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When I ask Paul if he regrets the decision to drop out at Sharon's behest, he says,
"It's not that simple. I wouldn't have had the ambition without her. I was doing it for her, not for myself, so much. What do I need, really? And she was lonely and it was important for her to be happy, to not get so sad she'd start drinking."
"I'm so terrible," she says. "How could I make you do that?"
"You were homesick," he shrugs, without a trace of resentment.
After moving to Honolulu, they waited tables and cleaned rooms. "Then there was 9/11, and the hotel scene just kind of fell apart."
It was only then, on the cusp of middle-age, that they began to see the reality of their situation together. Paul found a job working as a documents manager for Bank of America in Los Angeles, but was eventually laid off. The two returned to where they'd started out, only to discover how much the world had changed. Their former friends, the Easter Bunnies, were gone. Paul's daughter was now a college student who didn't want to be burdened by her father's chaotic lifestyle. Sharon's daughter still resented her mother's drinking problem of thirty years earlier. Their savings ran out before they could find work. After a life of scraping by and having fun, they realized they were no longer doing either.
At her shelter, couples are prohibited from showing any sort of affection toward one another. |
"All we have now is each other," Paul says.
I ask them if they've ever thought of getting married.
"Not really," Paul says. He explains that both of them had already gone through failed marriages when they met.
"Yeah, and besides," Sharon jokes, "don't you know that marriage is the leading cause of divorce?"
With the press focused on unemployment and housing foreclosures, couples like Paul and Sharon have served as convenient symbols of middle-class ruin. Yet despite the media narrative, couples form a miniscule minority of Americans on the streets.
"It's less than half a percent," says Sandra Peterson, who helps run Union Station Foundation, the largest homeless-services provider in Pasadena. "I've been here almost fourteen years, and I'd say we've had thirty to thirty-five couples. Currently we don't have any."
She isn't surprised. At her shelter, couples must sleep apart, and are prohibited from showing any sort of affection toward one another. The rules are meant to protect the large number of battered women served by the shelter, she explains; even male children over the age of sixteen are kept separate from their mothers.
As a result, most unmarried couples — even those who have been together for years — are a rare sight at homeless-services centers. "They'd rather be on the street in a homeless camp or under a bridge than be in a shelter where they'll be separated," Peterson says.
Paul and Sharon never go to shelters. "At shelters, there's nothing but drugs and winos," Sharon says. "I wouldn't be tempted, but we still don't like being around it. And at the shelters they would separate us. We won't do that."
Some countries, like the U.K., have taken a different approach. The troubled history of Victorian-era workhouses, in which women and men were forcibly separated from each other and from their children, has given way to a fair amount of accommodation, even for unmarried couples. In the United States, where the government has arguably played a stronger role in legislating marriage than in tackling poverty, homeless couples have few such options. Receiving joint accommodation usually requires a marriage certificate or some proof of long-term cohabitation — not things most homeless people carry on them.
At the same time, the number of married heterosexual families seeking services is on the rise, according to Rosa Carrillo, a social worker at L.A. Family Housing, a transitional housing center in North Hollywood. This is because married couples with children have no choice but to enter the shelter system or face losing custody to social services. For most it's an obvious decision, though not necessarily the happiest one.
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