Sociology
2014, Vol. 48(6) 1075­–1091
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0038038514523697
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Living Apart Relationships
in Contemporary Europe:
Accounts of Togetherness
and Apartness
Mariya Stoilova
Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Sasha Roseneil
Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Isabel Crowhurst
Kingston University, UK
Tone Hellesund
University of Bergen, Norway
Ana Cristina Santos
University of Coimbra, Portugal
Abstract
Drawing on a European cross-national biographical-narrative study of intimate life, this article
discusses the complexity of experiences of ‘togetherness’ and ‘apartness’ amongst people in
living apart relationships. We explore the five main ways in which interviewees spoke about and
understood their current living apart relationships (as: chosen; temporary; transitional; undecided;
and unrecognisable), which we argue shows the need for a broader conceptualisation of this form of
intimate relationship than is suggested by the established notion of ‘living apart together’. The article
points to interviewees’ varying experiences of receiving or being denied recognition and acceptance
by others as belonging to a couple, as well as to their differing degrees of desire for, or rebellion
against, expectations that living apart relationships should ‘progress’ towards cohabitation.
Keywords
biographical-narrative interviews, cohabitation, couple relationship, intimacy, living apart
together, recognition
Corresponding author:
Mariya Stoilova, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK.
Email: m.stoilova@bbk.ac.uk
523697SOC0010.1177/0038038514523697SociologyStoilova et al.
research-article2014
Article
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1076	 Sociology 48(6)
Introduction
Relationships in which the intimate parties do not cohabit have been an increasing focus
of social research over the past decade. In Europe, North America, and Australia between
6 per cent and 10 per cent of adults are in relationships in which they do not live with
their partner (Haskey, 2005; Levin, 2004; Strohm et al., 2009). It is suggested that such
relationships are increasingly socially significant (Roseneil, 2006) and that their number
has been increasing amongst all age groups (Allan et al., 2001; Haskey, 2005; Levin,
2004). There is considerable diversity amongst this group (Duncan and Phillips, 2010;
Duncan et al., 2013), with people having a wide variety of reasons for living apart, experiencing
varying degrees of choice and constraint, understanding their relationships in
differing ways, and coming to their relationships through diverse routes, at different
times in their lives (Haskey and Lewis, 2006; Roseneil, 2006). The increased prevalence
and visibility of these relationships is seen as related to changing norms about intimacy
and the diversification of partnering and parenting arrangements (Duncan and Phillips,
2010; Roseneil, 2006), and as associated with women’s increasing economic independence
(Holmes, 2004). They are also seen as being linked to improved standards of living,
longer life expectancy, increased geographical mobility (Levin and Trost, 1999), and
new communication technologies (Holmes, 2004).
Whilst there is a long history of married couples living apart, traditionally because of
the demands of the husband’s work (Gerstel and Gross, 1984) or immigration regulations
(Beck-Gernsheim, 2007), recent research has extended the focus beyond the study
of married couples and the exigencies of paid employment to explore the heterogeneity
of circumstances that surround couples who live apart. Yet, despite an implicit recognition
that new modes of coupledom are in evidence amongst people who live apart, there
is a tendency in the literature to seek to distinguish ‘true’ living apart relationships –
those that can be defined as ‘serious’(Ermisch and Siedler, 2009: 31), ‘regular’(Haskey
and Lewis, 2006: 39), or ‘steady’ (Reimondos et al., 2011: 45) – from those relationships
which are deemed temporary and therefore insignificant. In the absence of formal
markers of coupledom – such as marriage or civil partnership, a shared surname, common
children, or the informal but now widely recognised indicator of co-residence
(Roseneil, 2006) – living apart relationships do not have an easily defined ‘cut-off
point’ (Duncan and Phillips, 2010). So, researchers have often sought to identify the
‘real’ living apart relationships – those that are ‘mature’ and ‘committed’. In contrast, in
this article we adopt a less ‘categorical’ and more exploratory approach to the study of
non-cohabiting relationships, which does not determine in advance which count as
such, beyond an individual’s self-identification as being ‘in a relationship with someone
with whom they do not live’. We seek instead to investigate such relationships in their
diversity and to allow space for both those that are more readily recognised within
dominant ways of thinking about intimacy, and those that are potentially more unusual
or counter-normative in form.
We also depart from the established terminology that describes non-cohabiting relationships
as ‘living apart together’ (LAT) relationships (Levin and Trost, 1999), a term
which is gradually entering wider public discourse. Our focus in this article is on interrogating
what it means to be in a relationship when living apart: we explore
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both ‘togetherness’ and ‘apartness’, posing as an empirical question what might be the
meanings and experiences of both intimacy and distance when living apart. We choose
to refer, more neutrally, to ‘living apart relationships’ (LARs), rather than ‘living apart
together’ (LAT) relationships, because this latter terminology seems to over-emphasise
the ‘togetherness’ of the relationship that we think should be a matter of empirical investigation.1
Drawing on a sample of people in LARs in four European countries with whom
we carried out in-depth biographical-narrative interviews, we seek to understand our
interviewees’ relationships on their own terms – through their narratives and in the context
of their biographies.
