Why do so many women live in homes separate from their partners and children? Because it's a win-win situation | Emma Brockes

The model coupling - the dream, if you will - has always been Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton, or Annie Leibovitz and Susan Sontag: maintaining a marriage, de facto or real, in two households distinct, so you get all the benefits without any of the gross elements. You could keep the magic alive, extend the honeymoon period indefinitely and, by protecting your space and rationing your time together, create a scenario in which you were actually happy to see each other. Trends from celebrities tend to be fake, meaningless, or massaged in, but the appeal of this model has lingered. Beyond the small matter of money, what exactly isn't to like?

Or rather, what is there's nothing not to like about women in a given couple? In the New York Times this week – sound the horn – a new trends article falls on the growing number of women in the United States who, after the pandemic, choose to maintain the model of marriage of separate households, established during the lockout by some families to reduce Covid transmissions, and proving so preferable to the norm, apparently, that they are in no rush to reunite with their husbands.

It is well known that among straight couples, women initiate the most divorces – by some calculations 70% – and pushing for separate households is, I imagine, a step towards that end for many numbers in this new trend. But for others, it may really be a viable solution to the problem of loving your spouse but not wanting them all the time.

I admit that I am biased in this area. I live with my children, but I have never cohabited full time with a romantic partner. The luxury of deciding when people come and go in your home is hard to give up and once you get used to not living in someone else's emotional climate - the thought of it makes me once panicked and livid - very hard to give up.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, the number of marriages has declined over the past decade, and for some time in both countries single adult women have outnumbered their married counterparts. What is new is the increase in the number of those who still identify as married but live apart from their spouse; In the United States, married couples maintaining separate households rose by a quarter between 2000 and 2019, and in 2021 that number rose sharply again, according to the New York Times. The Census Bureau estimates that 3.89 million Americans, or 2.95% of married couples, live apart. They even have a little acronym: Lat, or "living separately together".

The trend seems to be the likely result of both everyone being at home for more than two years and drove each other crazy, and the fact that after the lockdown ended, studies showed that men quickly gave up childcare and domestic work that some had taken up during this time. Judging by the case studies in the article, for some women, quarantine in a quiet, separate residence while their husbands provided care at home, hit them at the level of an eye-opener. For others, the fact that even a global pandemic has failed to undermine – or in some cases actively deepen – the division of labor in the home along traditional gender lines has had a straw effect that has broke the camel's back.

I mean, there are obviously downsides to all of this, mainly financial, especially if you have kids. The overhead of two households is eye-bleeding. I remember being shaken when, straight out of college, a few friends would rush in with their partners and get married just as rushed, mostly, it seemed to me, to cut costs. It seemed crazy at the time, but on reflection, it might not have been a crazier justification than another. And on closer inspection, of course, none of these totem celebrity relationships foreshadowed anything...