Living Apart Together: Two Homes, One Couple, and the Part About Money

A client of mine told me flat out that he would never live with anybody. I put it on his profile, worded carefully, and about twelve introductions later I had the couple.

Living Apart Together: The Short Answer

Living apart together means a committed, monogamous couple who keep two separate homes on purpose. They speak every day, travel together, introduce each other as partners, and then each go back to their own bed and their own kitchen.

It is not a trial separation and it is not long distance that happened by accident. Nearly everybody I see doing it is over fifty and meeting somebody new after one long marriage has already ended.

And here’s the part that doesn’t come up on the first date. The reason is very often MONEY. Trusts already written. Grown children who know exactly what they inherit. A late husband’s insurance policy that a remarriage would cancel.

I have a couple living exactly this way right now. He was an early client of mine here in Santa Fe, and it took about twelve introductions to get there. I’ll show you what I wrote on his profile further down, because the wording is the whole trick.

What a LAT Relationship Actually Is, and Who Chooses One

I’ve been matchmaking since 1990, and across every hour of conversation I’ve recorded with matchmakers, therapists and divorce attorneys, exactly one guest has said the phrase out loud. That’s Gabriella Aratow, an Aspen matchmaker who has run her own firm, Keeper Introduction Services, for just over nine years.

So the definition here is hers. She finds it mostly among people who meet later in life, often divorcees in their sixties. Here is what she hears them say:

I raised a family, I made sacrifices, it was all good while it happened. But I don’t want to cohabitate again. I would like to have a girlfriend slash boyfriend, we are monogamous, we are committed, we call each other every day, we’re a couple, but we’re going to keep our residences separate.

Gabriella Aratow, Keeper Introduction Services

Then she added a qualifier, and I want it high on this page rather than buried, because it’s the honest edge of the trend. “But those are typically not people who’ve lived together for decades and had children together.”

Read that plainly. LAT is mostly chosen by people who did the cohabiting marriage once, finished it, and are meeting somebody new. It is not usually thirty-year couples deciding to un-cohabit. If that’s you, you’re the exception, and you need a therapist more than a matchmaker.

My friend Julie Spira, the online dating expert who’s been at this since Love@AOL in 1994, gave me the cleanest one-line version I’ve heard. Two people commit, provide for each other in their estates, never file anything, and what they have is, in her words, a relationship equivalent to a marriage without the paper.

Why So Many People Are Doing This Now

There’s a number people like to quote for how common this is. I’m not giving you one, because the versions I’ve seen don’t agree with each other. What I can give you is what I see.

Holly Moore, a California family law attorney who mostly represents men, said something on the show I’ve thought about ever since. “Historically we were only ever supposed to be married for like 20 or 30 years. And then we died.”

That’s exactly right. A fifty-year marriage is a modern invention, and we’re still working out what to do with the extra decades nobody planned for.

So a great many long marriages now end in the sixties and seventies.

Julie Spira calls that gray divorce, and her framing beats mine: it isn’t a failure, it’s a courageous recalibration.

Then there’s who’s actually out there. Past sixty there are far more single women than single men, and I’ve run that arithmetic on dating over 60. Many of those women have run a household for forty years and won’t hand anyone the keys in a hurry.

Add remote work and video calls, which Gabby and I agree have made two addresses far more workable than fifteen years ago, and you have a generation with the means and the reason to keep their own front door.

The Real Reason: Trusts, Insurance and Grown Children

Almost 40,000 people have registered with me privately over the years, so I’ve seen plenty of the paperwork behind the romance. Most people I meet in their fifties, sixties and seventies who are dating already have their trusts set up, and their children know what to expect when their parent dies.

So it is, in my experience, very unlikely that somebody with significant resources remarries past about fifty-five.

That’s an observation from my desk, not a study.

I put it to Julie Spira, and her answer named the alternatives. Some stay eternally engaged, the way Oprah has. Others say it flat out: I don’t want to marry again, because I have an insurance policy from my late husband, and if I remarry and it doesn’t work out I lose it.

And when the paper comes up, it can take the whole thing down. I introduced a woman to a wonderful man, they got engaged, and nine months in she broke it off because he insisted on a prenup and she would not sign it.

