[Combining shapes so that an SVG file only has one single line of intersection]

That worked fine. Thank you, Hangman.

Actually my shapes are much more complex than squares, and there are situations - like in the "five squares" example - where I could remove the centre one and still have the same  (empty) shape.

[Combining shapes so that an SVG file only has one single line of intersection]

I'm fairly new at this type of work so forgive me if the answer seems obvious. I'm working with some complicated designs to be cut using a Cricut Maker 3. The cutting blade can be quite rough on the material (magnetic sheet) particularly with multiple cuts. I want to reduce the number of cuts by only having a single cut between two shapes. For a simple example, take the two squares; I want a single cut down the centre, not two cuts (one for each square.  In the lower example, if I place four squares I'll only get a single cut for each of the interior lines, but if I add a fifth square in the middle I'll get four extra cuts. This has been my experience using the Merge Curves function. Is there a way to simplify the SVG file to eliminate extraneous cuts? TIA