Living Apart Together: Does Commitment Have to Share an Address?

Most of us have been given a fairly recognizable map for how a serious romantic relationship is “supposed” to develop.  You date.  You become exclusive or otherwise define the relationship.  You spend more time together.  Eventually you share a home, combine more of your lives, perhaps marry, and become increasingly interdependent.

For many, that progression works well.  It can provide companionship, economic stability, shared caregiving, family identity, and the ordinary intimacy that develops from brushing your teeth beside someone for years.

For others, they want the relationship without the shared address.

Living Apart Together (LAT) generally refers to intimate partners who understand themselves as being in a committed relationship while maintaining separate residences.  Sometimes that arrangement is temporary.  Work, school, custody arrangements, finances, immigration, family obligations, or geography may make living together impractical for a period of time.  Other couples could live together and deliberately choose not to (Giraud, 2023; Strohm et al., 2009).

That second group can be harder for people to understand because separate homes disrupt one of our usual markers of relationship seriousness.  If you love one another, why wouldn’t you eventually live together?  There are a surprising number of answers.

What Living Apart Together Can Look Like

LAT is not one particular kind of relationship.  Research on couples who live apart has consistently found considerable variation in why people do it and what the arrangement means to them (Benson & Coleman, 2016; Giraud, 2023).

For some, maintaining a home of their own protects forms of independence they value.  They may enjoy having control over their physical environment, routines, sleep, finances, parenting, or time alone.  Someone who has spent decades caring for partners, children, or family members may feel particularly reluctant to reorganize a household around another adult again.  A less separate version of this can often seen in couples with separate bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, or whole floors of a shared home.

Previous relationships can be an influence.  People who have experienced difficult marriages, divorce, unequal household labor, caregiving burdens, or the gradual disappearance of their own interests inside a relationship may approach cohabitation differently the next time around (Benson & Coleman, 2016).

There are also couples who simply function well this way.  They spend substantial time together, provide emotional and practical support, have satisfying sexual and romantic relationships, know one another’s families, make long-term plans, and still go home to different beds, rooms, and even addresses.

Living apart does not tell us very much by itself.

A couple maintaining separate homes because both partners genuinely value the arrangement is in a different situation from a couple living apart because one partner refuses greater commitment, because conflict makes cohabitation intolerable, or because finances and custody arrangements leave them with no other realistic option.  Those couples may look identical on a demographic questionnaire while having very different clinical concerns (Benson & Coleman, 2016; Giraud, 2023).

We Tend to Bundle Relationships Together

LAT becomes particularly interesting when we start separating parts of relationships that are often treated as though they naturally come as a package.

Consider how many different questions are hidden inside the phrase serious relationship:

  • Do we live together?
  • Are we sexually exclusive?
  • Are we romantically exclusive?
  • Do we consider one another primary partners?
  • How much of our finances are shared?
  • How often do we see each other?
  • How involved are we with one another’s families?
  • Who provides care when someone is sick?
  • Do we make major decisions together?
  • Are we legally married?
  • Are we planning a future together?
  • What commitments have we actually made to one another?

Those dimensions certainly affect each other, but one does not automatically determine the others.

A married couple can share a home and have very little emotional intimacy.  Two people living several miles apart can organize their lives around a deeply committed partnership.  Someone can value considerable independence while also being highly dependable when their partner needs them.  Two partners can share finances without sharing bedrooms.  Others may share a bedroom while keeping their finances almost entirely separate.

Once those pieces are separated, couples have more room to talk about what each piece actually means to them.

LAT Can Exist in Monogamous and Nonmonogamous Relationships

Living Apart Together is also separate from whether a relationship is monogamous.

A monogamous LAT couple may be sexually and romantically exclusive while maintaining two homes.  An ethically nonmonogamous or polyamorous person might live with one partner and live apart from another, live alone while maintaining several committed relationships, or maintain separate households within a relationship network.  I can’t tell you how many of my poly folx have said how awesome it would be to have everyone in tiny homes on a big piece of land.  Big families living on homesteads or in the same apartment community know a little about this.

Relationship anarchy takes the questioning of these assumptions further.  Rather than beginning with a predetermined hierarchy of romantic partner, spouse, family, friendship, and other relationships, relationship anarchist approaches tend to ask people to define the commitments within each relationship more deliberately (Nordgren, 2006).

Clients often express fear about abandoning commitment.  More often, it requires talking about commitment with considerably more specificity.

