by “We realized that we had to make a change in the couple before coexistence and daily life began to wear down the bond,” says Paula, a 44-year-old high school teacher who lives in Ciudad Evita, in the west of the suburbs. Buenos Aires The change was quite drastic: after living together for almost a decade, Paula and Martín decided a year and a half ago that the relationship would continue with the same loving commitment, but in separate houses.
Julia and Gonzalo, 47 and 48 years old, professionals from La Plata with a young daughter, opted for the same path of “uncoexisting.” Just like Miriam, 57, and her partner, Oscar, 54: now their houses are about ten kilometers from each other in different areas of the city of Córdoba.
Isolated cases or emerging trend? Too much home office? Another side of the deepening of individualism? Or the appreciation of uniqueness and one’s own spaces? A break, without a doubt, from the most traditional conception of being in a stable couple. For women, especially, there is a search for autonomy and independence and to leave behind an unequal distribution of domestic tasks.
The academic view
“It is part of a tendency not to think that the end of coexistence necessarily has to do with the end of the relationship,” says Débora Tajer, doctor in Psychology and professor of Gender Studies at the Faculty of Psychology at the UBA.
“Although it can be framed as an exercise in hyperindividualism, I also see in the cases that I know, that women bet on greater freedom of movement, to prove to themselves that they can be more autonomous, and it does them very good,” says Mabel Burín. , doctor in Clinical Psychology, specialist in Gender and Mental Health and director of the Gender and Subjectivity Program at UCES. Of course, Burin highlights, in order to sustain a relationship after deciding not to live together anymore, you must have at least the least economic and also subjective resources.
“It’s something that’s happening and I think we’re going to see a lot more of it. It is true that in Argentina there is a great limitation, which is the economic one and the rental situation. But without a doubt many people would want to do it,” estimates Lucía Díaz, psychologist, sexologist and couples therapist.
In a context of economic crisis and adjustment, rent increases and layoffs in different sectors, logic indicates that there are surely more couples who would like to live in separate houses than those who can do so; and even more so, those who, having decided to divorce, are forced to continue living together due to lack of income so that one of the two can move. Some opt, trapped under the same roof, for separate bedrooms. Others prefer different beds, due to differences in nighttime habits, times for falling asleep and waking up, or to feed sexual desire with a certain distance, without moving and far from a breakup of the couple.
“They are not new modalities, although perhaps they are beginning to be counted more because before there was a certain social shame in whitewashing these forms of coexistence,” says Díaz.
With commitment but without coexistence
Another way – increasingly widespread – is to start a formal, committed relationship, but in separate houses, which is known in Europe and the US with the acronym LAT, which means Living Apart Together. In some cases, it has to do with the fact that they are in different countries for work reasons, or because they met virtually and in those cases, they meet from time to time.
In other situations, they are people with children from previous partners – they know the wear and tear that coexistence takes, which led them to separate – and they prefer to protect themselves from daily friction and the choice of the LAT mode allows them to meet – generally some day of the week and on weekends. of the week – and share the best of life as a couple, without the hassle of domestic matters.
Stopping living together, but staying together is not exactly the LAT model: it is giving a change of direction, but thinking about a common horizon.
“It generated more sexual desire in me”
Julia and Gonzalo, the two professionals from La Plata, aged 47 and 48, met in 2018. They started living together 3 years ago, the age of their common child. “The arrival of our son meant the realization of a long-awaited wish for me,” says Julia.
Gonzalo had been in a relationship for two decades and with his ex, he already had two daughters, ages 13 and 18. She, on the other hand, does not. In the past, Julia had lived together for 8 years, but when her life crossed paths with Gonzalo, she had been without a stable relationship for ten years. The move to live together was “a bit particular,” she says. She was pregnant about to give birth and he was working in another province, after a year without finding a job.
“The coexistence began, then, between his daughters, the newborn baby and me.” He joined half a year later. “We have had many disagreements and discussions, a large percentage linked to coexistence, the organization of domestic tasks and household responsibilities, and due to differences in ways of upbringing”account.
The conflicts escalated to the point that separation was inevitable. He proposed it. “It was hard for me to think about it,” Julia admits. They turned to couples therapy. “We had decided to separate and that had already decompressed us from everyday life. I proposed to maintain the bond, as long as I am attracted to him and I love him, even though we have argued so much… We thought it could be a way to postpone the separation, as a way to delay it, but we decided to continue. That agreement made the process very loving for everyone, especially for our son. And strikingly, it generated more sexual desire in me, which I had completely forgotten before… I understood that it had to do with my motherhood, because it wasn’t like that before… Gonza’s move was during Easter. Since that moment we are doing very well, each of us in the family processing the changes and losses, but finding new ways at the level of the couple, with beautiful spaces and plans, and subtracting friction and differences,” Julia values.
