Abstract
This paper examines how people living apart together (LATs) maintain their relationships, and describes how they view this living arrangement. It draws on a 2011 survey on LAT in Britain, supplemented by qualitative interviewing. Most LATs in Britain live close to their partners, and have frequent contact with them. At the same time most see LAT in terms of a monogamous, committed couple, where marriage remains a strong normative reference point, and see living apart as not much different from co-residence in terms of risk, emotional security or closeness. Many see themselves living together in the future. However, LAT does appear to make difference to patterns of care between partners. In addition, LATs report advantages in terms of autonomy and flexibility. The paper concludes that LAT allows individuals some freedom to manoeuvre in balancing the demands of life circumstances and personal needs with those of an intimate relationship, but that practices of LAT do not, in general, represent a radical departure from the norms of contemporary coupledom, except for that which expects couples to cohabit.
Highlights
Up to now sociological interest has mainly focussed on the question of why people live apart together
Are living apart together (LAT) ‘conventional’ couples who happen to live apart, or does LAT mean a different sort of relationship? Answering these questions provides another way of approaching the sociological question identified above about whether, or not, LAT marks a radical departure in doing intimacy
Daily life: distance, contact and time together How do people carry out the daily life of relationships when partners live separately? A crucial finding is that most LATs live near one another, many very near
Summary
Up to now sociological interest has mainly focussed on the question of why people live apart together. See LAT as another stage on the well-established route to cohabitation and marriage. This would be little more than a continuation, even a renaming, of conventional relationship practices like boy/girlfriend “courtship”, or enforced spousal separation (see Duncan et al 2013 for review of this debate). Answering these questions provides another way of approaching the sociological question identified above about whether, or not, LAT marks a radical departure in doing intimacy. This is the issue we take up in this paper
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