Living Apart in Four Contrasting National Contexts
The research on living apart relationships presented here was part of a larger study of
intimate citizenship in multicultural Europe2 that focused on people living outside conventional
familial relations.3 The study was carried out in four contrasting national contexts
– Norway, the UK, Bulgaria, and Portugal. The selection of the countries was based
on a ‘most different’ comparative research design that comprised a ‘social democratic’
Nordic welfare state, a ‘liberal’ or – more recently, a ‘social investment’ – welfare state,
a ‘post-communist’ state, and a ‘Southern European’, post-dictatorship state.
The availability of data on the prevalence and characteristics of living apart relationships
varies across these four countries. Whilst there have been a number of studies in the
UK, and fewer on Norway and Bulgaria, there has been no national representative survey
of living apart in Portugal. Large scale surveys of family life have only recently started
to distinguish non-residential relationships, having tended previously to regard people
who were not married or cohabiting as single (Roseneil, 2006).
The most recent data on the UK suggests that about 10 per cent of adults are in a relationship
but do not live with their partner, which is a quarter of those who are not married
or cohabiting (Duncan et al., 2013). A similar proportion, 13 per cent, of Bulgarian adults
does not live with their partner, while in Norway the figure is over 28 per cent (UN,
2010).4 Bulgarian people in LARs are younger on average than in the other countries; the
Norwegians are more evenly spread across the age groups, while the UK living apart
group is somewhere in the middle. Previous research explains the prevalence of nonresidential
relationships in Eastern Europe (e.g. Bulgaria) and in Southern Europe (which
would include Portugal) in terms of the expansion of higher education, the low affordability
of housing, and cultural preferences resulting in progressively delayed home leaving
patterns of young adults (Sobotka and Testa, 2008). The Generations and Gender
Survey (UN, 2012) found that slightly under half of those surveyed in Bulgaria lived
apart because of housing, financial difficulties, or the demands of work, and over half
thought they were not ready to live together. Yet, three in 10 people also lived apart to
keep their independence (UN, 2012). Similarly, studies in the UK and Norway suggest
that both preference and constraint play a role in living apart arrangements (Duncan and
Phillips, 2010; Duncan et al., 2013; Levin, 2004). In contrast to Eastern and Southern
Europe, where living apart relationships tend to be understood in terms of delay in leaving
the parental home, in Western Europe and Nordic countries it is often linked to
greater popularity of solo-living (Jamieson et al., 2009; Roseneil, 2006). The number of
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people living alone has risen over the past decade in all four countries, most significantly
in Bulgaria, and in 2011 a fifth of the households in Portugal, three in 10 households in
the UK and Bulgaria, and four in 10 in Norway consisted of a person living alone
(UNECE, 2012).
Sample and Methodology
Not wanting to assume in advance which relationships in a person’s life were the most
important or meaningful, we used the biographical-narrative interpretive method (BNIM)
(Roseneil, 2012; Wengraf, 2001) which encourages the interviewee to speak as freely as
possible in response to a single initial question: ‘can you tell me the story of your life and
personal relationships, all the events and experiences important to you?’. Whilst the interviewees
knew that they were asked to participate because they were in a non-cohabiting
relationship, we did not focus explicitly on this but sought to elicit narratives of ‘life and
personal relationships’ more generally. After the response to the initial question (which
varied in length between 6 minutes and 2 hours 53 minutes), the interviewer embarked on
a process of seeking further narrative detail about events and experiences that had been
mentioned by the interviewee. The interviews lasted between 28 minutes and 4 hours 9
minutes, with a mean length of 2 hours and 11 minutes. In contrast to a traditional semistructured
interview, this method allows much greater space for the relationship meanings
of the interviewee to emerge spontaneously, and to be understood, in vivo, within the
context of the overall biographical-narrative that they offered (Roseneil, 2012).
We interviewed 21 people who were in living apart relationships (14 women and
seven men), of whom 13 were members of national majority populations and eight were
from minoritised groups (Roma, Turkish, Pakistani, or Sami). Our relatively small sample
consisted of people in their 30s and 40s (and one in his early 50s) who were living in
the capital cities of the four countries and who were mostly well educated.5 Eight of our
interviewees were in same-sex living apart relationships, and 13 were in opposite sex
ones. The duration of their relationships varied between a couple of months and 20 years.
The analysis involved a ‘twin track’ process, focusing first on each interviewee’s
‘lived life’ (the biographical ‘facts’ recounted in the interview), second on their ‘told
story’ of intimate life (the narrative), and then on the relationship between the two
(Roseneil, 2012). Noting the diversity of cultural backgrounds, sexuality, life ‘stage’,
relationship history, and length of living apart amongst the interviewees, we grouped our
interviewees into five clusters on the basis of the main way in which each spoke about
and understood their current living apart relationship: as (1) chosen; (2) temporary; (3)
transitional; (4) undecided; and (5) unrecognisable. Each grouping represented different
experiences of togetherness and apartness, but also reflected different journeys into living
apart relationships, highlighting both the specificity of each individual’s experience,
and their socio-cultural and historic situatedness.
Previous research has used some of the distinctions that emerged from our analysis,
but generally has less extensive typologies, and identifies less diversity than our research.
