Moving in together is usually treated as a good sign. It means things are getting serious. The relationship is heading somewhere. Before long you’ve got a joint Netflix account and matching mugs in the cupboard. Sundays turn into lazy mornings in bed. You build up a small collection of inside jokes about the neighbor upstairs, and eventually, you can recognize their footsteps in the hallway before they’ve even reached the door. Of course, that’s only half of it. The other half is a lot less flattering. Living with someone also means seeing them at their least appealing, day in and day out. You get to know the way they hunch over the sink to floss, and how they leave hair in the drain every single time they shower. You fight about the dishes and their taste in wall art. There’s nowhere to go when you just want ten minutes to yourself. A growing number of couples have decided they want none of that. So they’ve come up with a workaround that promises the best of both worlds: staying in a committed, long-term relationship while keeping their own separate homes. The arrangement is known as “living apart together,” or LAT for short. But does it actually work, and can a little bit of distance really make couples happier in the long run? Jackson Hirsch / Unsplash (not the actual photo) At its simplest, LAT describes two people who consider themselves a couple but live in separate homes. What makes it distinct from a long-distance relationship, or from a couple who simply hasn’t moved in together yet, is intention. Someone might live three hours away from their partner because of work and spend every weekend wishing they could finally share a home. A couple practicing LAT might have every opportunity to move in together and simply choose not to. Living separately isn’t a temporary inconvenience they’re trying to fix. It is the arrangement they prefer. In practice, that can take many forms. Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton famously spent years living in adjoining houses in London, linked by a connecting passage, while raising their two children together. Other couples might live across town, in separate cities, or spend longer stretches apart. Some do it for a few years, while others never plan to share a home at all. They can be dating or married, together for months or decades, with the only real constant being that each person still has a place of their own. Over the past few decades, living this way has become more common. For example, according to U.S. Census data, the percentage of married people living separately grew by more than 40% between 2000 and 2022. By 2022, around 3.89 million married Americans were living apart from their spouses. A study covering ten European countries also found that around 9% of adults in France, Belgium, Germany and Norway were in LAT relationships. So while “living together apart” may still sound unconventional, it is hardly a fringe way of being in a relationship. Kelly Sikkema / unsplash (not the actual photo) But why would anyone voluntarily choose to live away from the person they love? Well, there’s no single answer. People arrive at LAT for all sorts of reasons, and those reasons can look very different from one relationship to the next. One of the most common, though, is surprisingly simple: living apart can make the relationship itself feel more special. When you spend every night in the same bed and every morning at the same kitchen table, the little things that once made your heart skip lose some of their magic. Like a favorite song you’ve played too many times, after a while it starts to get on your nerves. The science backs this up. A long-term study of 123 married couples found that those who felt their relationship had fallen into a rut seven years into marriage reported a greater drop in satisfaction nine years later. Doing the same things all the time and rarely experiencing anything exciting together appeared to take its toll. Once you’re no longer sharing a home, seeing each other becomes intentional, something you actively look forward to rather than something that simply happens by default. Cooking dinner feels like a proper date instead of another chore, and even grocery shopping can be fun when it isn’t just one more errand to get through. Sharon Hyman / Instagram Sharon Hyman has been with her partner David for 23 years without the two of them ever sharing a home. The Montreal filmmaker lives about 15 minutes away from him and calls their setup “apartnering.” In a personal essay for TODAY, she wrote that the distance is exactly what allows them to show up for each other properly. “By having our own spaces, I feel that David and I are actually more present for each other.” “David is a very important part of my world, but he is not my entire world,” she explained. Living separately leaves room for friends, family and a wider sense of community, rather than putting all of that pressure on one relationship. It also strips away a lot of the everyday friction that comes with sharing a home. There is no ongoing debate over dishes or socks on the floor, which leaves more room to focus on what Hyman sees as the parts of a relationship that actually matter: “support, care, intimacy and companionship.” That doesn’t mean they never argue. They do. The difference is that when things get heated, each of them has somewhere to retreat. Hyman said that having the space to cool down and reflect often makes it easier to come back to the conversation in a healthier way. Eva Yang / Unsplash (not the actual photo) A lot of couples eventually discover that, as much as they love each other, their lifestyles and routines aren’t always compatible. LAT lets them stay together without constantly asking one person to adjust to the other. Lindy and Colin have been together for 20 years. He loves living in inner-city Melbourne, while she prefers being closer to the beach. Lindy is much tidier, while Colin’s home is filled with travel memorabilia, photographs and mismatched colors. They live around 15 kilometers apart and spend their weekends together. “Some people say you can spoil a good relationship by moving in together,” Colin told The Guardian. Rachael Partleton and Steven Wingrove live in separate flats in the same converted London house, with their front doors just 16 inches apart. Steven has the better television, Rachael has the better kitchen, and when the night is over, they usually head back to their own beds. “We rarely sleep in each other’s bed,” Rachael told The Standard. When she does stay over, she says she doesn’t sleep particularly well. “It’s nice to be in my own bed.” That’s a pretty nice solution when you consider that people whose sleep is disturbed by their partner miss out on an average of two and a half nights of sleep every week. If one of you snores while the other tosses and turns, all those broken nights can add up quickly. Jason Briscoe / unsplash (not the actual photo) Living apart together has a particular appeal for women. For generations, they have been expected to take care of the home and family. That can mean cooking, cleaning, planning meals, remembering appointments and keeping track of everything that needs to get done. Even when husbands and wives earn roughly the same amount, women still spend more time on housework and caregiving, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. So for some women, it’s simply easier to take care of themselves and their own home rather than do the same for another person or an entire family. They don’t have to remind someone to pick something up from the store, do another person’s laundry or cook a huge dinner for everyone. That freedom may be especially appealing to older women who have likely spent decades doing exactly that. A study across 11 European countries found that among people aged 51 and over in LAT relationships, only 24.8% of women planned to eventually live with their partner, compared with 36.3% of men. Hrant Khachatryan / unsplash (not the actual photo) There is one fairly obvious catch to all this: living apart can be expensive. For celebrities like Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton, maintaining two adjoining London houses might have been perfectly doable. For most couples, paying for two homes instead of splitting the cost of one is a much bigger ask. Government data cited by Scripps News found that the average person living alone spends about 36% more on housing each year than a married couple living together. Things can also get more complicated when one partner becomes seriously ill. Who looks after them if they suddenly need someone around every day? In a study of 15 older people caring for their LAT partners , most had to adjust their living arrangements or spend more time at their partner’s home. Some also found that their partner’s relatives had more say in decisions about their care, making it harder to get involved. And a second front door doesn’t make the usual problems disappear. You can sleep in different beds and still struggle with trust, communication or resentment. Distance can remove a few everyday irritations. It can’t do the harder work for you. Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 / Unsplash (not the actual photo) Maybe the better question is whether sharing an address actually adds anything to the life you’ve built together. For some couples, the answer is an obvious yes. They want lazy Sunday mornings together and the comfort of knowing someone will be there when they get home. Others find that a little distance makes the time they spend together more special. They like having something to look forward to rather than sharing every ordinary Tuesday. The important thing is that both people want the same kind of relationship. If one sees separate homes as a long-term choice while the other is secretly waiting for the day they finally move in, someone is bound to be disappointed. Perhaps that’s what makes LAT so interesting in the first place. It challenges the idea that every serious relationship has to follow the same path, with moving in together as the inevitable next step. Couples get to write their own rules instead. Who says there’s only one way to live happily ever after?