Eri Kardos’s work on relationship agreements offers a useful way of approaching this clinically.  Partners can identify both explicit agreements and expectations they have been carrying without ever discussing them.  Where will we live?  How will we handle sex with other people?  What information do we expect to share?  Who gets access to our home?  How much time do we expect together?  What does caregiving look like?  What constitutes betrayal?  What decisions do we make jointly? (Kardos, 2016)

Couples make these agreements whether they discuss them or not.  Some agreements are inherited from family, religion, culture, previous relationships, or assumptions about what couples are “supposed” to do.  Making them explicit gives partners the chance to discover what they agree on or are taking for granted (Kardos, 2016).

The Clinical Question Is Usually “What Does This Arrangement Do?”

Even therapists can easily import our own ideas about relationship development into the room.  One clinician might see separate residences as evidence that a relationship is stalled.  Another might romanticize LAT as a particularly enlightened way of maintaining independence.  Neither assumption tells us much about the people sitting in front of us.  Related research with CNM clients has likewise found that affirming and inappropriate therapist practices are associated with how helpful clients perceive therapy to be and whether they terminate prematurely (Schechinger et al., 2018).

When I’m working with clients, I am more interested in what function the arrangement is serving inside a particular relationship.

  • Does having separate homes allow both people enough autonomy that they can engage one another more fully when they are together?
  • Does it reduce chronic arguments about household labor or parenting?
  • Does it preserve an important sense of identity?
  • Does it make a complicated family system more manageable?

Or

  • Does living apart allow an unresolved problem to remain unresolved?
  • Does one person want more integration while the other keeps moving the threshold?
  • Is distance being used to regulate attachment anxiety or avoid conflict?
  • Are partners describing the arrangement as mutual when one of them is quietly hoping it will change?

Those questions can also change over time.  An arrangement that worked beautifully for five years may stop working when someone becomes ill, retires, loses income, has a child, begins caring for an aging parent, or simply wants something different.

There is no structural arrangement that protects a couple from having to be vulnerable and renegotiate boundaries and expectations.

You Are Allowed to Ask What Actually Works

People often arrive in therapy because the relationship they have does not quite match the relationship they think they want to have.

Sometimes the work involves helping partners move toward greater connection or commitment.  Sometimes it involves helping them recognize that they want different things.  Sometimes they discover that the structure causing them anxiety is mostly an inherited expectation.

Living Apart Together gives us another way to ask a broader question: Which forms of closeness help these particular people remain connected while still being able to remain themselves?

That might eventually mean moving in together, or not.  What works for you?

Written by: Daniel Stillwell, Ph.D., LMFT

Daniel Stillwell, PhD, LMFT - Clinical Director and a Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT) at the South Asheville branch of Matone Counseling.Daniel Stillwell (he/him) is the Clinical Director and a Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT) at the South

Asheville branch of Matone Counseling. He has an LMFT in North Carolina and is a nationally credentialed (AAMFT) MFT supervisor. After receiving his masters in MFT from Louisville Seminary, he went on to earn a PhD in Family Therapy from Saint Louis University. He has practiced on and off since 2008, spending several years also as a professor of MFT for different universities. His passions for client care and organizational leadership are a great match for Matone Counseling and he has been delighted to be a part of the team since 2019.

References and Further Reading

Benson, J. J., & Coleman, M. (2016). Older adults developing a preference for living apart together. Journal of Marriage and Family, 78(3), 797–812.

Carter, J., Duncan, S., Stoilova, M., & Phillips, M. (2016). Sex, love and security: Accounts of distance and commitment in living apart together relationships. Sociology, 50(3), 576–593.

Giraud, C. (2023). Living apart together: 40 years of sociodemographic research on LAT relationships. Population, 78(1), 51–82.

Kardos, E. (2016). Relationship agreements: A simple and effective guide for strengthening communication, reducing conflict, and increasing intimacy to design your ideal relationship. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Lambert-Shute, J. J., & Nguyen, H. N. (2020). Living apart together: Cultivating new possibilities in old age. Family Therapy Magazine, 19(5), 26–29. https://ftm.aamft.org/living-apart-together-cultivating-new-possibilities-in-old-age/

Nordgren, A. (2006). The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy. The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andie-nordgren-the-short-instructional-manifesto-for-relationship-anarchy

Schechinger, H. A., Sakaluk, J. K., & Moors, A. C. (2018). Harmful and helpful therapy practices with consensually non-monogamous clients: Toward an inclusive framework. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 86(11), 879–891.

Strohm, C. Q., Seltzer, J. A., Cochran, S. D., & Mays, V. M. (2009). “Living apart together” relationships in the United States. Demographic Research, 21, 177–214.