For example, Roseneil (2006) distinguishes between ‘undecidedly’, ‘regretfully’, and
‘gladly’ apart couples, while Duncan and Phillips (2010) differentiate between ‘dating’
and ‘partner’ LATs. Levin (2004) also divides her sample into people who choose not to
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live together and those who cannot live together due to external constraints. Other studies
classify non-cohabiting individuals on the basis of their relationship history, highlighting
the importance of past intimate life events (Regnier-Loilier et al., 2009;
Reimondos et al., 2011), which our study also demonstrated. However, we decided that
relationship histories should be explored within the groupings based on subjective experiences
of living apart, rather than the other way around.
When looking for explanations as to why individuals might cluster in particular
groups, differences of class, education, age, gender, or sexuality do not seem to correlate
in any clear way with our interviewees’ subjective experiences of living apart. Ethnicity
was in some cases connected to particular cultural norms about coupledom and hence
linked to interviewees’experiences of living apart relationships as unrecognisable, as we
discuss later. Relationship length seemed to be important only for the undecided group,
which generally consisted of people in shorter relationships, of under 18 months,
although it did not include all ‘relationship novices’. Being married to, and having children
with, the LAR partner6 was the most significant difference, as all interviewees in
such circumstances (three cases) saw living apart as temporary. However, most of our
sample was not married and had no children, with only two other people (in the transitional
and the unrecognisable groups) having a child from a previous relationship.
Variations between countries are also difficult to extrapolate from such a small sample
and with each cluster including representatives of most nationalities. Without any attempt
to generalise from this, it is worth noting that, whilst the largest group, living apart as
chosen consisted mainly of interviewees from Norway and the UK, the wealthier nations
with stronger welfare states, with only one from Portugal and none from Bulgaria. In
contrast, the unrecognisable LARs were Bulgarian and Portuguese, and although their
small number (three cases) forecloses any meaningful discussion of cross-national differences,
this might point to the existence of stronger traditional normativities around
intimate life (see Roseneil et al., 2012). The suggested link between solo living and living
apart relationships (Jamieson et al., 2009; Roseneil, 2006) was not observable in our
sample: only three interviewees lived on their own (two in the UK and one in Bulgaria),
11 lived with family members (in three cases children only), and seven people shared
housing with friends or housemates. The Bulgarian sample seemed to be more constrained
and more often lived with relatives, whereas the UK LARs were independent
from family, with our Portuguese and Norwegian interviewees more evenly divided
between those who lived with relatives and those who did not. However, given our small
sample, and the orientation of the biographical-narrative method ‘to the exploration of
life histories, lived situations and personal meanings’ and its attention to ‘the complexity
and specificity of lived experience’ (Roseneil, 2012: 130), we focus here on analysing
subjective experiences of living apart, rather than on broader socio-economic and crossnational
factors, which undoubtedly situate and mould the subjective experiences but are
hard to extract in a meaningful way.
Living Apart as Chosen
The largest cluster of interviewees (seven of 21) was those whose narratives presented
the living apart dimension of their relationship as chosen. Their stories resonate with
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research that sees living apart relationships as manifestations of the increasing possibility
of diversity in ways of living intimate life (Levin, 2004; Roseneil, 2006). These were
people who considered themselves to have chosen to live apart and were happy about
being in such an arrangement for the long term. These interviewees shared a sense of
their intimate arrangements being an alternative form of intimacy, yet their reasoning and
subjective experiences of their relationships differed. There were people who celebrated
their non-conventionality, others who found it quite comfortable, and yet others who had
to undergo a long process of adjustment to what they regarded as a ‘legitimate’ form of
intimacy.
This group consisted of three men and four women, aged between their early 30s and
their late 40s, from different ethnic backgrounds, who had been with their partners for
between one and 10 years. They might all be described as being ‘gladly apart’ (Roseneil,
2006), but their individual routes to being in a living apart relationship had been quite
different. There were people who had never been married or in a civil partnership and
had never cohabited with a partner (Clara, Imran), and others who had previously cohabited
with a partner on a long-term basis but had not been married (Vera, Lucy).7 There
were people who were divorced (Jenny, Richard), as well as a majority Norwegian gay
man, Paul, who was currently married and living with his partner but also had another
open and long-term concurrent non-cohabiting relationship.
Concurrent relationships are usually excluded from studies of living apart relationships,
in the attempt discussed above to focus on ‘real’ and ‘steady’ couples. For example,
in their study on living apart, Haskey and Lewis (2006) did not ask married and
cohabiting people if they were living apart from a partner, thus neglecting both the possibility
of married couples living in separate households, and that both married and
cohabiting couples might have concurrent relationships, even though they acknowledged
that as many as 15 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women have such relationships.
Paul’s living apart relationship challenged normative notions of togetherness, and he
explicitly took a political stand against the normalisation of same-sex relationships and
the imposition of (hetero)normative, monogamous ideals of coupledom. Although he
cherished his secure and long-established home-life with his husband, his living apart
relationship with another man was also important to him. Whilst Paul was not against the
idea of cohabitation per se, he could in some ways be grouped together with two other
interviewees for whom living apart was a political statement (Liefbroer et al., 2012)
about the importance of personal choice and of intimate relationships outside the conventional
co-residential and sexually exclusive couple. Vera, a majority Portuguese heterosexual
woman in her late 30s, positively embraced living apart as an intimate lifestyle.
