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| Don’t mock the Redknapps. Living apart together can save a marriage | Don’t mock the Redknapps. Living apart together can save a marriage |
| (2 months later) | |
| Louise and Jamie Redknapp are recoupling part-time. When it allows each partner room to be themselves, having separate homes can be a good idea | |
| Fri 17 Nov 2017 06.00 GMT | |
| Last modified on Mon 27 Nov 2017 13.37 GMT | |
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| For the novelist Margaret Drabble and her biographer and husband Michael Holroyd, it was an arrangement that gave both the freedom to write. And for the actor Helena Bonham Carter and director Tim Burton, maintaining two separate adjoining apartments seemed the perfect if unconventional recipe for family life – at least until it ended in them splitting up. | For the novelist Margaret Drabble and her biographer and husband Michael Holroyd, it was an arrangement that gave both the freedom to write. And for the actor Helena Bonham Carter and director Tim Burton, maintaining two separate adjoining apartments seemed the perfect if unconventional recipe for family life – at least until it ended in them splitting up. |
| Yet the romantic grey area that is living apart together, or inhabiting not just separate bedrooms but separate homes, still holds a guilty allure for many long-serving couples. Imagine, time alone! Even just a couple of nights a week, whether to flop exhausted on the sofa and not have to talk, or to go out and enjoy the bright lights a homebody partner won’t; to be master of the remote control, eat crisps and wine for dinner instead of cooking, catch up with friends she or he never got on with – but all within the blissful security of a committed relationship. If it didn’t come larded with sotto voce questions about whether one of you is secretly having an affair, how many more couples would want to follow suit? | Yet the romantic grey area that is living apart together, or inhabiting not just separate bedrooms but separate homes, still holds a guilty allure for many long-serving couples. Imagine, time alone! Even just a couple of nights a week, whether to flop exhausted on the sofa and not have to talk, or to go out and enjoy the bright lights a homebody partner won’t; to be master of the remote control, eat crisps and wine for dinner instead of cooking, catch up with friends she or he never got on with – but all within the blissful security of a committed relationship. If it didn’t come larded with sotto voce questions about whether one of you is secretly having an affair, how many more couples would want to follow suit? |
| The former girl band singer Louise Redknapp and her footballer husband Jamie this week emerged as the newest potential recruits to the club. Having separated last year, after she announced that being a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing made her realise what a frustrated “Stepford wife” she had become tucked away in Surrey with the kids, the couple are now considering getting back together. But it’s a very specific kind of together, seemingly involving splitting her time between a place in London and the family home in Surrey. The question of whether that makes them married, amicably separated or something in between remains intriguingly blurred. | The former girl band singer Louise Redknapp and her footballer husband Jamie this week emerged as the newest potential recruits to the club. Having separated last year, after she announced that being a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing made her realise what a frustrated “Stepford wife” she had become tucked away in Surrey with the kids, the couple are now considering getting back together. But it’s a very specific kind of together, seemingly involving splitting her time between a place in London and the family home in Surrey. The question of whether that makes them married, amicably separated or something in between remains intriguingly blurred. |
| All of this is obviously rather easier for those rich enough to afford two homes (or one mansion with separate wings, à la Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson). But an estimated 9% of British couples now live apart together, and they can’t all be millionaires. They’re more likely to be army spouses with one half deployed overseas, long-distance commuters who stay away in digs a few nights a week, couples who met the love of their life overseas, or simply older people who got together relatively late – perhaps after a failed earlier marriage – and now don’t want to leave the comfort of their own homes. One recent study by researchers at the University of Missouri involving steady American couples over 60 who didn’t live together found they still saw themselves as perfectly committed but were resistant to giving up hard-won independence. | All of this is obviously rather easier for those rich enough to afford two homes (or one mansion with separate wings, à la Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson). But an estimated 9% of British couples now live apart together, and they can’t all be millionaires. They’re more likely to be army spouses with one half deployed overseas, long-distance commuters who stay away in digs a few nights a week, couples who met the love of their life overseas, or simply older people who got together relatively late – perhaps after a failed earlier marriage – and now don’t want to leave the comfort of their own homes. One recent study by researchers at the University of Missouri involving steady American couples over 60 who didn’t live together found they still saw themselves as perfectly committed but were resistant to giving up hard-won independence. |
| Often it’s not forever – Drabble and Holroyd started sharing a house again some years ago, and older “separateds” may also choose to move back in as they become frail and in need of care. But for every couple who hate being forced apart by circumstances, there’s probably another secretly thriving on it. Living apart together may, in other words, be less about rejecting commitment than about being open to different ways of doing it at different times of life. And if that’s not for everyone, divorce rates suggest that neither is the conventional model. | Often it’s not forever – Drabble and Holroyd started sharing a house again some years ago, and older “separateds” may also choose to move back in as they become frail and in need of care. But for every couple who hate being forced apart by circumstances, there’s probably another secretly thriving on it. Living apart together may, in other words, be less about rejecting commitment than about being open to different ways of doing it at different times of life. And if that’s not for everyone, divorce rates suggest that neither is the conventional model. |
