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"  Whenever a newspaper runs a feature about a married couple who live apart\u2014which happens more often than you&amp;#039;d think, at least every six months\u2014the news crackles through the blogosphere, and my social circuit, on an electric current of raw, naked envy. &amp;quot;Oh my God\u2014my own space, all to myself? How do people pull it off? What a dream,&amp;quot; sighs very happily married V. We&amp;#039;re absentmindedly browsing the racks in a consignment shop while discussing the latest instance, a story about a man and a woman in Vermont who constructed two separate houses connected by an enclosed bridge, when I&amp;#039;m overcome with d\u00E9j\u00E0 vu. I&amp;#039;d had this exact conversation six months ago, with very happily married S., after an article appeared about a woman who built her own (tiny, adorable) gingerbread cottage for alone time and occasional overnights, located across a stream and up the hill from the home she shares with her husband. Each time it&amp;#039;s as if we&amp;#039;re struck anew by this most novel arrangement, as if we&amp;#039;ve never heard of it before, as if I hadn&amp;#039;t been dreaming of it for a full decade, ever since Brooke Kroeger&amp;#039;s biography of the writer Fannie Hurst first planted the idea in my mind. If you&amp;#039;ve never heard of Hurst, she was the highest paid short-story writer of the first half of the twentieth century\u2014a prolific Danielle Steele type, but one who wrote about immigrants and shopgirls. She was the author of 26 books that were adapted into 31 films, and her death in 1968 earned her a front-page obituary in The New York Times. Equally glamorous was her private life, which was the most winning blend of prim and sensational: On May 4, 1920, the Times broke the story that everyone&amp;#039;s favorite author, heretofore considered single, was in fact married to a dashing musician named Jacques Danielson, and had been for five years, and\u2014I hope you&amp;#039;re sitting down for this\u2014they lived in separate studio apartments in the same building on West 69th Street. The article opens:  FANNIE HURST WED; HID SECRET 5 YEARS Sailed Into Matrimony With Pianist &amp;quot;in a Bark of Their Own Designing,&amp;quot; LIVE APART, THEIR OWN WAY Meet by Appointment\u2014It&amp;#039;s a New Method Which Rejects &amp;quot;Antediluvian Custom.&amp;quot;  In the story, Hurst explained that she considered nine out of 10 marriages to be &amp;quot;sordid endurance tests, overgrown with the fungi of familiarity and contempt,&amp;quot; and that by living separately from her husband, she was able to keep her most sacred relationship a &amp;quot;high-sheen damask&amp;quot; rather than a &amp;quot;breakfast cloth, stale with soft-boiled egg stains.&amp;quot; The press went wild, with all sorts of sanctimonious editorials and letters to the editor, inciting the chivalrous Danielson to publish, three days later, a charmingly reasonable defense of their living situation as being both loving and economical. &amp;quot;For those who seem to think that I am being cheated of the carpet slipper, fire-side aspect of domesticity,&amp;quot; he wrote, &amp;quot;whenever I find the ache beginning to set in for the comfortable sag of the patent rocker, I need only to drop in at Miss Hurst&amp;#039;s for one of the delicious homemade dinners her maid of five years permanency knows so well how to prepare.&amp;quot; Convinced readers took note, and for a while, among those who could afford it, a &amp;quot;Fannie Hurst marriage&amp;quot; was much in vogue. I was living with a boyfriend when I first read about Hurst, and I&amp;#039;d grown increasingly anxious about whether I could continue it long-term. Our daily intimacy, though so lovely and cozy, somehow didn&amp;#039;t suit me. I didn&amp;#039;t know what to make of this. Was I one of those selfish, noncommittal Peter Pan types who couldn&amp;#039;t grow up? Ironically, I hugely enjoyed our domestic life together\u2014we both loved to cook and lounge and talk and read, and he was generously tolerant of my messy ways. (He figured out, for instance, that my awful habit of tossing my clothes on the floor could be accommodated with an armchair in the bedroom; I&amp;#039;d fling every\u00ADthing on it throughout the week, then deal with the mountain come Saturday.) But my brain felt crowded, as if I couldn&amp;#039;t hear myself think; I longed to wake up in my own bed in the morning, with my own thoughts. And I wanted more mystery, too, more of a sense that we were separate people with our own lives and interests who were choosing to spend the evening together because we wanted to, not because we were too lazy to leave the house. For all these reasons, a Fannie Hurst marriage seemed the perfect solution, a way to retain our own independence while also being