She had been living apart for several years and asserted that ‘permanently sharing a
space is not good for a relationship’. A previous relationship of eight years had been
‘worn out’ during its final two years when she and her partner lived together for the first
time, which she saw as directly leading to the end of the relationship. She felt strongly
that daily routines ‘eroded’ and ‘exhausted’ love relationships and was convinced that
she would not change that viewpoint, even though she had experienced some pressure
from partners who wanted to cohabit. At the time of the interview Vera was living with a
gay male friend in a flat they co-owned, and she explained that she often referred to him,
with a knowing irony, as ‘my husband’. Their relationship was one of close friendship,
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sharing, and support and Vera was explicit that she preferred to live in this non-normative
arrangement than with an intimate partner, an example of what Roseneil and Budgeon
(2004) describe as a characteristically contemporary process of de-centring sexual relationships
and prioritising friendship.
At the other end of the spectrum were Richard and Clara, who went through difficult
processes of relationship negotiation and internal emotional struggle to reach the point
where they now accepted living apart as a long-term arrangement. Tensions were visible in
each of their narratives, which reflected at length on the pros and cons of living apart relationships.
Richard, a British heterosexual divorced man in his late 40s, said that at the
beginning both he and his divorced partner had wanted to ‘take things quite slowly’ and
‘not put too many demands and pressure on each other’, which their living apart arrangement
allowed. Later on, however, he wanted to cohabit, but his partner had a strong preference
to live apart. They had been together for about 10 years and Richard was certain that
they would continue living like this in the future. In spite of some desire to cohabit, Richard
felt that living apart allowed him ‘a lot more freedom to be an individual’ and that he was
more protected from ‘falling to pieces’, should the relationship break down. Although he
missed the intimate proximity of cohabitation, he found holidays difficult because he and
his partner were ‘in each other’s pockets’. If not content, he seemed at least reconciled to
living apart, and was able to reflect on both its negative and positive aspects.
Clara, a Norwegian majority heterosexual woman in her late 40s, explained that she
initially thought that not cohabiting was a sign of a ‘failed relationship’ and that she had
been preoccupied with the question ‘why aren’t we like other couples?’. Securing recognition
of their coupledom from friends and family was also challenging, and Clara felt
that she had ‘worked on herself’ a lot to reach a place where she felt confident in the
legitimacy of their relationship and content with the closeness, care and excitement it
offered. She currently appreciated how this arrangement allowed her to preserve the
strong bonds she had with friends and family members and to maintain her care responsibilities
for relatives.
However, most interviewees in this cluster did not seem to feel pressure to conform to
normative forms of intimacy; on the contrary, they celebrated their non-conventionality.
On the whole, this arrangement seemed to fit busy working lives and existing responsibilities,
while allowing couples to have ‘special time’ when they met. The degree of
choice and purposeful rebellion against norms varied between individuals and also over
time. This occasionally included rather complex and contradictory negotiations of the
meaning of such relationships and their social legitimacy. Yet this group can be seen as
challenging some elements of conventional notions of intimacy in which coupledom is
contiguous with (or moving towards) co-residence, sexual exclusivity, and life-long
commitment. These interviewees might be seen as engaged in processes of queering
personal relationships by de-centring conjugal relationships and sexual partnership and
prioritising friendship (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004).
Living Apart as Temporary
Four interviewees talked about living apart as a temporary feature of their relationship.
In contrast to the first cluster, this second one includes people who were regretful about
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living apart from their partner. All spoke about being prevented from cohabiting by
external factors, such as employment opportunities and immigration regulations. These
interviewees were in relatively long-standing relationships of between three and 20
years, and all had cohabited with their partner in the past. They assumed that once circumstances
allowed it, they would once more live together. Their ages ranged from early
30s to early 50s, and their period of non-cohabitation from very recent to six years. Some
had lived apart for long periods before this current separation and two of the interviewees
(Zainab and Alika) had already made arrangements to start cohabiting again in the near
future. For all interviewees in this group their current LAR was the most significant
intimate relationship in their lives so far, and three of the four interviewees were married
to their partner and had children together.
The extent to which couples are forced by circumstances to live separately, either
temporarily or long term, is often discussed in the existing literature (Levin, 2004;
Régnier-Loilier et al., 2009; Roseneil, 2006), with employment, education, care responsibilities,
financial constraints, and national regulations regarding couple reunions
amongst the factors mentioned most often. A recent study of living apart in the UK suggests
that as many as 38 per cent of LAT interviewees gave some form of constraint as
their main reason for living separately (Duncan et al., 2013). However, our analysis of
narratives of temporarily living apart suggested that these interviewees’ subjective experiences
of living apart were more complex, involving both constraint and elements of
choice, both past and present. For example, Zainab, who was a British Pakistani woman
in her late 30s, had been married for 15 years but had been living apart from her husband
for nearly half of that time, since she was deported from the USA for over-staying her
visa (see Roseneil, 2013). Zainab struggled financially and practically after the deportation,
having previously been highly dependent on her husband, but gradually built a life
for herself and her children in London and started enjoying her new freedom. She decided
not to go back to America a few years later when her husband’s newly acquired US citizenship
allowed her to rejoin him. Furthermore, she had mixed feelings about the fact
that her husband was soon going to join her in the UK, and thought that they would have
to re-negotiate how they would live together after her period of independence. Albay,
who was a married Bulgarian man from an ethnic Turkish background in his early 50s,
had also lived apart from his spouse for a long time – seven years. Living in a rented flat
in Sofia, and geographically separated from his wife because they both wanted to keep
their jobs, he was an example of the ‘commuter couples’ who have long been recognised
by social researchers (Gerstel and Gross, 1984). Albay seemed reconciled to the situation
and spoke about it in a rather matter-of-fact manner, focusing on the necessity to live
apart ‘in a country where there is never enough money’. He assumed that once his job
allowed it, he would move back in with his family, but he was not clear when this might
happen.
