For some people, it started with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, grew stronger with Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter, and has since been validated by Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor. For others, it was realizing that the key to their grandparents’ long, loving marriage was separate bedrooms and bathrooms. For me, it was years of ambient, abstract thoughts that one day coalesced into an assertion: I’m happily married, but I’d be happier living alone.
More Americans than ever are married but living separately, and more of them are crediting it with keeping their marriages happy.
This was difficult to say then, and it’s not much easier now. Couplehood and cohabitation have always gone hand in hand: You fall in love and move in together; you get married and buy a house together; the co-mingling of habits, quirks, and material goods is evidence of commitment and maturity. Romantic pairings that don’t prioritize living under one roof — long-distance relationships, for instance — still generate suspicion and unease. And the tacit understanding of romantic success as two people whose love for each other inevitably leads to pair-bonded domesticity means that living alone is still framed as a kind of purgatorial waiting room, the parking lot at the grand institution of marriage. Don’t get too comfortable, you won’t be here forever.
Marriage itself, though, has seen much better days. The marriage rate dipped below 50% in 2010 and has trended further downward ever since. Faith leaders and politicians tend to blame this on women being too educated and independent; economists chalk it up to income inequality; sociologists point to weaponized incompetence and your mother just thinks you’re too picky. But what if it’s not marriage itself that’s falling out of favor, but cohabitation? As of 2023, roughly 3.89 million people are married but live separately, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s “America’s Families and Living Arrangements” report. That number represents less than 3% of married people — but it also grew by more than 25% between 2000 and 2019. More Americans than ever are married but living separately, and more of them are crediting it with keeping their marriages happy.
The phenomenon of Living Apart Together has been called a philosophy, a movement, and even a revolution. But for a lot of people, it’s just confirmation that wanting to be with someone doesn’t mean needing to live with them. “If I had accepted [my ex’s] proposal and then said ‘But I don’t want to live together,’ it would have confused everyone,” says Nicola, a 39-year-old whose traditional first marriage didn’t last long. “It would have been like, ‘There’s something wrong with her.’ But I didn’t even know that was an option.”
A look at Reddit’s “Living Apart Together” forum suggests that she’s far from alone. A majority of people now in LAT relationships discovered them after feeling like they’d failed at cohabitation: the worry that wanting to live apart from the person you love is selfish or deviant turns a lot of great relationships into miserable ones. “We hit a rough patch five years ago and separated,” one post reads. “A little time and distance made us realize how much we love each other, but we never moved back in together because we also both realized that we really, really like living alone.” “I wish I had figured this out years ago,” laments another. “It took until my early 60s, after three divorces.” Living together separately isn’t always an option — but knowing you’re not a freak for wanting to can be a relief regardless.
There’s a bounty of reasons people find it difficult to share a home with a partner: One of you is a neat freak and the other a pack rat; one goes to bed at 9 p.m. sharp while the other works until the wee hours. One of you wants three dogs and the other wants no dogs and one bird. And sometimes it’s just hard to assure the person you love that you’re not rejecting them. “I have somehow always found myself living with partners who are extroverts, while I am a pretty extreme introvert,” says Jenny, who lives alone after a recent divorce. “I can turn it on when I need to and feel comfortable doing so, but I need a lot of alone time. [And] when you’re living with someone, you run out of excuses for how to be like ‘I need alone time now’ that don’t come across like ‘I’m sick of your face.’”
The institution of marriage, after all, has spent a lot of time surveying its entrants through narrowed, accusatory eyes — suggesting, for instance, that having separate friendships and interests is a slippery slope into nefarious territory, or that if you can’t be every person your spouse needs (partner, lover, confidant, friend, cheerleader, shrink) you’re not trying hard enough. LAT relationships aren’t a refutation of marriage, but they are often a kind of corrective to the received wisdom of what marriages should be. “So much of our culture depicts young girls dreaming about their weddings. But every middle-aged woman I know dreams about living alone in the woods, maybe with a dog,” wrote Lyz Lenz in her 2024 book “This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life,” a line that had me pointing in Leonardo DiCaprio–esque recognition when I read it. For those who did everything they were told was important and necessary — getting married, setting up house, having children — an LAT relationship is a fresh new page in their adult lives, a slate wiped clean of instructions and expectations.
“So much of our culture depicts young girls dreaming about their weddings. But every middle-aged woman I know dreams about living alone in the woods, maybe with a dog.”
“The people in my life who have been weird about it, I don’t think they think I’m cheating on my partner, but they do see it as cheating,” says Nicola, echoing a number of Reddit posts about barbed or resentful comments that accuse LAT couples of playing marriage on easy mode or violating the code of compulsory heterosexuality that sees marriage as a commitment to a spouse and to children but also, in some unavoidable way, to an equitably shared dissatisfaction. Nicola, who doesn’t have children, likens it to an attitude she heard a lot in her early 30s from people who seemed to think her choices were a condemnation of theirs: “Why do you get to skip that part? That’s not fair!”
It’s not surprising that women appear to be the most enthusiastic adopters of LAT life, with the COVID-19 pandemic often cited as an inflection point. Studies consistently show that women in heterosexual marriages and partnerships take on disproportionate shares of chores, childcare, and what’s known as the mental load: making doctor’s appointments, knowing when the oil needs to be changed and the coffee filters replaced, remembering birthdays and arranging holiday plans. Research findings are consistent regardless of work schedules and number of children; indeed, women with more prestigious jobs or higher salaries than their male partners often end up with more to do at home — a kind of gender tax that pops up even in otherwise egalitarian relationships.
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The number of women who refer approvingly to Whoopi Goldberg’s statement on why she’s done with marriage (“I don’t want someone in my house”) on social media and who consider Burton and Bonham Carter “couple goals” despite the fact that they split up a decade ago echoes Lenz’s experience with women hankering for life alone in the woods. One Reddit poster refers to “the fights you won’t have” over things like who didn’t remind someone that the rent was due and who doesn’t know how to load a dishwasher like a civilized human — “the friction that doesn’t even come into existence” because there’s no impetus for it. LAT relationships have their own frictions and pitfalls; they’re just less likely to be about the same set of domestic matters time and again.
And the reasons LAT relationships work are often straightforwardly practical. The high cost of living, for instance, means that two people who live in rent-controlled apartments in big cities will likely be priced out of renting a larger place if they give up those apartments. Partners who both have children often find blended cohabitation a challenge. And then there’s sleep: Very few Americans get enough as it is, and sleep-related changes that come with aging — the need for props like CPAP machines and ergonomic body pillows, menopausal night sweats, or suddenly misaligned sleep schedules — often catalyze LAT relationships.
After being diagnosed with sleep apnea at 56, for instance, “I went from being ‘guy who snores like a mariachi band’ to ‘guy with a vacuum-cleaner hose stuck on his face.’ Neither very attractive, both pretty humiliating,” says Angus. “It just became easier and felt more altruistic to say ‘Love you, I’m gonna head home.’ In the long run, the time we spend together awake is much more important to me.” Nicola speaks semi-reverently about a woman in her 70s who has had two LAT marriages since her 50s but shares sleeping hours exclusively with her three cats. And as someone who sleeps best like the Nordic person I absolutely am not, Cameron Diaz speaks for me with her campaign to “normalize separate bedrooms.”
But I also don’t think we need to call these things “sleep divorce,” either. Living apart together, like traditional cohabitating, is no guarantee of happily-ever-after, but chipping away at the stigma around it is making a difference to people who feel alone in wanting to live separately. “I spend more time wanting to see this person than I would if we lived together,” says Nicola. “I love that we make a choice every day to say that you’re the one.”
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