We’re hoping for a better outcome.
For the four and a half years that we’ve been together, we’ve been apart, me in Manhattan, Tom in Brooklyn, at least most of the workweek, and during chunks of the weekend, too. We tell our friends that it’s a borough standoff, a game of Big Apple chicken, but that’s just a line and a lie, a deflection of the questions you field when you challenge the mythology of romance.
Moving in with each other: that’s supposed to be the ultimate prize, the real consummation. You co-sign a lease, put both names on the mailbox, settle on a toothpaste and the angels weep.
But why not seize the intimacy without forfeiting the privacy? Establish a different rhythm? One night with him, one night with a pint of Chubby Hubby and “Monday Night Football” or a marathon of “Scandal,” my wit on ice, my stomach muscles on hiatus, my body sprawling ever less becomingly across the couch. Isn’t that the definition of having it all?
Others think so. On Wikipedia there’s a phrase, a page and an acronym devoted to the likes of Tom and me, a tribe grown larger over the last few decades. We’re “Living Apart Together,” and we’re not loopy, we’re LAT, just as Woody and Mia weren’t freaks, just trailblazers, until he blazed his trail to a less trammeled pasture. By one estimate at least 6 percent of American couples married and unmarried — Tom and I belong to the latter group — don’t cohabitate. For Western Europeans, naturally, the figure seems to be higher. They have their problems and their airs over there, but they’ve always been expert at leisure and love.
The LAT life is healthy, according to all the studies. O.K., one study, admittedly puny in scope, but it just came out. Published in the current issue of the Journal of Communication, it closely followed 63 couples, about half of whom lived together and half of whom couldn’t, separated by circumstance rather than choice. The couples in commuter relationships said that their conversations were less frequent but deeper. They confessed more, listened harder and experienced a greater sense of intimacy. Absence worked its aphoristic magic on the heart. Fondness bloomed, no doubt because covers didn’t get stolen and someone else’s dishes weren’t left in the sink.
Just as there are couples with distance forced on them, there are couples with no option other than proximity, given the cost of two households or the kids in the mix. But there are also couples like Tom and me. We’d made our own homes before meeting each other. We’d tailored our budgets accordingly. We relish a measure of independence, can vanquish loneliness with a subway ride and don’t feel much loneliness in the first place. He’s in my head all the time.
Or he’s on my screen. That’s the thing about our wired age: apart is actually the new together, because alone isn’t alone anymore. On top of calling, there’s Skyping, e-mailing, texting, sexting: a Kama Sutra of electronic intercourse. Why bother with movers and bicker over wall art?
Even in earlier eras, before the ready meeting place of cyberspace, this sort of arrangement worked. Fannie Hurst, a hugely popular short-story writer in the early 20th century, and her husband had separate studio apartments in the same building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They made appointments to see each other. She explained that most of the other marriages she’d observed were “sordid endurance tests, overgrown with the fungi of familiarity and contempt.” Tom and I don’t want to be fungal. On this we’re resolute.
by Frank Bruni, NY Times | Read more:
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