My Romantic Partner and I Don't Live Together. Here's Why

The first Golden Bachelorette says she wants separate residences, too.

By

Vicki Larson

 
Published November 27, 2024
gif illustration of wife and husband reading in different settings and then visiting each other at airport
Rami Niemi

As Joan Vassos, the first Golden Bachelorette — a spinoff of the Bachelor franchise — greeted the 24 men vying for her affection in her form-fitting sparkly gold gown, slurped homemade soup with one, drank prune juice with another and then played pickleball with all of them (in heels), she didn’t know too much about them. But there was one thing she wanted them to know about her: she would not move permanently away from her family for any of them.

Vassos was clear-eyed about that even when she was one of the women who sought the hand of Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner last fall. After five months of not-so-blissful matrimony, Gerry and Theresa Nist finalized their golden divorce. This, after their January 2024 wedding on ABC attracted a collective 7.13 million viewers during the live broadcast and streaming.

“That was actually the first question that Gerry asked me,” Vassos, a 61-year-old widow, said in a CNN interview earlier this year. “[He] said: ‘You live in Maryland, I live in Indiana. How do you see something like this working out?'" Her answer to him then, and now:

“You have to be willing to … travel and be with that person and maybe spend a couple of months or a couple of weeks at a time … and then maybe eventually, you figure out a destination that would work for you and your families or have another house where everybody gets together.”

Vassos is the inspirational face of finding love later in life for formerly married women. She is part of the trend of seniors tweaking what a loving committed partnership looks like and embracing what’s known as a "living apart together" (LAT) relationship, a growing lifestyle choice in the United States and across the globe.

And because it’s so attractive to Third Agers, some sociologists believe future studies of LAT relationships should consider older adults who see the lifestyle as a viable alternative to living with a romantic partner and not as a path to eventual cohabitation as a separate category. They propose that they be called LLATs, a term for those living apart together later in life.

At 68, I, too, prefer to live apart from my romantic partner, something I have mentioned to every man I’ve dated — or at least since I actually began to think more critically about marriage and romantic relationships since I divorced for the second time two decades ago.

But I didn’t come to this realization by choice. Like many people, I grew up believing romantic relationships could only look one way — you live together. That made sense to me in my 20s and 30s, when I was looking for a husband I could have children with. But after divorcing at age 48 with two young children, the thought of melding two households in some Brady Bunch-like arrangement seemed overwhelming and not the best way to raise my boys.

Still, I assumed my then-boyfriend and I would live together at some point when our kids got older. The longer he was vague about it, however, the more I started to realize that I enjoyed my freedom — something I didn’t allow myself to have during my marriage. I also started to realize how I missed my boyfriend when we were apart, and how that made our time together more intentional and precious.

It makes sense in part because, as law professor Cynthia Grant Bowman says, living apart allows an older couple to “keep their own familiar space, preserve their inheritance for their children and, in the case of women, protect themselves against gendered divisions of domestic labor characteristics of marriage.”

Yet, there are some important realities to consider if an older couple chooses commitment and separate residences. One primary consideration is retirement.

While many people look forward to retirement, imagining those happy golden years, the facts are that ending a career can cause a surge in anxiety, a loss of identity, loneliness and financial woes. Couples may also have differing retirement timings and goals. This issue can become more complicated when negotiating expenses and amounts of time spent together for couples living apart. Then there are the matters of health and travel between two homes.

If you live far from your LAT partner, transportation to see each other and financial concerns may make time spent together challenging. That could make it tempting to move in together, or at least move closer geographically. That could mean both people living away from family, friends, community and perhaps long-established healthcare providers. Even if an older LAT couple lives close enough to each other and are enjoying good health and mobility, how much time they want to spend together can cause some anxiety, too.

United Kingdom-based psychotherapist Pierre Cachia suggested to me that LAT couples should have important discussions, and agreement on, how they will deal with these issues of aging as early as possible in their relationships.

“It might be anything from shifting medical support centers, preparing family and friends for the transition, talking about the loss that will come from any shift in the shared LAT lifestyle,” Cachia says.

Finally, LAT couples need to consider their adult children, some of whom may act poorly once a parent becomes ill or incapacitated, their fears rising about caregiving and inheritances.

That could cause huge fractures. So, it’s important to consider your children’s thoughts about the expectations and responsibilities that come with LAT partnerships. Have those tough and honest conversations about caregiving and end-of-life planning, as well as spell those wishes out in legal documents.

Beyond these “housekeeping” issues, one of my crucial realizations about the success of LAT was emotional: I have come to realize how living with a romantic partner often leads couples to take each other for granted and to complacency. This clearly played out in my marriages.

And, I really don’t want to replicate the past.

Do any of you live apart from your partner? How's it going? Let us know in the comments below.

Vicki Larson is a longtime award-winning journalist at a San Francisco Bay Area newspaper, author of Not Too Old for That: How Women are Changing the Story of Aging (Rowman & Littlefield, April 2022) and co-author of The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels, (Seal Press, 2014), named a Best Book of 2014 by PopSugar. A resident of Marin County, California, her writing can be found in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Aeon, WHYY, Quartz, HuffPost and Medium.