committed to each other. But I could never find the courage to bring it up. Eventually we broke things off, and I haven&amp;#039;t lived with anyone since. Little did I know as I fretted over my inability to grow up that researchers were hard at work legitimizing Hurst-style arrangements as a historically new family form called Living Apart Together (LAT). Hard numbers are impossible to come by, given that the Census Bureau doesn&amp;#039;t count this demographic, but it has become increasingly common for two people in a loving, committed union, married or otherwise, to maintain separate living quarters. One survey indicates that in the United States some 6 percent of women and 7 percent of men live separately from their partners; throughout northern Europe, it&amp;#039;s about 10 percent\u2014a quarter of all the people there who live alone. For celebrity endorsements, look no further than Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton, who keep side-by-side town\u00ADhouses in London; Anita Hill and her long-term boyfriend, Chuck Malone, who maintain separate houses in Massachusetts; and the 2010 National Book Award winner, Jaimy Gordon, whose husband, Peter Blickle, lives a 20-minute stroll away\u2014most evenings she walks her dog over to his place. Through the 1980s, Mia Farrow and Woody Allen commuted back and forth across uptown Manhattan (of course, that didn&amp;#039;t end very well). The arrangement naturally suits artists and writers (see Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre), who tend to have deep appetites for solitude. And there are those whose professions necessitate long-term deployments, such as missionaries and members of the military. But the new ranks of LATs are everyday couples who just happen to find that they&amp;#039;re happier together when living apart. San Francisco\u2013based clinical psychologist Judye Hess lives a three-minute walk around the corner from Simon, her computer-consultant boyfriend of 13 years. After meeting online in 1998 (he carries her personal ad in his wallet to this day), they kept up a long-distance, bi-city relationship, but three years in, rather than shorten the commute via cohabitation, they decided to find him a house in her neighborhood. &amp;quot;At first, he slept over every night,&amp;quot; Hess said when we spoke, &amp;quot;but pretty soon I balked. It felt too routine, too set in stone. Now we have no rules; each day we decide what we&amp;#039;re going to do that night, whether separate or alone.&amp;quot; Around the time Simon joined her in San Francisco, Hess coauthored a paper for the Journal of Couples Therapy called &amp;quot;Dual Dwelling Duos: An Alternative for Long-term Relationships.&amp;quot; (She was aware of the LAT designation but thought hers was catchier.) In it she explains that couples who don&amp;#039;t want to live together are often charged with being commitment-phobic, and she argues that this is too narrow and punitive a view of what human relationships can and should be. &amp;quot;In addition to paying the bills, doing the laundry and the dishes, and dealing with problems of in-laws,&amp;quot; she writes, &amp;quot;couples are supposed to be enticing sexual partners as well as the best of friends. All of this seems like a lot to ask from any one relationship, and divorce rates indicate how difficult a task this really is.&amp;quot; Hess concedes that there are disadvantages to living apart: Sex and companionship are less readily available, and such couples miss the shared creativity that comes with making a home. &amp;quot;They will have less of an opportunity to create or try to replicate their original family closeness,&amp;quot; she adds. But for her and others of her ilk, the advantages are far more pronounced: Time together is truly quality, not cluttered with mundane chores; personal idiosyncrasies tend to be appreciated, the way they are at the start of a relationship, instead of slowly morphing into grating annoy\u00ADances; differences in standards of neatness and tastes in music and decor don&amp;#039;t need to be constantly negotiated or suffered through. &amp;quot;The partners who do not live together can come together out of choice and desire, rather than because they share the same space and have no other options,&amp;quot; she writes. Surely the addition of children to the equation would complicate if not entirely collapse an LAT arrangement. And it&amp;#039;s not always easy to weather the skepticism from those friends and family who don&amp;#039;t quite get the decision to live apart\u2014much as in Hurst&amp;#039;s day, when critics hurled epithets ranging from &amp;quot;philanderers&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;spendthrifts.