Julia Carter

Why do people live apart together

Interpretations of living apart together (LAT) have typically counter-posed ‘new’ versus ‘continuist’ perspectives. Recent surveys, however, construct LAT as a heterogeneous category which support a ‘qualified continuist’ position – most people live apart as a response to practical circumstances or as a modern version of ‘boy/girlfriend’, although a minority represents something new in preferring to live apart as a more permanent family form. This paper interrogates this conclusion by examining in detail why people live apart together, using information from a nationally representative survey from Britain and from interview accounts. Our analysis shows well one important feature of living apart together – its flexible pragmatism. LAT as a category contains different sorts of relationship, with different needs and desires. While overall coupledom remains pivotal and cohabitation remains the goal for most, LAT allows more freedom for manoeuvre in conducting relationships. LAT is both ‘new’ and a ‘continuation’.

Practices and perceptions of living apart together

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.

Sex, Love and Security: Accounts of Distance and Commitment in Living Apart Together Relationships

Drawing on a 2011 national survey and 50 semi-structured interviews, we explore the differing ways in which those in living apart together (LAT) relationships discuss and experience notions of commitment. We found that sexual exclusivity in LAT relationships is expected by the large majority, regardless of their reasons for living apart. The majority of the interviewees also expressed a high degree of commitment to their partner in terms of love, care and intimacy, alongside an appreciation of the increased freedom and autonomy that living apart has to offer. Respondents were divided into four groups according to their perceived commitment: 1. Autonomous commitment, 2. Contingent commitment, 3. Ambivalent commitment, and 4. Limited commitment. Despite differing degrees of commitment, however, the overall finding was that the importance of relating and making relational decisions was central, even in the lives of those living in such unconventional relationship styles.

Wedding paradoxes: individualized conformity and the ‘perfect day’

Marriage rates in twenty-first-century Britain are historically low, divorce and separation are historically high, and marriage is no longer generally seen as necessary for legitimate sexual relationships, long-term partnership or even parenting. Yet at the same time weddings have become more prominent, both as social aspiration and as popular culture. But why have a wedding, especially an ornate, expensive and time-consuming wedding, when there appears to be little social need to do so? Similarly, weddings have never been more free from cultural norms and official control – so why do these supposedly unique and deeply personal events usually replay the same assumed traditions? We draw from a small qualitative sample of 15 interviews with white, heterosexual celebrants to address these questions. While existing accounts posit weddings as a social display of success, emphasizing distinction, and manipulation by a powerful wedding industry, we argue that weddings involve celebrants necessarily adapting from, and re-serving, tradition as a process of bricolage. This shapes the four major discourses interviewees used to give meanings to their weddings: the project of the couple, relationality, re-traditionalization and romanticized consumption. At the same time many couples did not want to be distinctively unique, but rather distinctively normal. This is what we call ‘individualized conformity’.

Why Marry? The Role of Tradition in Women's Marital Aspirations:

While the individualisation trend has given way to a relational, reflexive turn in the sociology of relationships, there continues to be a writing out of convention and tradition in understanding relationship processes (excepting Gilding 2010). This paper aims to write tradition back into discussions around relationships by drawing on the accounts of young women and the central role that tradition plays in their relationship narratives. The analysis focuses on: participants’ accounts of marital security reflecting the desire for permanence in an impermanent world; accounts of romance and fairy tales in contrast to pragmatic concerns; and participants’ use of bricolage in combining the desire for ‘invented’ traditions with an emphasis on personal choice and agency. This paper highlights the ambivalent nature of the young womens discourse around relationships, agency and tradition: ultimately, themes of individualisation are revealed in their restatement of tradition. This emerges in three distinct ways: the emphasis on marital security appears as a response to ‘risky’ relationships; participants aspire to the ‘traditional family’ in response to growing fluidity in family relationships; and romance is appealed to in order to counteract their often very pragmatic approach to the life course. Thus, while there are changes in the ways couples can and do live in their relationships, there remains continuity in the ways that tradition is used by participants to articulate relationship aspirations. Tradition becomes reaffirmed in a context of individualism and de-traditionalisation which reflects a pragmatic response to changing social norms and values.

Inventing Tradition: Cohabitation and Common Law Marriage

This chapter uses the case study of cohabitation to further examine the invention of tradition in family practice. Cohabitation, until quite recently both rare and socially deviant, is now widespread and generally seen as entirely normal. This rapid change depended on the invention of common law marriage and the creation of an equally invented academic history of cohabitation. Rather than a constant struggle in ‘experiments in living’, cohabitants found legitimacy and normalcy through invented tradition.

Choosing Tradition: Getting Married

This chapter further explores the links between de-traditionalisation and re-traditionalisation. It does so by examining the survival of marriage in Britain and the desire of many young women to ‘choose’ tradition in marrying and becoming a wife. In so doing, the chapter, using insights from critical institutionalism, mounts a critique of contemporary attempts to update individualisation theory and details how tradition is reworked and reproduced in dealing with social change.

The Leakage of Meaning: Traditional Naming Practices

This chapter focusses on the continuing practice of female name change after heterosexual marriage. It aims to understand how this anachronistic practice is made to seem and become natural and what the significance is of this for families in the UK. Partly this is a taken-for-granted assumption where tradition lies outside conscious scrutiny and if scrutinised can often evoke incomprehension, anger, and conflict. But also people actively use female name change as a handy tool in displaying family. In these ways meaning ‘leaks’ from a patriarchal past to contemporary marriages.

Differential Agency: Living Apart Together

This chapter explores different expressions and enactments of agency through the lens of living apart together (LAT) relationships. LAT relationships draw on traditional patterns of coupledom within a new family or relationship arrangement. The chapter emphasises the differing levels and degrees of agency that enable LAT relationships in a variety of different circumstances with varying preferences, constraints, and obligations on couples. Agencies are relational with others, bonded with partners, sometimes reduced to patiency, and often emotionally derived from feelings of fear or vulnerability.

Pragmatic Tradition: Personal Life in the 1950s

This chapter examines the notion of ‘traditional society’ and the linked notions of revolutionary change in personal life and the ‘queering of society’. Noting the problems with ‘unmarking the ordinary’, it does this using historical data from Britain in 1949–50 on attitudes and practices around sex and marriage. While a minority might be described as ‘traditional’, notably clergymen, equally a contrasting minority could be seen as ‘individualisers’. But the majority used tradition pragmatically in the light of circumstances.