That was fifteen years ago and they’re both still single.

Underneath it, I think, sat something she couldn’t say out loud: that she expected marriage to make her financially safe for life. Spira’s reply is the one I’d put on a card. Life has no guarantees.

Married Couples Living Apart Together, and Couples Who Never Married at All

Plenty of the people who ask me about this aren’t single. They’re married, in two homes, wondering whether that makes them a category or a casualty.

Sometimes it’s purely financial. I know a couple who stayed separated but not officially divorced for over ten years, because untangling the businesses would have hurt everybody’s finances enough that they chose not to until one of them wanted to remarry.

California draws its own legal line at a date of separation, and every state is different, so that one is an attorney’s question and it’s the subject of my page on dating somebody still married on paper.

The other thing people mix up constantly is that not remarrying and not living together are two SEPARATE decisions.

Cat Cantrill, a matchmaker divorced with two children and single eight years before she met her partner, told me they’d agreed never to marry, since they’d both done it already. Then they moved in together anyway, and didn’t get engaged until she started becoming a matchmaker. She reversed one decision and never touched the other.

Kristi Price, a matchmaker of fifteen years, puts her version simply: her goal is not to get married again, because she’s in a long-term relationship which is great. A finished sentence, and the longer argument is on my page about whether the aisle has to be the goal.

How I Write “I Will Never Live With Anybody” Into a Profile

Now the client I promised you. I love the guy. Nice looking, successful, accomplished, active. And he told me, in exactly these words, “Julie, I don’t want to ever live with anybody.”

Here’s what I did with that. I made sure his profile said he would love to be in a lifelong love partnership, travel together, and that he likes his own space.

Read those two sentences next to each other, because the distance between them is the entire skill. He said NEVER. I wrote “likes his own space,” put it last, and led with what he wanted rather than what he refused.

It was probably our twelfth introduction, with a woman I’d done a consultation with, and his program was technically over by then. I liked the match, so I made it.

Why be that careful? Because I’ve watched a bald preference get a good man vetoed on sight.

A lady nearly binned a gentleman because his profile said he prefers to live without pets. She has a cat. The cat is fifteen years old. I have a feeling the relationship outlasts the cat, and honestly, it would have been better if I didn’t even have that information on there.

Which puts me in mild contradiction with myself, since I did put my client’s preference on the page. Both are true, and the resolution is in the order of the words.

State the want first. Put the constraint last, as a preference and not a prohibition. That’s a sentence somebody gets curious about. “I will never live with you” is one they close the tab on.

Julie Ferman

How to Say It on a Date Without Sounding Cold

Everything written about this assumes the couple already exists. Nobody answers the question I actually get asked: I’m single, this is what I want, when do I say it and how, without sounding like terms and conditions?

Say it early, and inside a sentence about what you do want. Julie Spira’s template is the best I’ve heard: I was married before, I’ve been divorced a long time, I’m hoping to find someone to share my life with, not sure if I want to get married again, but I could.

As long as somebody knows where you stand, they get to decide whether they want to play in this game with you. That isn’t cold. It’s the opposite of wasting somebody’s year.

Dr. Marcy Cole, the holistic psychotherapist who founded First Tuesday Global, gave me the two questions almost nobody asks. What are you dating for. And do I meet your most important criteria.

A coaching client of mine spent months on a woman and asked neither, and my note to him was blunt: should you be spending $150 over dinner every Friday without knowing? You’re not saying you’re the one, as Marcy puts it. You’re saying, who are you, this is who I am, do we want to move forward.

Then be honest about whether this is a criterion or a preference. You get three critical criteria, maybe four, never more than five. Everything outside that, turn the volume down. Dressing up number nine as a rule costs you people you’d have liked.

The Disadvantages of Living Apart Together

Everybody sells you the upside of this. Here’s the other side, and some of it comes from people who disagree with me.

Two of everything costs more than one of everything. Two mortgages, or a mortgage and a lease, two sets of bills, two roofs to fix. Whatever this arrangement is protecting, it is NOT the monthly budget.

