Practices and perceptions of living apart together

Abstract

This paper examines how people living apart together (LATs) maintain their relationships, and describes how they view this living arrangement. It draws on a 2011 survey on LAT in Britain, supplemented by qualitative interviewing. Most LATs in Britain live close to their partners, and have frequent contact with them. At the same time most see LAT in terms of a monogamous, committed couple, where marriage remains a strong normative reference point, and see living apart as not much different from co-residence in terms of risk, emotional security or closeness. Many see themselves living together in the future. However, LAT does appear to make difference to patterns of care between partners. In addition, LATs report advantages in terms of autonomy and flexibility. The paper concludes that LAT allows individuals some freedom to manoeuvre in balancing the demands of life circumstances and personal needs with those of an intimate relationship, but that practices of LAT do not, in general, represent a radical departure from the norms of contemporary coupledom, except for that which expects couples to cohabit.

Keywords:

• living apart together
• couples
• intimate relationships
• family practices
• Britain

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mansour Pourmehdi for help with SPSS.

Notes

1. In the 2011 British Social Attitudes Survey, 9% of adults had a LAT partner; this rose to 22% of ‘single’ non-cohabiting adults and, excluding the widow(er)ed (who do not choose singledom), to 26%.

2. On two of the three surveys (BSA and NatCen Omnibus), we also checked the co-residential status of respondents who said they were married, cohabiting or in a civil partnership.

3. Weighting was applied all three constituent surveys both to correct for unequal selection probabilities and to calibrate to population estimates. This reduced the number of LAT respondents to 518. Percentages in the tables refer to the weighted sample.

4. A small number of questions were simplified or omitted for the ONS survey (which was conducted last), where responses to the two previous surveys had shown little variation. The BSA survey had an additional question on ‘the ideal relationship’, asked of all respondents – not just LATs.

5. Sex of respondent and sex of LAT partner, and the respondent’s age, ethnicity, marital status, housing tenure, highest educational qualification, region, disability, economic status, household composition.

6. The interview schedule first checked that the interviewee was still in a LAT relationship, and then covered household membership, the practicalities of the relationship, why the interviewee lived apart from their partner, the emotional nature of the relationship, previous relationships, future plans and expectations, whether the interviewee thought there were differences between LAT relationships and cohabiting relationships, ‘who is important’ and ‘who is close’ to the interviewee, and who is seen ‘as family’, who provides practical help, advice and emotional support and financial assistance to the interviewee and whom the interviewee provides care for, the interviewee’s sense of their responsibilities to their partner, and the interviewee’s attitudes to legal rights for LAT partners. See the UK Data Archive for full schedule.

7. Small base sizes (<100) mean the findings for these ‘long distance’ groups should be taken as indicative here and elsewhere.

8. All interview names are pseudonyms.

9. ‘Do you personally think of yourselves as “a couple”?’

10. For the BSA survey this same question was asked of both LAT and non-LAT couples.

11. There was no direct question about commitment in the interviews; instead the issue was prompted more subtly although often this was not necessary, as interviewees themselves would raise the topic.

12. The remainder said no partner at all (9%), not in a relationship, but occasional partners (3%), or no ideal / none of these answers (4%).

13. Only 3% of the total LAT sample was married.

14. The questions asked in the 2001 and 2011 surveys, while similar, are not identical (the question text and answer options were different, and the questions were fielded on a different interview mode – self-completion in 2001, and face to face in 2011) so we can only use broad comparisons as an indication of similarity and difference.