It seemed that where either the relationship or the living apart arrangement was relatively
new to the interviewee, the constraint was felt more strongly and the separation
was experienced as either posing a threat to the relationship or as difficult to accept. On
the other hand, in cases when the couple had an established long-term relationship, or
they had been living apart for longer, there was a stronger feeling that living separately
did not threaten the relationship.
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Underneath the apparent coherence in the narratives of the interviewees who understood
living apart as temporary and undesirable and who seemed to share a strong commitment
to the existing relationship and expectation of future cohabitation, there was a
range of subjective experiences and life journeys into living apart relationships. These
interviews highlighted how feelings of belonging and attachment to the relationship were
dynamic, changing across the interviewee’s life, and over the course of the relationship,
or the period of separation. They also suggested that the length of time people had
lived apart and together influenced the extent to which they felt more or less secure
when living apart, and that subjective happiness and satisfaction within the relationship
itself influenced the extent to which individuals felt content with the non-cohabiting
arrangement.
Living Apart as Transitional
The living apart as transitional group arguably represents the ‘traditional’ type of living
apart relationship: a ‘stepping stone’ (Ermisch and Siedler, 2009; Haskey, 2005) towards
more ‘serious’and ‘committed’long-term cohabiting relationships. Described by Duncan
and Phillips (2010) as ‘dating LATs’, this cluster of interviewees saw their current living
apart arrangement as temporary because there was an expectation and/or desire that they
were on a trajectory towards a cohabiting relationship, which constituted ‘proper’ coupledom.
This group consisted of three people who were in their early to late 30s, and had
been with their partners for a period between five months and four years, and who
expressed different degrees of certainty that cohabitation would come next. For example,
Marianne, who was a majority Norwegian heterosexual woman in her late 30s, had been
with her partner for the shortest time (five months), but already had strong expectations
that their relationship would lead to long-term, stable cohabitation. In contrast to the
tendency of some studies on living apart to assume that people in short-term relationships
probably do not see themselves as a couple or are not seen as such by others and
can, therefore, be excluded from samples,8 Marianne’s narrative demonstrated that a
relationship of relatively short duration can nonetheless be linked to strong feelings of
togetherness and being in a couple, as well as to solid expectations of cohabitation. In
this sense her account of her relationship was one of the most conventional of our ‘nonconventional’
sample and also highlighted the problem with asserting a rather ‘mechanical’
notion of ‘living apart togetherness’ based on length of a relationship. Another
interviewee, Bobby, who was a majority Bulgarian man in his 30s and had been with his
partner for four years, expressed an equally strong expectation and desire to move in
with his partner and spoke at length about their frustration that financial constraints were
postponing their cohabitation.
On the other hand, Maggie, a majority Bulgarian lesbian in her early 30s who had been
with her current partner for two years, offered a much more complex discussion of the positive
and negative outcomes of possible cohabitation, which involved reflections on her own
habits and preferences, as well as on socio-cultural expectations of ‘appropriate’coupledom.
Having often moved between cohabitation and living apart in the past, Maggie seemed to
prefer to live together but could not do so, both because of the difficulty she experienced in
openly showing her commitment to a person of the same sex, and due to financial
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constraints. Whilst being very unsure about when and how she and her partner might start
living together, Maggie clearly saw cohabitation as a more desirable way of being together,
one which would also represent a new stage in the relationship – a step towards ‘creating a
family’, ‘having tranquility in the relationship’, and ‘sharing everything’.
The interviewees in this cluster suggested that the relation between feelings of togetherness
and the duration of the relationship was more complex than has tended to be
assumed in existing studies of living apart relationships. Strong feelings of being together
were present in the narratives of people who had been in a relationship for a fairly short
period of time (Marianne), while feelings of being held apart (due to social norms or
financial difficulties, for Maggie) were present in a much longer relationship. However,
across quite different lengths of relationship, all three interviewees in this cluster shared
the feeling that cohabitation was a marker of greater commitment and were hoping to
live together in the future.
Living Apart as Undecided
Some ambivalence about the relationship, expressed as feelings of not being ready or it
being too early in the relationship, is the single most common reason for living apart
according to a recent UK survey (Duncan and Phillips, 2010: 118). The notion of ‘undecidedly
apart’ (Roseneil, 2006) has been used to describe people who have not made an
explicit decision about whether to cohabit or not, as their relationships ‘were not constructed
within a framework in which living together was something about which to
decide’(2006: 8.15). According to Roseneil, ‘undecidedness’was related either, in stable
relationships, to not feeling the need to consider co-residence, or to feeling that the relationship
was more contingent and less settled (2006: 8.15–16). Similarly, in our study,
undecidedly living apart involved uncertainty about the future of the relationship, and
some ambivalence about identifying as a couple at all.
