—Okay, but you in your house and I in mine. I am not going to go back to pick up anyone’s underpants at 70, almost 71.
What Carmen answered Hilario five summers ago was because Hilario asked Carmen for a “normal” relationship, after seeing each other almost every weekend for a year and some days during the week. Carmen’s name isn’t Carmen, it’s her middle name, and Hilario chose it herself. She gives these and a few more details because she says that “quite a disorder” she raised with “having a boyfriend again” after becoming a widow and “quite a shot” was later explaining why “not even dead” was she going to repeat the 40 years she had come from . “But I’m telling this because I didn’t think she was going to see me saying that when my husband died and I spent a few years alone, I realized that she had been a slave all my life. Lots of love, always, but slave. And she looks how good I am now. Each one in her house. In love, but she is not a slave ”.
From the time Carmen walks out the door until Hilario rings the bell, there are about 10 minutes. It was one day on a walk between the two houses when they had that conversation, and he never asked again. That talk, in that way, never took place between Ana Llopis and Juan Carlos Gómez, who do call themselves that and live in Granada. Aged 35 and 46, a CSIC translator and researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, respectively, they have been together since September 2020 and have never lived together. They do not want to. They live a little further away than Carmen and Hilario, about 40 minutes. And their motives are different, but they are spun.
Llopis talks about “seeing relationships in a different way”, about “less dependency, more freedom and more equality”. Carmen does it about “unlearning what it was like to be with someone” and about “one’s space”. In the stories of the dozens of people interviewed, there are repeated issues: the dismantling of the traditional couple model, how it is structured and what it implies, the need for their own space, the economic capacity to live like this, separated, and the awareness that it is less ecological. But, above all, how it is crossed by feminism. It is they, the women, who mostly raise this possibility, and behind that request they say that there was, at some point, a reflection related to autonomy and independence, the “burden” and “care”, never equitable and not always reciprocal, which almost always implies coexistence in heterosexual couples.
The ‘living apart together’ of the seventies
This, about loving without cohabiting, has been happening for years, many. It was at the end of the seventies when the concept began to become popular, especially in the United States, and the term was coined. Living Apart Together, (LAT is its acronym; in Spanish, together living apart). It has grown ever since, with a bit of a spurt in recent years. In the United States it was clearly reflected after the pandemic. Between 2000 and 2019, married people living in two different houses increased by 25%, and in 2021 there was a peak which reaches 3.89 million people. They are about 2.9% of married Americans, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau.
In Spain there are no regular official statistics that count this type of couples. The Center for Sociological Research did collect information in the last Spanish General Social Survey, 2018. So, these represented 7.2%. But not all were for the same reasons. There were 11.4% who responded to labor or educational questions, or 3.7% to those related to children or parents. 11.8% was the percentage that corresponded to LAT couples as such, those who did it to “maintain their independence”.
And it happens that, sometimes, the reasons intersect. Esther Gil and Nadia Cervera, a sociologist and art historian, aged 50 and 42, respectively, have been in a relationship for three years after a “friendly divorce” from Gil, who has two children. Cervera takes care of her mother. In Cádiz they share “leisure and relaxation spaces”, and neither of them is burdened with what Gil calls the “inherited stressed moments”, that is, the care of each one of their respective families.
“Living together is an option, not the end of the road”
There is no single profile of these couples and among them there is a wide range of circumstances, but there are some approximations. The study Privacy management in the information and knowledge society. Couples and breakups in Spain today, from the BBVA Foundation, published last year, lists some of them: the average age is 42.3 years, one in three comes from a separation or divorce and 46.5% have university studies. “These are consolidated relationships, with more than six years of duration and are the ones that most expect to continue in this situation within three years (40%). Those in this group are also the couples who least expect to get married (77.5%), and 43% have lived with a partner before,” the document deepens.
The situation of Vicen Ybarra and Xisco Zafra fits into those percentages. They met on Tinder almost three years ago. She is 44 years old, works in the health field, and he is one year older and is a teacher. “We have had several previous relationships, with and without cohabitation, each one their respective marriage of more than 10 years, we both have two children from those marriages and we do not have the slightest intention of living together. In fact it has been required sine qua non, mainly on my part, to be able to continue taking steps. I give my son and daughter a lot of support with this: that living together is an option, not the end of the road, they are not committed to living together to consummate a successful relationship”.
These relationships have a wide casuistry related to the social changes of the last decades, especially among the younger population, according to research by the BBVA Foundation. But they are not without their critics. Especially as you get older, there is “a critical discourse with the fact of not wanting to live together as a personal option, since this affects the classic concept of a couple that is articulated around the idea of romantic love.” Those who hold this position “interpret this non-coexistence as a lack of commitment, as a symbol of selfishness that directly clashes with the fact of sharing that the couple represents.”