Then there’s who shows up when somebody gets sick. There’s a line women say about not wanting to be a nurse or a purse. The first person I heard say it was my mother-in-law, Feisty Frida Ferman, and I thought it was funny.

I’ve heard it 250 times since and it isn’t funny.

Ladies, if you’ve ever said it, STOP. What it announces is that you’re in this for yourself.

I know a gentleman widowed three times who was there for all of it.

Two households make that harder. Nobody is down the hall.

Then the deepest objection, from Marina Edelman, a licensed therapist of eighteen years trained to Gottman Level 3. She dislikes codependence and independence alike and puts a third word between them: interdependence. I depend on you, you depend on me, I show up for you, I expect you to show up for me, we do life together.

Her physiological point stopped me. We can’t regulate our own nervous systems, she says. We need hugs from actual people to feel calm. We are not built to be alone, and I said so on air because I believe it.

Marcy Cole put the counterweight best. How do we find our we-ness without abandoning the I?

Is It Avoidance? The Argument I Haven’t Settled

I haven’t resolved this one.

Shannon Swallow came on the show to talk about intuition. She’s an intuitive reader and coach, roughly ten thousand readings over twenty years by her own count. As a little girl she said she’d never marry, she’d just have boyfriends every five years.

She grew up fiercely independent and loved her life, and having a man long distance, part-time, on and off, worked for her for years.

Then, in her words, it wasn’t until they were about to move in together that she wanted to die. She’d been telling herself for forty or fifty years that she didn’t want something she did want. Her position follows: when somebody says no, I don’t want that, there’s something there. That’s her view rather than a finding, and I want to be precise about it.

Set it against Gabby Aratow’s clients, who raised the families, made the sacrifices, and now don’t want to cohabitate again.

That isn’t a wall. That’s a woman who has run a house most of her adult life and would like her own kitchen.

Here’s what each is right about.

Shannon is right that a preference formed at nineteen and never re-examined deserves examining, and that fear is very good at dressing up as principle. Gabby is right that a preference formed at sixty-eight, after four decades of evidence, is data rather than damage. The test isn’t what you want. It’s whether you’ve ever seriously questioned it.

I sit between them, and I’ll be straight about which way I lean. I wrote my client’s preference onto his profile and matched him on it. I took the man at his word.

Living Apart Together Is Not Long Distance

These get confused constantly. LAT is a choice two people make while living close to each other.

Long distance is a circumstance imposed on people who’d rather be nearer, and it has its own page, for anyone with a match who lives in another state.

They share one problem. Neither gets its consistency for free.

A couple under one roof accumulates closeness by accident, in the kitchen at seven in the morning. Two households manufacture it on purpose or not at all.

Gabby’s method is the most practical thing either of us said on the subject. Don’t lean on text. Schedule things, put them in the calendar, so both of you know when you’ll next see each other.

Then watch what your reassurance does. The right partner responds very positively to it, she says. Somebody who recoils may not be in the same place you are. Julie Spira’s version is her 2026 headline trend: emotional safety is replacing chemistry, and people want consistency before excitement.

There’s also no shared address proving commitment for you, so the proof has to live somewhere else. I have a coaching client on date twelve with a woman it’s going well with, and he still has Bumble open. What I told him is what I’d tell any LAT couple. She’ll know you’re serious about her when you’re not there anymore.

So Should You Do It? How I’d Decide

Two questions.

Is it in your top three? If keeping your own home sits inside your three critical criteria, it’s real and you should be matched on it. If it’s ninth, turn the volume down on it.

Does the money actually require it? For a lot of my people it genuinely does. If the trusts are written and the children know the plan, an attorney can tell you in an hour what a marriage would do to all of it.

And know what you’re trading. I tell clients we’ve traded a headache for a stomach ache, and Gabby’s version is that people are packages, so there’ll always be something you miss about him. Two homes buy you your own space, and the accidental closeness is what you pay for it.

Since 1990 I’ve put more than 1,400 couples together, and not one of them happened because somebody was quietly hoping. If keeping your own home is your condition, tell me so in your own words and let me do the careful part. Get privately registered with me.

FAQs About Living Apart Together

julieferman.com · Julie@JulieFerman.com · 805-371-9557