This cluster comprised four women, from their early 30s to their early 40s, who had
been in their non-cohabiting relationships for relatively short periods of between one
month and about one and a half years. The unifying factor for this group was the feeling
of uncertainty about the relationship, which also occupied a relatively small and insignificant
part of the life stories offered in the interview. As people were not explicitly
asked about living apart, this allowed them to decide when and in how much detail to
speak about their current living apart relationship. For example, Pam, a British majority
lesbian woman in her early 40s, who had been seeing her partner for just over two
months, only mentioned this new ‘relationship’ towards the end of the interview; in the
wider context of her life story, it was a minor feature. Two other interviewees felt uncertain
whether to describe themselves as in a relationship. For example, Ashen, a Turkishborn
woman in her late 30s living in the UK, felt that her 18-month relationship did not
have the status of a ‘proper’ relationship. Despite this, she and her partner had an agreement
that they would take care of each other if they did not find anybody else:
I am still with that person, but not to a ‘relationship’ extent. Ahm. Just some sort of agreement
that if I don’t find the partner that I want, and if he doesn’t, then we will look after each other.
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Stoilova et al.	 1085
Ashen had, then, a degree of commitment to her partner, who regularly visited her, and
she often referred to his opinion during the interview, but she remained uncertain about
the future of the relationship and seemed to be using it as a ‘back-up’ plan while looking
for something else.
Rita, a majority Portuguese heterosexual woman in her late 30s who had been with
her partner for just under a year, expressed a different kind of ambivalence. Whilst she
was quite emotionally invested in the relationship and wanted it to continue, her partner
was very reticent about cohabiting. This seemed to create a lot of ambiguity for her
because she believed co-residence to be necessary if she were to have children. She
seemed unsure about the future of the relationship but hopeful about ending up with the
‘right’partner: ‘if this relationship is not the right one for me, I am still hopeful [that] I’ll
get myself a partner, even if it is when I’m an old lady, with my walking stick’. The idea
of the ‘right partner’ was connected to expectations about having children and living
together, even though Rita talked about enjoying certain aspects of living apart, such as
‘being independent’.
So, accounts of ‘undecidedly living apart’ were sometimes related to being in a
fairly recent relationship, in which the feeling of belonging to a couple was still being
established (and whether this would in fact be the case was unclear) but where there
was some sense of the on-goingness of the relationship. But Ashen and Rita, who had
been with their partners for longer, shared doubts about whether this was the ‘right’
relationship for them, as it did not promise to provide what they sought. They saw this
as related to the choice of partners, rather than the living arrangement or duration of
the relationship. Hence, in some cases being undecidedly apart was about being in the
‘early days’ of the relationship (Pam, Hanna), whilst for others the relationship was
more of a ‘place-holder’ until the ‘real thing’ happened (Ashen, Rita). Such emotional
complexities about ‘being together’tend to be concealed, we suggest, by the terminology
of ‘living apart together’.
Living Apart Relationships as Unrecognisable
An influential strand of sociological writing on the transformation of intimate life in
recent years has emphasised the increasing possibility of choice in relation to sexual
partnership, sexual behaviour, the timing and ordering of significant life events (such as
cohabitation, marriage, and having children), and the organisation of living arrangements
(Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Giddens, 1992; Weeks et al., 2001). This
understanding of personal relationships suggests that processes of individualisation and
de-traditionalisation are productive of a greater cultural focus on the autonomy and
authenticity of individuals, and argues that personal life is increasingly a matter of negotiation
between individuals who are able to craft identities and relationships in new ways.
Whilst our research on people living outside conventional couples and families offers
considerable support for this, identifying the multifarious ways in which people are
engaging in relational and personal experimentation, and showing how narratives of selfdetermination
and autonomy were widespread amongst our interviewees, we also found
that lived experiences of intimacy are still shaped in significant ways by powerful norms
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1086	 Sociology 48(6)
related to coupledom and procreation (see Roseneil et al., 2012). In respect of living
apart relationships we found that in some socio-cultural contexts where cohabitation
seemed impossible, living apart was determined by normative understandings of what
constitutes acceptable intimacy and coupledom.
The interviewees whose accounts spoke about living apart from their partner in terms
of the unrecognisability, and even ‘impossibility’, of their relationship were two Roma
women in their early 30s – Raquel from Portugal and Toni from Bulgaria – and a majority
Bulgarian gay man, Krasimir, who was also in his early 30s. For various reasons, their
relationships were positioned outside normative notions of acceptable coupledom, and
lacked social recognition and visibility. On-going for between six months and 11 years,
these relationships were experienced as ‘impossible’ forms of intimacy, even though all
three interviewees spoke about their commitment to their partners.
Raquel spoke of having had several ‘impossible loves’with men who were not Roma.
She had wanted to marry some of them but duty to her parents had stopped her from
doing this: ‘in order to avoid heart-break for my parents, I’ve stopped myself. […] If I
had followed my own will, I would have married a non-Roma person a long time ago’.
Krasimir had been in a same-sex non-residential relationship for five years, but his partner
did not see himself as gay, and he felt that they had to keep their relationship secret.
Krasimir explained that they often acted as friends rather then as partners when they
were amongst others. Even though Krasimir identified as being in a living apart relationship,
his told story revealed not only a complex knot of personal relations but also his
own uncertainty about how he should describe this relationship. Issues related to
Krasimir’s expectation of sexual exclusivity, which was not fulfilled in this relationship,
what he described as the inability of his partner to come out as gay and to have an open
relationship, and the lack of social acceptance of same-sex intimacies, both in general
and by his partner’s family, were all intertwined in complicating the couple’s relationship.
