I Love You - Now Go Home

The next time your partner inexplicably leaves dirty laundry around the house, remember that some happily married couples dont have to deal with that. Meet the apartners.

- Cady Drell

I’m pretty sure my last live-in relationship would still be intact if we’d just had separate bathrooms. After five years, little differences in our preferences and routines started seriously getting to us: we worked opposite hours, and he liked to shake off stress by going out a lot with other people, while I liked to retreat to our cocoon-like bedroom and binge on Netflix shows. In the end, compromising on what we wanted just to share space made us feel like we’d stopped growing as individuals. Once we broke up, I wondered if I’d ever reconcile my need for serious alone time with the fact that being with someone means being with them.

So I was intrigued when my friend, Esihle Dlamini, 29, revealed that she and her husband live in different apartments. This arrangement, she explained, gives her space to pursue her work and hobbies, and helps them better understand what’s actually going on with each other. “We enjoy this idea that there is a space we each have to ourselves that nobody else is going to enter for a period of time,” says Esihle of her marriage. “I don’t think it really forces communication.”

Turns out, this arrangement is kind of a thing. Sociologists call it ‘living apart together’, or LAT, and it’s distinctly different from the phenomenon of commuter relationships, in which couples live apart for their jobs but typically see an end date to this. LAT couples are fully committed, even married, but they specifically choose not to live together.