| Where our grandparents were glued together, Generation X relationships rely on making each other happy enough to stay | Where our grandparents were glued together, Generation X relationships rely on making each other happy enough to stay |
| “Till death do us part” means a rather longer haul now than it did in biblical times, but the real challenge for contemporary couples isn’t just higher life expectancy. It’s higher expectations of how emotionally rewarding that life should be. | “Till death do us part” means a rather longer haul now than it did in biblical times, but the real challenge for contemporary couples isn’t just higher life expectancy. It’s higher expectations of how emotionally rewarding that life should be. |
| Where our grandparents were glued together by religious duty, the stigma of divorce and the very real fear of penury for women not equipped to support themselves outside marriage, Generation X relationships rely on making each other happy enough to stay. Mock us for our twee date nights if you like, but we have at least grasped that we can’t take forever for granted any more, that this whole thing needs work. Settle down at 30, and you’re looking down the barrel of half a century together, during which both sides hope never to feel bored or miserable or trapped or unfulfilled. That’s a big ask for all but the immensely lucky and adoring. | Where our grandparents were glued together by religious duty, the stigma of divorce and the very real fear of penury for women not equipped to support themselves outside marriage, Generation X relationships rely on making each other happy enough to stay. Mock us for our twee date nights if you like, but we have at least grasped that we can’t take forever for granted any more, that this whole thing needs work. Settle down at 30, and you’re looking down the barrel of half a century together, during which both sides hope never to feel bored or miserable or trapped or unfulfilled. That’s a big ask for all but the immensely lucky and adoring. |
| No wonder we seek ways of making relationships more elastic, more capable of accommodating life’s inevitable ups and downs – perhaps especially where small children are out of the equation. | No wonder we seek ways of making relationships more elastic, more capable of accommodating life’s inevitable ups and downs – perhaps especially where small children are out of the equation. |
| The expectation, if depressingly often not the reality, among younger couples is that they’ll be in the trenches of early parenthood together; that they’ll both work and both do their share at home, rather than one being stuck in the kitchen while the other slopes off cheerfully to the pub. It’s meant more intimate family lives in many ways, but the payback is that it’s not just stay-at-home mothers such as Redknapp who wake up 10 years later wondering dazedly what happened to the person they used to be, the one who appears to have died a death during the years where there was barely time to finish a cup of tea, let alone cultivate a personal hinterland. Once the kids are grown, how many working parents will crave a bit of space to reclaim these lost identities? Hence, perhaps, the emerging concept of a “marriage sabbatical” in later life, or temporary time off – to travel, to pursue selfish things – before coming home to the person that it turns out you never actually stopped loving. | The expectation, if depressingly often not the reality, among younger couples is that they’ll be in the trenches of early parenthood together; that they’ll both work and both do their share at home, rather than one being stuck in the kitchen while the other slopes off cheerfully to the pub. It’s meant more intimate family lives in many ways, but the payback is that it’s not just stay-at-home mothers such as Redknapp who wake up 10 years later wondering dazedly what happened to the person they used to be, the one who appears to have died a death during the years where there was barely time to finish a cup of tea, let alone cultivate a personal hinterland. Once the kids are grown, how many working parents will crave a bit of space to reclaim these lost identities? Hence, perhaps, the emerging concept of a “marriage sabbatical” in later life, or temporary time off – to travel, to pursue selfish things – before coming home to the person that it turns out you never actually stopped loving. |
| Living apart together can without doubt be lonely and stressful sometimes, although not always in the way outsiders think. (Separations, a naval wife once told me, get easier with practice but not reunions: you’ve just got the hang of coping, established a routine that suits the kids, and then he comes home and wants to change everything.) | Living apart together can without doubt be lonely and stressful sometimes, although not always in the way outsiders think. (Separations, a naval wife once told me, get easier with practice but not reunions: you’ve just got the hang of coping, established a routine that suits the kids, and then he comes home and wants to change everything.) |
| And to the cynical, separate lives will sound like the perfect cover for infidelity. But the point if anything of living apart together is to avoid those needlessly destructive affairs that stem from one partner desperately wanting to feel like their old self again, by not losing that self in the first place. | And to the cynical, separate lives will sound like the perfect cover for infidelity. But the point if anything of living apart together is to avoid those needlessly destructive affairs that stem from one partner desperately wanting to feel like their old self again, by not losing that self in the first place. |
| Temporary liberation from a partner’s maddening habits – wet towels dropped on bathroom floors, empty juice cartons carefully replaced in the fridge – can certainly help the heart grow fonder. But the real joy of the occasional absence is being able to stretch out in life a little, to remember how it feels to be a person rather than merely half a couple. The art of a really strong marriage is perhaps in being separate, but not separated; just enough apart to always be together. | Temporary liberation from a partner’s maddening habits – wet towels dropped on bathroom floors, empty juice cartons carefully replaced in the fridge – can certainly help the heart grow fonder. But the real joy of the occasional absence is being able to stretch out in life a little, to remember how it feels to be a person rather than merely half a couple. The art of a really strong marriage is perhaps in being separate, but not separated; just enough apart to always be together. |
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