Hence, the ‘invisibility’offered by not living together was welcome to some extent,
but Krasimir struggled to claim their coupledom because of its non-conventionality. He
said that the relationship was ‘very artificial’, ‘not real’, and ‘not true’, while also
describing it as ‘the best thing’ in his life and something he would not stop fighting for.
Living apart seemed to function as a way of maintaining the secrecy, and hence the very
possibility, of a same-sex relationship, in a cultural context where living openly in such
a relationship seemed unimaginable. This was in direct contrast to the other Bulgarian
interviewee in a same-sex relationship, Maggie, who saw living apart as limiting opportunities
for intimacy, particularly physical intimacy, and who was hoping to cohabit in
the future, as we discussed earlier.
Toni was also in a ‘closeted’ relationship, although an opposite-sex one. Her relationship
was kept secret because her long-term partner was living with another woman with
whom he had children. Toni’s relationship had continued for 11 years, during which time
she got pregnant and had a miscarriage. She clearly stated her preferences for a cohabiting
relationship, for greater support from her partner, and her desire for them to have
children together – her longing for ‘a family’. Toni expressed her regret and dissatisfaction
in very strong language, arguing that she had been ‘used like a dog’, and that her
partner was ‘a waste of time’, and ‘an obstacle’ to getting the relationship she wanted. In
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Stoilova et al.	 1087
spite of being regretful about living apart, Toni seemed entangled in this relationship and
thought that it was too late in her life to pursue alternatives.
Each of these interviewees expressed on-going commitment, albeit rather tormented,
to their unrecognised relationship, and perceived living apart as the only option that was
available in the context of the absence, and seeming impossibility, of recognition from
others of their coupledom. This ‘impossibility’ was strongly internalised and believed to
be an external reality, a ‘social fact’ that could not be challenged. The unrecognised relationships
described by our interviewees are not only unrecognised by their families,
friends and communities; they also are missing from the existing research on living
apart, which has, we suggest, focused too much on the identification of ‘serious’, and
publicly recognised, and recognisable, relationships. However, we found that living
apart can be a way to manage to pursue an intimate relationship that sits outside culturally
dominant notions of acceptable coupledom and personal life.
Conclusions
To seeing living apart purely in terms of the diversification and opening up of choice that
characterise contemporary intimate life (Levin and Trost, 1999) masks the complex ways
in which ‘togetherness’and ‘apartness’feature simultaneously in non-cohabiting relationships.
People in living apart relationships have varying experiences of receiving or being
denied recognition and acceptance by others as belonging to a couple, and express differing
degrees of desire for, and rebellion against, expectations that their relationship will
‘progress’towards shared residence. In our study, experiences and meanings of ‘togetherness’
and ‘apartness’ varied across individual narratives of non-residential coupledom, as
well as within individual interviewees’ lives, with changing degrees of choice and constraint
marking the attempts of individuals and couples to negotiate being together in the
context of other factors, such as established personal routines, desire for independence,
financial constraints, and existing commitments to paid work, care, friends, and families.
The largest group of interviewees in our sample, whose accounts suggested that they
were living apart by choice, preferred, and sometimes celebrated, living apart as an alternative
form of intimacy. For them, living apart was a state of being together in a committed
and long-term way, whilst also being apart in a meaningful and welcome manner.
Others who described their living apart as temporary or transitional seemed to prioritise
shared residence as an intimate arrangement and were separated by external factors but
still valued some aspects of ‘apartness’, such as greater independence and ability to follow
work commitments. For those who were undecided about their living apart relationship,
being apart from their partner allowed space for the relationship to unfold, or for
other relationships to develop. Finally, living apart in a relationship that was unrecognised
by others allowed some couples to be together in contexts where alternative
arrangements seemed impossible, so that formal residential apartness allowed ‘under the
radar’ togetherness.
Whilst this clustering of our interviewees’ predominant narratives of their living apart
relationships was quite distinct, and we were able, relatively easily, to locate each interviewee
alongside others with similar narratives, their narratives were also cross-cut
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1088	 Sociology 48(6)
by common feelings of emotional attachment to their LAR partner, stories of giving and
receiving care and support, and descriptions, to a greater or lesser extent, of both the benefits
and constraints of the arrangement. Living apart from a partner seemed to enable a significant
degree of flexibility and fluidity within the relationship, by allowing the combination of
intimacy within coupledom and life ‘outside’ the relationship. Moreover, discussions of
‘togetherness’ in the interviews were far from exclusively about intimate sexual relationships.
Across the clusters that we have identified, our interviewees variously expressed
strong feelings of attachment to family members and friends, of belonging to networks and
communities of identity and interest, and sometimes talked about ‘being together’with concurrent
intimate partners. There was also a strong sense, for many interviewees, of the
importance of staying true to themselves and their own needs, and a desire to preserve and
protect their existing way of life, with its routines and security. Hence, we argue for the
importance of attending to the many ways in which ‘togetherness’and ‘apartness’are complex
experiences in living apart relationships. We point too to the need for sociologists to
cast our gaze beyond a focus just on the more readily intelligible couple relationships, and
to admit into sociological research on intimate life those that are more unusual or counternormative,
and that are sometimes hidden and culturally unrecognisable.
