Shared Roofs and Equal Roles? Navigating Gender in Later-life Intimacy through Cohabitation in Urban China

Abstract In later life, social and emotional connections are integral to both mental and physical well-being. In China, the challenge of eldercare provision is particularly acute given the scale of population ageing and the diversity of eldercare needs. Meanwhile, limitations in formal care provision continue to channel responsibility for eldercare toward families. The aftermath of China’s one-child policy and increased mobility and spatial dispersal of family members has prompted a “peer-ageing” strategy. Together, these trends have contributed to a growing number of single older adults pursuing cohabitation: a romantic, non-marital partnership involving shared living arrangements and mutual care. Drawing on qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews with 64 participants, and participant observation through eight months of fieldwork in Beijing in 2023, this study explores how and why older cohabitors navigate gendered roles in everyday cohabitation. How does this manifest in financial arrangements, domestic labour, and care? This research finds that older cohabiting couples often reach egalitarian outcomes through contractual arrangements on personal finance, shared domestic labour, and redefined expectations of care. This more gender-equitable dynamic arises from temporality—the contingent and pragmatic processes shaped by life-course trajectories, practical constraints such as material realities, healthcare needs, and future uncertainty—rather than an explicit feminist commitment. This research, therefore, proposes the framework of Inadvertent Egalitarian Temporalities. Grounded in social gerontology, this study shows how later life cohabitation can subtly rework relational identity and gendered social expectations, and how intimacy is increasingly structured around immediate well-being, workable routines, and contingent companionship arrangements, underemphasizing gender roles in a new form of later life intimacy.