Why This Viral NYC 'Mommune' Is Hitting Home With Other Single Moms

A couple of New York City mom friends have gone viral for a simple, inspiring reason: shacking up together, not as lovers, but best friends, along with their three kids. Because real estate is pricey and parenting is hard — and what better way to both ease the cost and ensure built-in emotional support?

“Our #mommune is not temporary,” the friends captioned an Instagram video, posted at the end of March, that shows mom-of-two Bernie Sinclaire putting up a curiously patterned orange-and-pink wallpaper. It’s since been viewed by more than 169,000.

“It’s not that we’re waiting for a boyfriend or a man or a traditional family,” she says in a voiceover as she smooths and trims the wallpaper. “This is the kind of lifestyle that works for us: a women-centered lifestyle in a home full of yoni symbols.”

Since then, Sinclaire and Annabelle Gonzalez, both teachers, have been sharing glimpses into their life and prompting curiosity, support, and envy.

“This seems like the natural way things should be — a matriarchy,” said a commenter on the viral post.

Another noted, “I think that we’re gonna start to see a lot more of this, and I am so here for it. I love the idea of women coming together and supporting each other,” while yet another offered, “This is amazing! Thank you for being such an awesome example of the different ways a family and raising kids can look!”

Other wrote: “Perfection,” “This is a dream,” “I wish I had been raised like this,” “This is honestly why I desperately wish I was lesbian sometimes,” and “I would love to find me a partner just like that.”

Though Sinclaire and Gonzalez are currently at the center of the discussion, they’re far from the first to try out such an arrangement and certainly won’t be the last.

“I didn’t invent the term ‘mommune,’” Sinclaire tells SheKnows. “I’m approaching it from a financial perspective and an affordability perspective, living in New York.”

Other stories looking at the mommune phenomenon — single moms coming together to share household tasks and expenses and create the community they desire in which to raise their kids — pop up from time to time. In March, the Independent profiled several such living arrangements, including of two friends in Florida, and several years ago, the New York Times looked at mommunes in Maryland, Florida, and Abu Dhabi. Both stories gave a nod to CoAbode, a service that helps moms match, connect, and combine households.

“Single moms stagger under the burden of providing for young children without proper financial support from family or social services,” said CoAbode founder Carmel Boss in a 2024 press release about the service. “The very people who could most benefit from a stable emotional support system often go home with their children to an empty house or apartment.” 

Such thoughts are also in the artistic ether, according to a recent Atlantic article titled “Is Cohabitation the Feminist Future?” It looks at the wave of literature tackling the topic — the Japanese novel Sisters in Yellow and the memoirs Two Women Living Together and My Seven Mothers, among others, and notes, “Each of them invites readers to think more fully about how women might assert their independence in societies still designed in many ways for men — and to imagine what might get upended in turn.”

Making Mommunes Happen — and What They’re Like

While CoAbode appears to be the main, if not sole, app connecting moms who want to cohabitate (another, Mommymune, appears to be not functioning), but other women are getting ideas. On the West Coast, Marissa Merrill, a Los Angeles–based actor/director and mom of a 9-year-old, has purchased an eight-bedroom house in Oregon that she hopes to eventually turn into a co-living space for moms; she’s locked down the Mommune name for her website in the meantime.

Sinclaire says that she is developing her own mom-matching app — and has been entertaining fantasies about expanding into an entire city building (or at least having meetups about it). That’s because the amount of feedback she’s gotten from moms, not to mention the flurry of press prompted by the viral video, has been staggering.

“I think that it offers a real solution to women that find themselves stuck for various reasons — either financially stuck because they’re single moms on a one-income household, or it offers women this idea of the different family structure that maybe they hadn’t considered before,” says Sinclaire, who now splits the $4,350 rent of a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment in upper Manhattan with Gonzalez.

In addition to the financial support, she says, they trade school drop-off and kid-watching duties. “But the main thing we noticed immediately was the relief from the amount of domestic labor,” she adds, “and how quickly we could accomplish tasks that were originally just us doing them independently.” Sinclair explains they are like “a power couple” with their combined efficiency, and that the relief has allowed them more free time to rediscover their “hobbies and passions.” One of which, Sinclaire says, is the Mommune itself, which prompted them to start posting on Instagram.

“We had no intention of becoming content creators,” she says. “We were just playing around.” Their posts range from thoughtful to silly and celebrate different aspects of the mommune, as well as how they make sure to spend time apart to bond with their kids.

While Sinclaire’s son, 4, gets on so well with Gonzalez’s 7-year-old daughter that they refer to each other as brother and sister, Sinclair’s older son, 9, had a bit more trouble warming to the idea. “Because he, developmentally, was able to understand, like, okay, so you don’t want to live by yourself. But why not choose Dad? Because I do have a positive and healthy co-parenting relationship with his father,” she says. “He’s had more questions about it.”

Living together doesn’t quite feel like having a roommate, says Sinclaire. “We have sit-down dinners together, go food shopping together, vacation together,” she explains. “I think of a roommate as someone who lives in a random room and steals your food … We function as a family.”