Couples Living Apart Together

Dr. Robert T. Francoeur asks, "How much togetherness is healthy?"

In the social exuberance of the Roarin' 1920s, Margaret Mead began her search of a sexual Eden in the idyllic islands of the South Pacific where innocent children ran around naked, "night crawling" boys visited girls to ward off insanity with frequent sex, and both men and women were more or less free to enjoy sex with multiple partners. Mead's reports of growing up in New Guinea, Samoa, Bali, in what were then called "primitive societies" are still read today by those hoping to find or create a modern Garden of Eden. As with all pioneering research, Mead's accounts of sexual customs left some interesting questions unanswered. One that has long intrigued me is why adult South Pacific Islanders chose to live in sex-segregated housing. Men with men; women with women, even after marriage. Teenagers and adults in these societies have very positive, "liberal" views of sexual intimacy and pleasure. These people enjoy sex, and enjoy it frequently. But not living together in their own private home or apartment, as we do today. They get together when they want and find a private place to enjoy themselves, away from others, and then return to the men's or women's house. Five hundred years ago, European married couples lived in multi-generation, multi-family "big houses," with public baths, lots of varied contact among adults, and practically no privacy. Even a hundred years ago, most of our ancestors lived in small private homes and apartments usually with several generations of relatives. The shared space and lack of privacy kept a married couple's expectations of one-on-one intimacy, both erotic and non-erotic, within bounds -- "realistic" if you want. Despite many problems and tensions, some claim this extended family lifestyle had a climate of marital togetherness and personal expectations that may have been more healthy than the intense expectations we have today of passionate erotic love and daily togetherness over many decades in our own private castle. As our great grandparents moved from farm to city, the role of children in the family changed. On the farm, children contributed to the family economics. In the cities, child labor laws gradually converted children into long-term consumers, dependent on their parents for support through high school and college. Faced with the cost of raising children into their adult years, the average European woman today has 1.5 children, compared with 6 to 8 children a hundred years ago. Married couples developed new expectations of intimacy, togetherness, romanticism and erotic pleasure that please more demands on the marital bond than ever before in human history. In the past five years, as I worked on my International Encyclopedia of Sexuality, I found rates of marriage were declining in most European countries, while cohabitation, single parent families, and couples with one or no children are increasing. Strong evidence of major changes in our patterns of pair-bonding. Early on, Jelto Drenth and A. Koss Slob, who wrote about sex in The Netherlands for my Encyclopedia, caught my attention with a single sentence noting that a child born "out of wedlock" could be born to a cohabiting couple, a lesbian couple, an unwed homosexual or heterosexual woman, or "a child in a Living Apart Together (LAT) arrangement." A second mention of LAT came from Jan Trost in his chapter on Sweden. Given the lack of hard data on the sexual behavior of Swedish singles in 1996, Trost suggested that "quite a few of those who are officially classified as singles and even as living in one-person household very often are one way or another living in a dyadic relationship. Here I refer to those who are non-maritally cohabiting but who are classified, for a number of reasons, as living alone. I also refer to what is nowadays called LAT (Living Alone Together), couples living apart in separate households but still together as a couple. These dyadic relationships seem to be increasing gradually." When I mentioned LAT to Jakob Pastoetter in Berlin, his return e-mail explained the Germany's strong economy is the main reason for the growing number of LAT relations today. "If both partners have or want to have their own career, or if one or both partners can find work only in different cities, instead of taking the toll of commuting every day, many couples decide for two or even three households at least for some time." Then Pastoetter offered a hard statistic. "In Germany, more than 15 percent of all couples (married as well as unmarried) have this kind of weekend relationship. Higher education and flexibility make it more likely to live apart together." In the 1970s, we talked about married and other committed couples having a particular kind of LAT. We still call them "commuter marriages". A friend of mine has a steady secure job in New York; his partner has been offered a position of pastor in a Baltimore church. The church elders suggest the two make their relationship official with a wedding, but he spend five days in New York and the couple get together on weekends in Baltimore. LAT. Other variations of LAT are more interesting. For 25 years one wife I know maintained a triple career, her own professional work, raising four children, and serving as the doctor's supportive "Girl Friday", With her nest empty, the wife suggested they sell their big house and buy two smaller homes within a half mile of each other. They would then both have their private space, take responsibility for their own careers, and get together whenever they were so inclined. Living Apart Together: separate apartments or homes close to each other, with private time and space a priority within a long-term committed relationship. In one sense, LAT is a very old and traditional way of life, dating back to the agricultural world of Old Europe. In those days, few newly wed couples could afford to establish their own household. Only wealthy farmers, burghers, and aristocrats could afford to pay the bride prize or dowry sufficient for the newlywed couple to establish their own household. The younger sons and daughters of the wealthy could marry but the bride and groom usually continued living with their parents, LAT, until they could afford their own home. Likewise when poor day laborers and servants married. The alternative was to join a convent or the clergy. "In a sense," Pastoetter reminded me, "LAT relations are only new if we forget history." True, but what is new in LAT is the fact that increasing numbers of couples in Europe and North America are choosing to make a commitment to each other with the agreement that they will live separately. Consider that the Institute for Social and Economic Research in the U.K. predicts that one in five Brits will never marry. Down under, Peter McDonald, a demographer at the Australian National University, predicts that about a quarter of young Aussies will never get married. Chrissy Iley, writing recently in The London Sunday-Times, was not surprised at this. Young people don't want to [marry]. They don't see the point. They'd rather live together." With more and more of us living into our 80s, 90s, and beyond, small wonder the divorce rate is rising and we have serial monogamy. Chrissy married Spencer when she was very young. He was her first proper boyfriend and she innately knew they could make it together long term. They didn't even go for a trial marriage. She had only one expectation: her marriage would be forever. Only she did not realize how much a marriage could change as the years passed. When Spencer asked Charlie Wafts of the Rolling Stones the secret of his long marriage, he replied: "Separate bathrooms". So Chrissy and Spencer have separate homes. "This works for me because everybody needs an autonomous zone. Everyone needs love, but everyone needs space to feel that love." "The most interesting togetherness," Chrissy explains, "is when you know separateness. People fall out of marriages not because one day they wake up out of love, but often because they are crushed under the weight of domestic trivia. They become emotionally claustrophobic." Spencer and Chrissy have no children and she admits that with children marriage may make more sense than LAT. When Chrissy got married she had no idea she would end up in an LAT, but that, she says is "what works for me for now. I read a story last week about a woman who chose to be a housewife, how she took delight in making rack of lamb for her husband. It all sounded rather attractive and I began to wish I had the time for such events." "But it also sounded very between-the-wars. Marriage was different then because everything else was different. A woman's only job was homemaking. If the marriage ended, she lost her career as well. But also, why would a man want to leave a house that was a pretty palace, a kitchen that was always stuffed as wonderfully as his stomach? Obviously, he wouldn't and didn't as much." "Did people have affairs?" Chrissy asks. "Of course they did. And the affairs were recognized for what they were - diversions and ego pillows that can easily be provided by different people." I would suggest that we have unrealistically romanticized and eroticized marriage in our films, novels, and songs by focusing on its passionate "in love" birth. Marriage whether it is living together or apart together, is, as Chrissy says, "about something solid and safe." Few women today are willing to be a man's Total Woman domestic goddess. Women no longer spend most of their adult lives raising children. The two score years of togetherness our ancestors hoped for have now been replaced by "three score and ten" years together. That will take some creative adaptations, with LAT certainly among our short or long term options.