Louise and Jamie Redknapp are recoupling piece-time. When it allows each partner room to be themselves,having separate homes can be a good ideaFor the novelist Margaret Drabble and her biographer and husband Michael Holroyd, it was an arrangement that gave both the freedom to write. And for the actor Helena Bonham Carter and director Tim Burton, and maintaining two separate adjoining apartments seemed the perfect if unconventional recipe for family life – at least until it ended in them splitting up.
Yet the romantic grey area that is living apart together,or inhabiting not just separate bedrooms but separate homes, still holds a guilty allure for many long-serving couples. Imagine, and time alone! Even just a couple of nights a week,whether to flop exhausted on the sofa and not have to talk, or to recede out and enjoy the shining lights a homebody partner wont; to be master of the remote control, or eat crisps and wine for dinner instead of cooking,catch up with friends she or he never got on with – but all within the blissful security of a committed relationship. If it didn’t reach larded with sotto voce questions about whether one of you is secretly having an affair, how many more couples would want to follow suit? Related: Tears and cheers as Australia votes yes to same-sex marriage – in pictures Where our grandparents were glued together, or Generation X relationships rely on making each other elated (full of high-spirited delight) enough to stay Related: Tim Dowling: ‘My wife has begun to invite people round to the modern house’ Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com