IT STARTED with a kiss under the mistletoe at a Christmas party in a friend’s manor house in France. Given that he lived near by and she lived in the Midlands, it progressed slowly. Less of a coup de foudre, more of a slow burn. They went out, they stayed in, they discovered shared passions. A routine trip on a Brittany ferry turned into a romantic cruise. Contrary to most expectations, they fell in love. Soon they were invited everywhere as a couple and set about introducing each other to their combined total of 12 delighted children and grandchildren.
What they did not do is move in together. They tried it, and found that, when you are a new couple in your early seventies, you can have too much baggage to fit under one roof. She could not bear to give up her circle of friends, nor her cosy home in England, close to most of her grandchildren. He never contemplated leaving his established career as an artist in France, nor his spectacular studio with its views over the rooftops of a historic medieval town. In addition, they realised that sharing their assets would mean bequeathing their heirs some nasty headaches. Taken all round, the merging of two mature lives required emotional engineering on the scale of the Forth Bridge. The pain to pleasure ratio, especially for an autumnal relationship, looked uncomfortably high.
Friends were startled to discover that their solution is quite common among couples at their life-stage, something that sociologists have only just begun to notice. It has also acquired a name, or rather an ungainly acronym, LATting. LAT stands for Living Apart Together, meaning being a couple, perhaps even getting married, but not cohabiting. It is going steady for grown-ups.
LATting is not a new idea. Couples rich enough to maintain two households and powerful enough to defy social conventions have sometimes chosen this third way of being together. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy spring to mind, keeping separate households for the duration of their love affair, an arrangement that left her much-prized independence intact and allowed him the latitude to maintain the shell of his marriage to an ailing wife and the privacy to indulge in occasional drinking binges.
In London in the 1980s, the literary golden couple Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd married but lived apart, she in Hampstead and he in Ladbroke Grove. What is new is that LAT relationships are no longer only for the rich and famous. Ordinary people, enjoying a higher standard of living than ever before in later life, are choosing this ideal blend of independence and commitment.
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The Dutch, ever in the vanguard of alternative lifestyle development, noticed the trend first, when a sociologist analysed statistics on love and marriage in the over-55s and discovered that about 24 per cent of those who considered themselves to be part of a couple were neither married nor living together, nor had any plans to change their status.
“A new and rapidly increasing phenomenon,” concluded Professor Jenny de Jong Gierveld, of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Her survey found that LATting was most popular with older couples, with women, with richer folk and with those previously married more than once. When the couples were interviewed, the reasons for their choices were often the same as the considerations that weighed heavily with my friends: they did not want to deconstruct rewarding and important parts of their lives for the sake of the new relationship, or to embark on costly financial rearrangements.
Soon, lonely-hearts ads began to appear in Dutch newspapers from people wanting LAT relationships. Studies in Norway and Canada confirmed the trend, and at the University of Leeds, Sasha Roseneil — a Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies engaged on a five-year research programme on modern relationships — also began a project to examine the phenomenon. Her findings will be published early in 2006.
In Britain, Roseneil found the same decisions being made for the same reasons. “People are embedded in their existing relationships. They have pre-existing commitments that they value, often to children or to elderly parents whose lives they don’t want to disrupt. Or they may want time to themselves for their own friends or their hobbies.”
LATters, she discovered, were typically confident enough to design their own alternative lifestyle, and were often also prudent people who knew the downside of excessive intimacy. Sometimes they had been hurt before. “I love him too much, therefore I don’t want to live with him,” explained a wary divorcée.
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Professor Roseneil found that “many people are doing this because they don’t trust very much any more. They have experienced a divorce or the breakdown of a relationship, they have been through a lot of pain and they have built their self-confidence up again slowly. Now they are afraid of putting all their eggs in one basket once more.”
LAT relationships are often the woman’s choice, with older women reporting little motivation to take on responsibility for the laundry, housework or cooking for yet another person. “They say ‘I’ve looked after one man, I’ve brought up kids, I don’t want to have to do all that again’,” Professor Roseneil notes.
Men, on the other hand, like the sense of independence. “We both have freedom,” one said simply. To both sexes, the LAT relationship is a way to skim the cream of a love affair. “One of our respondents said ‘I get all the good bits. I get to go out, have fun, see someone on their best behaviour most of the time, and I don’t have to have any of the bad bits’.”
As she begins to analyse her research, Professor Roseneil is getting a picture of people in the baby-boom generation and beyond who have never been bound by social conventions and are used to experimenting with different ways of living.
Her findings agree with those of Gierveld in the Netherlands, who reports: “Adults entering their middle years and beyond in the early decades of the 21st century will have experienced a greater diversity of relationship and marital experiences in their lifetimes than did earlier generations. This may result in an increased share of LAT relationships among older adults in the future.”
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Professor Roseneil argues that “people who are in their sixties now are not the older people of 20 or 30 years ago. They may have lived together with earlier partners, or sustained a distance marriage. People are consciously creating a way of life for themselves, which is a really interesting change.
“Sociologists talk about ‘detraditionalisation’,” she adds. “If the relationship revolution of the post-Sixties was to break the link between sex and marriage, so that cohabitation became a new form, then the revolution now is breaking the link between sex and living together, so that relationships are sustained across two households.”