Divide and conquer: married but separate

Whenever a newspaper runs a feature about a married couple who live apart—which happens more often than you’d think, at least every six months—the news crackles through the blogosphere, and my social circuit, on an electric current of raw, naked envy. “Oh my God—my own space, all to myself? How do people pull it off? What a dream,” sighs very happily married V. We’re absentmindedly browsing the racks in a consignment shop while discussing the latest instance, a story about a man and a woman in Vermont who constructed two separate houses connected by an enclosed bridge, when I’m overcome with déjà vu. I’d had this exact conversation six months ago, with very happily married S., after an article appeared about a woman who built her own (tiny, adorable) gingerbread cottage for alone time and occasional overnights, located across a stream and up the hill from the home she shares with her husband. Each time it’s as if we’re struck anew by this most novel arrangement, as if we’ve never heard of it before, as if I hadn’t been dreaming of it for a full decade, ever since Brooke Kroeger’s biography of the writer Fannie Hurst first planted the idea in my mind. If you’ve never heard of Hurst, she was the highest paid short-story writer of the first half of the twentieth century—a prolific Danielle Steele type, but one who wrote about immigrants and shopgirls. She was the author of 26 books that were adapted into 31 films, and her death in 1968 earned her a front-page obituary in The New York Times. Equally glamorous was her private life, which was the most winning blend of prim and sensational: On May 4, 1920, the Times broke the story that everyone’s favorite author, heretofore considered single, was in fact married to a dashing musician named Jacques Danielson, and had been for five years, and—I hope you’re sitting down for this—they lived in separate studio apartments in the same building on West 69th Street. The article opens: Sailed Into Matrimony With Pianist “in a Bark of Their Own Designing,” LIVE APART, THEIR OWN WAY Meet by Appointment—It’s a New Method Which Rejects “Antediluvian Custom.” In the story, Hurst explained that she considered nine out of 10 marriages to be “sordid endurance tests, overgrown with the fungi of familiarity and contempt,” and that by living separately from her husband, she was able to keep her most sacred relationship a “high-sheen damask” rather than a “breakfast cloth, stale with soft-boiled egg stains.” The press went wild, with all sorts of sanctimonious editorials and letters to the editor, inciting the chivalrous Danielson to publish, three days later, a charmingly reasonable defense of their living situation as being both loving and economical. “For those who seem to think that I am being cheated of the carpet slipper, fire-side aspect of domesticity,” he wrote, “whenever I find the ache beginning to set in for the comfortable sag of the patent rocker, I need only to drop in at Miss Hurst’s for one of the delicious homemade dinners her maid of five years permanency knows so well how to prepare.” Convinced readers took note, and for a while, among those who could afford it, a “Fannie Hurst marriage” was much in vogue. I was living with a boyfriend when I first read about Hurst, and I’d grown increasingly anxious about whether I could continue it long-term. Our daily intimacy, though so lovely and cozy, somehow didn’t suit me. I didn’t know what to make of this. Was I one of those selfish, noncommittal Peter Pan types who couldn’t grow up? Ironically, I hugely enjoyed our domestic life together—we both loved to cook and lounge and talk and read, and he was generously tolerant of my messy ways. (He figured out, for instance, that my awful habit of tossing my clothes on the floor could be accommodated with an armchair in the bedroom; I’d fling every­thing on it throughout the week, then deal with the mountain come Saturday.) But my brain felt crowded, as if I couldn’t hear myself think; I longed to wake up in my own bed in the morning, with my own thoughts. And I wanted more mystery, too, more of a sense that we were separate people with our own lives and interests who were choosing to spend the evening together because we wanted to, not because we were too lazy to leave the house. For all these reasons, a Fannie Hurst marriage seemed the perfect solution, a way to retain our own independence while also being committed to each other. But I could never find the courage to bring it up. Eventually we broke things off, and I haven’t lived with anyone since. Little did I know as I fretted over my inability to grow up that researchers were hard at work legitimizing Hurst-style arrangements as a historically new family form called Living Apart Together (LAT). Hard numbers are impossible to come by, given that the Census Bureau doesn’t count this demographic, but it has become increasingly common for two people in a loving, committed union, married or otherwise, to maintain separate living quarters. One survey indicates that in the United States some 6 percent of women and 7 percent of men live separately from their partners; throughout northern Europe, it’s about 10 percent—a quarter of all the people there who live alone. For celebrity endorsements, look no further than Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton, who keep side-by-side town­houses in London; Anita Hill and her long-term boyfriend, Chuck Malone, who maintain separate houses in Massachusetts; and the 2010 National Book Award winner, Jaimy Gordon, whose husband, Peter Blickle, lives a 20-minute stroll away—most evenings she walks her dog over to his place. Through the 1980s, Mia Farrow and Woody Allen commuted back and forth across uptown Manhattan (of course, that didn’t end very well). The arrangement naturally suits artists and writers (see Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre), who tend to have deep appetites for solitude. And there are those whose professions necessitate long-term deployments, such as missionaries and members of the military. But the new ranks of LATs are everyday couples who just happen to find that they’re happier together when living apart.