Funding
EU Framework 6 Integrated Project (grant number 028746), directed by Beatrice Halsaa, Sasha
Roseneil, Solveig Bergman and Sevil Sümer.
Notes
1.	 Perhaps including ‘together’ alongside ‘apart’ in coining the term ‘living apart together’
serves as a rhetorical move, but we prefer a more simply descriptive term that leaves the
‘togetherness’ of the ‘living apart’ relationship open to investigation.
2.	 FEMCIT – Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: the impact of contemporary
women’s movements – was an EU Framework 6 Integrated Project (grant number 028746),
directed by Beatrice Halsaa, Sasha Roseneil, Solveig Bergman and Sevil Sümer (see Halsaa
et al., 2012). The Intimate Citizenship Work Package, on which this article is based, was
directed by Sasha Roseneil. See http://www.femcit.org
3.	 We interviewed 67 people (41 women; 25 men), from their late 20s to early 50s, who were
one or more of the following: living apart; unpartnered; lesbian/gay/in a same-sex relationship;
sharing housing.
4.	 Other sources give lower proportion of LATs in Norway - 10% in Levin (2004).
5.	 Fifteen people had an undergraduate or higher degree; three people had finished secondary
school and three had studied until 16 years or less. Our sample is skewed towards an older age
group than that identified as the most common age to be in a living apart relationship (mid to
late 20s) in the UK (Duncan and Phillips, 2010).
6.	 We use the term ‘partner’ without suggesting that this was the interviewees’ own terminology.
In Norway there is a well-established word for a living apart partner (‘særbo’); in the UK
the term ‘LAT’ is gaining some recognition through media discussions, often stimulated by
academic research, but in Bulgaria and Portugal there is no corresponding terminology.
7.	 All names are pseudonyms.
8.	 For example, Ermisch (2000) excluded people in relationship for less than six months and
Haskey and Lewis (2006) did not include any people who had been with their partner for less
than a year.
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Mariya Stoilova is a researcher at OnePlusOne and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Birkbeck
Institute for Social Research at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Her research on intimacy,
family transformations, and gendered citizenship focuses on UK and Eastern European dynamics,
policy implications, and practice development. Her recent publications include ‘Mind the gap: The
changing face of gender (in)equality in Bulgaria after 1989’ (in Ramen and Hassenstab, eds,
Palgrave, forthcoming), ‘Why do people live apart together?’ (Families, Relationships and
Societies 2(3): 323–38, with Duncan et al., 2013), Citizenship and Reproduction/Reproducing
Citizens (special issue of Citizenship Studies, ed. with Roseneil et al., 2013) and the co-authored
book The Tenacity of the Couple Norm (Palgrave, forthcoming).
Sasha Roseneil is Professor of Sociology and Social Theory, and Director of the Birkbeck Institute
for Social Research at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. She is also Professor II in Sociology
in the Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo, Norway. She was Deputy Director of the
EU Framework 6 Project, FEMCIT, and lead the FEMCIT research on intimate citizenship on
which this paper is based. Her recent publications include Social Research after the Cultural Turn
(Palgrave, 2010, ed. with Stephen Frosh), Remaking Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: Women’s
Movements, Gender and Diversity (Palgrave, 2012, ed. with Beatrice Halsaa and Sevil Sümer),
Beyond Citizenship: Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging (Palgrave, 2013) and
Citizenship and Reproduction/ Reproducing Citizens (special issue of Citizenship Studies, ed. with
Crowhurst et al., 2013). The co-authored book The Tenacity of the Couple Norm is forthcoming
(Palgrave).
Isabel Crowhurst is Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at Kingston University, London, UK.
Her research on gender, sexuality and migration focuses on the regulation and practices of intimacy
and commercial sex. She is chair of COST Action IS1209 ‘Comparing European Prostitution
Policies: Understanding Scales and Cultures of Governance’ (ProsPol), and is currently completing
a monograph entitled Regulating Migrant Prostitution.
Tone Hellesund is an ethnologist, university librarian and former senior researcher at the Stein
Rokkan Centre for Social Studies, University of Bergen, Norway. She has worked on historical
and contemporary transformations of intimacies and sexualities. She is the author of Kapitler fra
singellivets historie [Chapters from the History of Single Life] (Universitetsforlaget, 2003) and
Identitet på liv og død. Marginalitet, homoseksualitet og selvmord [Identities for Life and Death:
Marginality, Homosexuality and Suicide] (Spartacus, 2008).
Ana Cristina Santos is a senior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra,
and Honorary Research Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, University of London.
She has been involved in a number of research projects exploring issues of gender, sexual and
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reproductive rights, citizenship, and human rights. Since 2012, she has been the Principal
Investigator of a research project on disabled women and intimate citizenship funded by the
Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. In 2013 she was awarded a 5-year research
grant by the European Research Council to lead a study on Citizenship, Care and Choice: The
Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe. Her most recent book is Social Movements and
Sexual Citizenship in Southern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Vice-chair of the Sexuality
Research Network of the European Sociological Association, Cristina is also an activist in the
LGBT/queer and feminist movements in Portugal.
Date submitted March 2013
Date accepted November 2013
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