time has many options.
Too late.
As I recall, Rose and Dorothy moved in with Blanche, because they couldn’t get their own place.
Blanche was swimming in money that she would from her successful ex husband through a divorce.
Dorothy felt it was perfectly ok to jump on that wagon by bringing her mom out of the retirement community to live with them instead.
Rose has always been along for the ride, and totally endearing to have around. But those other women were no role models.
Am I wrong about this shows premise? I mean it was funny, but so was Soap (imo)
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