Things You Only Know If You Live Apart From Your Husband

in the last three months, my husband Andy and I have barely slept in the same bed. Why? Because we don’t live together. A few days after our second wedding anniversary, Andy helped me move my things into a house in West Yorkshire – then drove back to our flat in London.

But we’re not separating; quite the opposite. At the end of December we celebrated two years of marriage with a couple of nights away: cheeseboards, bubble baths, muddy walks and so forth. Two years of marriage is marked with cotton; he got me a dressing gown and I paid for our break (hotel sheets, see?). But on the second night I couldn’t sleep, aware of the seismic change we were in the midst of, and wondering whether us living in different postcodes for the first time since we started dating nine years ago was the right thing to do, or if it would be the end of us.

It turns out my husband Andy and I are part of a growing movement. In a recent interview, Sex Education actor Gillian Anderson gushed about the benefits of living apart together (LAT) with her boyfriend, The Crown creator Peter Morgan. ‘My partner and I don’t live together,’ she said. ‘If we did, that would be the end of us. It works so well as it is – it feels special when we come together.’ She added that if she sees ‘trousers left lying on the floor at [his] house [I can] step over them and not feel it is my job to do something about it’.

But choosing not to move in with one another after a steady three-year relationship is not the same as moving out after two years of marriage. And yet... I write fiction, and while writing my second book last year, I found that life – and space, or lack thereof – in London was draining me. I’d hop from job to desk, library to meeting and back again.

I reached burnout towards the end of summer, feeling as though I was doing too much and none of it well. With Andy’s encouragement I quit my job as a sub-editor at a women’s magazine and began scanning Airbnb for properties not far from where
I grew up. I was in distress and, it seemed, wanted to migrate home, ironically to the place I once couldn’t wait to leave. We couldn’t both quit our jobs, sell our flat and up sticks, so I decided I’d do it alone for a bit.

While all this was going on, Andy was putting in 10 hours a day in his job as a newspaper journalist. Our calendars clashed so badly we even went on separate holidays: me to Seville with a friend and New York with my mum, and him on a boys’ trip to San Francisco. Then, in autumn, when the opportunity for him to work in Australia for six weeks presented itself, he took it.

To add to all this, I suffer from contact dermatitis on my hands, which flares up when I’m stressed, so I didn’t wear a wedding ring for most of the year. As you can imagine, this raised eyebrows. Our parents expressed mild alarm. Friends said they weren’t worried, but who knows what was said behind closed doors. I was asked a few times by colleagues where my wedding ring was, and polite jokes were made. ‘I couldn’t do that,’ was the main response when we told people I was moving to Yorkshire by myself; sometimes it was, ‘I wish I could do that,’ as if I had announced I was wintering in the West Indies, not holing up in a wind- battered valley in the North of England.

Andy and I have always been fiercely independent and pretty impulsive – a potentially disastrous combination, but it works for us. We met at uni and moved in together a month into our relationship. We spent our twenties building our careers and finding out who we were, and still did all the nights out and group holidays we would have done had we been single. Somewhere along the way we decided to grow together rather than apart; growth is inevitable and we were lucky enough not to get sick of each other or want different things. We still want to be together just as much as we did when we were 21, and we don’t have kids yet but hopefully they’ll be in our future. But while we’re child-free, we’re enjoying living how we choose.

We still see each other most weekends, but what I’m enjoying most about LAT is really LAL (living apart from London). Every day I put on my walking boots and, within 10 minutes of leaving my front door, I can be on top of a moor or walking along the river in a wooded valley. I’m listening to more audiobooks, I’m watching more films. I have a bath every night, and soup every day. I plan all my meals and my dad brings me leftovers for my freezer – chicken pies and lamb tagine. I’m enjoying being free yet organised, a master of my own day.

That’s not to say it isn’t hard. Evenings are the most difficult, having no one to talk to, though to be honest when we are together we mostly sit on our phones, not watching the Netflix show we’ve spent 45 minutes choosing. I initially had a wobble when I waved Andy off at the front door and closed it to complete silence, knowing I wouldn’t see him for 12 days and worrying about him closing the front door to complete silence.

About her own living situation, Gillian Anderson said, ‘I miss the person I want to be with, which is a lovely feeling.’ And
I couldn’t put it better myself. Missing someone at 30 has none of the pining, tortured ardency of a teenager. It’s a daily confirmation that you married the right person. Plus, I don’t miss the trouser thing.

[‘The Foundling’ by Stacey Halls is out now (£12.99, Manilla Press)](http://‘The Foundling’ by Stacey Halls)

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