&amp;quot; But the notion that, for LATs, sex is less convenient and therefore less frequent is debatable; if anything, isn&amp;#039;t a sexual life based on active desire\u2014and a touch of those early-days aphrodisiacs, unpredictability and mystique\u2014better than one of implicit obligation? And, at least among the couples I spoke with, infidelity has never been an issue. Indeed, LATs strike me as more secure than most. It takes a lot of trust and confidence in your relationship to make a nontraditional choice and to give your partner that kind of freedom. Indeed, LATs even argue that the economic issue is not as big a hurdle as one might think\u2014though, depending on where you live, the arrangement may require a certain degree of lifestyle sacrifice. In an age when dual-income families and living beyond our means have both become the norm, who&amp;#039;s to say that two modest studios are more expensive than one large house? New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg sought out LATs for his most recent book, Going Solo, about the growing demographic of single people who live alone in America. He found that LAT arrangements appeal most to older women who are divorced or widowed and to young professionals who enjoy having control over their own space. It used to be that marrying was the only way to leave one&amp;#039;s childhood home and become a grown-up, but now that we&amp;#039;re marrying later\u2014today the median age is 29 for men and 27 for women, compared with 23 and 20 in 1960\u2014we have a longer period of time in which to establish our adult identities, and real estate is a significant step in this process. &amp;quot;These days, getting your own place is the way you become an adult,&amp;quot; Klinenberg says. Given that, on average, men still out-earn women, it&amp;#039;s surprising that single women trump men when it comes to buying their own homes; in 2010, more than 1 million single ladies signed a mortgage, almost twice as many as single men. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a huge social change,&amp;quot; says Klinenberg. &amp;quot;For many of the single women I inter\u00ADviewed, buying their own place was an extraordinary experience that involved asserting themselves as adults and signaling to themselves and the people in their lives that they weren&amp;#039;t waiting for something to happen. They were moving ahead with their own lives.&amp;quot; Is it much wonder, then, that not all of these women are eager to give up their hard-earned, carefully decorated domains simply because they&amp;#039;ve fallen in love? This isn&amp;#039;t so much a matter of the old saw about &amp;quot;getting set in your ways&amp;quot; as it is a recognition that a certain amount of independence feels good\u2014and feeling good is what makes relationships strong. I called North Carolina\u2013based John Curtis, a former family therapist and author of The Business of Love, a book about the challenges and opportunities of modern dual-career couples, to see what he thought about LAT. &amp;quot;Young people are seeing that the old way of doing things isn&amp;#039;t working, and they&amp;#039;re experimenting with how to fix it,&amp;quot; Curtis says. &amp;quot;Some couples are absolutely foolish to live together, while others are astute to.&amp;quot; The key, he argues, is thinking consciously about what you each need as individuals and as a unit. &amp;quot;The healthier the individual, the healthier the couple,&amp;quot; he continued. &amp;quot;If that means spending time apart in order to strengthen the self and then bringing that stronger self to dinner, that&amp;#039;s a great thing. After all, living under the same roof doesn&amp;#039;t guarantee intimacy.&amp;quot; For a long time, I told myself I didn&amp;#039;t know how to think about the future. The fact that I wasn&amp;#039;t dying to get married, yet wasn&amp;#039;t opposed to it either, meant that I couldn&amp;#039;t orient myself toward one fantasy or the other, so whatever lay beyond my immediate present was shrouded in an opaque gray mist. But over the years, I&amp;#039;ve caught glimpses of an imaginary future that has been coalescing into an identifiable image in the far corner of my mind, and the older I get, the more I realize that I do have a fantasy after all\u2014two, actually. One is grand and looks like this: We meet, we fall in love, we combine our resources to take over a five-story brownstone (I get to be rich in my fantasy life) with my own Edith Wharton\u2013style boudoir suite on the top floor, his on the third, and the rest given over to a series of private and entertaining areas, and our offices. (I guess Mr. Imaginary is also a writer of some stripe. Also, we have similar setups in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and London. Remember: fantasy!) The other is simple: We meet, we fall in love, we don&amp;#039;t move in together. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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