Almudena Hernando, archaeologist, professor of Prehistory at the Complutense University of Madrid and researcher in the field of gender archeology and the construction of identities, dwells on the word egoism. “It is said that now people are not generous, that they do not know how to live together, that they do not live together because they cannot bear anything, because they do not have true love, because love is generous and love is noble. But all this has a conception: those who gave, those who were generous, were, are, the women”.
A change related to feminism
This change, “clearly related to feminism,” says Hernando, is a demonstration “of each member of the couple’s ability to support themselves” in a society in which women are no longer “representing the role of their traditional domestic function , emotional support and care.
Among the respondents in the analysis on the love of 40dB. For EL PAÍS last year, only one in 10 imagined that it is better not to live together and those who were furthest from that average were those with fewer resources. By gender, women would prefer this option much more (12.7% vs. 7.1%), and the distance between them grew the older they were: the baby boomers (over 57 years) rejected living together three times more than men of their generation. The foregoing, which responded to preferences, translates in real life to the fact that of those over 57 coupled, only 3.5% do not live together.
A low percentage compared to other European countries and related to the family and religious culture that has prevailed in the majority in Spain in recent decades. But that too is changing. María Teresa, in her mid-seventies, after a divorce and living alone for seven years, decided that she would “never again”. Since 2021 she spends the weekends with her “boyfriend”. She laughs when she says her boyfriend because for her it’s going back to hers 16: “The feeling is the same, only I’m not going to trip over the same stone again. I want to pick up my junk, clean up what I dirty, eat at the time I want and whatever I want”.
This perception of the past as “stone” is what Coral Herrera, writer and expert in feminism and romantic love, talks about. Coexistence, she says, causes women to end up fulfilling the historically assigned role, and choosing another way goes against several myths: “That of the dedicated and self-sacrificing woman, the one who is support and endures everything. She breaks the model of femininity dedicated to care and in this change the importance of self-care and avoiding abusive relationships is also revealed. It also breaks with the myth of the unique, true and eternal love insofar as it does not comply with the traditional structure, and in that sense also with the formula of the happy family. And it breaks with the fear of loneliness, which has us women very subjected, the fear of being alone, of growing old alone”.
She is convinced that for women “this formula is more positive than for them.” Unless, she notes, “you find a partner who is really committed to the change, and it’s hard to find that partner.” That couple could be Antonio. She lives in Barcelona, she is 55 years old and has been with Pilar, 46, for a decade. To him, living apart seems like an “evolution” of relationships.
He points out that this format is viable when certain conditions are met: a mature relationship, that both parties have a life beyond the other, a working career that fills and satisfies them and that gives them economic freedom. “We are two individuals, not a limiting set. It must be given in conditions of equality, pure and hard. Independent woman, independent man. The other is not there to fill in gaps, but to share”.
“Men have to learn to relate, to bond, to care”
In reinvent love (Paidós, 2022), Mona Chollet quotes Eva Illouz in the end of love (Katz, 2020). Illouz talks about the growth of negative ties – the inability to establish lasting relationships – and how there are signs that attest to it, such as the sharp increase in the last two decades of family units made up of only one person (in Spain they already exceed five million, according to the INE).
But for Chollet it is “an error” to assimilate cohabitation and commitment: “Naturally you can love and venerate the person with whom you live. Just like you can live alone and be a psychopath cold as an iceberg. But you can also live alone and be lost and passionately committed to someone. And you can live as a couple out of comfort, laziness, conformism, because you don’t have the means or the courage to change your home. To be captive is not to be compromised.”
That captivity, half a century ago it was almost the only possible way of life for women. But it fades more and more. “We have individualized ourselves, we can support ourselves both professionally, economically and relationally. We know how to do it. Instead, men have to learn to relate, to bond, to support, to care. Since the majority has not done that, women find a gap. There are few who know how to do both”, explains Almudena Hernando.
Chollet has on reinvent love a phrase that summarizes part of the change in the social structure that LAT couples can entail: “Separate homes short-circuit the couple and the family as devices for exploiting the women’s labor force”. It is the theoretical form of “okay, but you are at your house and I am at mine. I am not going to go back to pick up anyone’s underpants at 70, almost 71″ that Carmen told Hilario five summers ago.
[Algunas de las personas que contaron sus historias para este reportaje pidieron o bien no aparecer con sus nombres, o no con sus nombres completos, por motivos personales].
#Couples #choose #live #good #house #love #slave