“He makes his life, I make mine, but there is no doubt of infidelity”
Myriam and Oscar are employees, she in an educational establishment and he in a public company. They have been together for 15 and a half years. When they started the relationship, he was 39 years old, separated and the father of a 4-year-old girl. Myriam, also separated, was 42 and the mother of two teenagers, ages 16 and 18. The relationship had twists and turns, some impasse… And in 2014 they decided to start living together: she moved into his apartment; Her children, now older, were left living alone in their house.
“It lasted a year and a half. And in July 2015 we decided to continue as a couple without living together,” says Myriam. “It just coincided with the fact that she had been the grandmother of one of my children who, shortly after – when my granddaughter was 10 months old – separated from her. So I was very focused on my grandmother. I started taking care of my granddaughter, helping my son with his upbringing. The baby was small. For me it was the ideal situation to stop living together. We were both able to organize our lives. We have differentiated economies. I am in my apartment alone. My children already live on their own. I pay for my things. And I usually go to his house on Wednesday afternoons until Thursday when I go to work. And I return on Friday afternoon until Sunday,” she says. They spend the weekend together. “It’s cool, he makes his life, I make mine, but there is no doubt of infidelity,” Myriam highlights.
He says that he really likes music, he plays the piano and has a band, and he gets together with friends to play at his house. “I study, I take courses, I go to Pilates and I handle myself. The truth is that all my life I lived with someone, if it wasn’t with my children, it was with him or with other couples and at this age, I have discovered being alone with cats. I love him too. We have settled down, so neither I break his balls nor he breaks me, and in general we reserve weekends and Wednesdays to be together.” They share the weekend expenses. In the same way that the two of them bought “a flower bed and an excellent mattress” for Oscar’s house, where they sleep together. “It’s the only common asset we have,” laughs Myriam. She is 57 years old and he is 54. They live about ten kilometers apart in different neighborhoods of the city of Córdoba.
“Being the person who supports the house was a challenge”
Paula is a teacher and is 44 years old. Martín is a winder, he works in the family workshop with his father and he is 39 years old. They live in Ciudad Evita, La Matanza district, in the same neighborhood a few blocks away. “A year and a half ago they decided to stop sharing the same home. They had been living together for six years. “We both needed more space and autonomy in terms of time,” says Paula. He has a 15-year-old daughter from a previous relationship who usually lives with her from Monday to Friday and goes on weekends with her father.
Martín had joined their family organization. “It’s not that it didn’t work, but it was a little overwhelming for him. The need for time and space was different for both of them. For him, it was more about having his own time and space when he returned from work. I had the need and the challenge, actually, to live alone. “I went from my parents’ house to being in a relationship with my daughter’s father,” he says. “We both realized that we had to make a change in the couple before coexistence and daily life began to wear down the bond,” Paula reflects.
“Being the person who financially supports the house was also a challenge for me because I had never had a stable job to be able to do so,” he says. She is a teacher at a secondary school. “I graduated in 2019, with a pandemic in between, only in 2022 was I able to have more hours of classes to be able to support the family economy.
–How did you decide to stop living together? –This newspaper asked him.
–We were talking about it for months. For me it was a great opportunity. We see each other on weekends and the rest of the days we communicate via WhatsApp.
Individualism or excess of home office?
consulted by Page 12couples therapist and sexologist Lucía Díaz maintains that “non-coexistence” goes hand in hand with the era of home office which was established more strongly during the Covid pandemic. Although it is not the only factor, he says, “Sharing a home and, on top of that, finding one or both of you permanently at home, working, also leads you to see things about the other’s privacy that perhaps it would be good not to have so close, especially the annoyance or bad mood at work, or problems of the work that you are consuming by sharing the same space and that you could easily not see them from working in an office every day of the week”, points out,
Díaz finds pure profits when couples stop living together or live in separate roofs. The encounters, in addition to being intentional, planned and a little more desired, also lead to having one more conversation from the beginning, from the initial question of how are you, and it causes couples to tell each other everyday things, he highlights. “And not assuming that I get up and go to bed every night with the same person makes people consider the possibility of missing the other person,” he adds.
For Tajer, author of the book Psychoanalysis for all (Topia, editions), the processes of “disagreement” would not be related to an excess of individualism. “Individualism is when the only thing that matters to you is your own over the other or at least in the first place, and it seems to me that this is something else. It is a choice based on uniqueness, about how each person truly is, and it also allows us to make better bonds because not everyone who lives together is happy living that way. This is a possibility for people who love each other very much but who want to have their space and do their things,” he says. There are personal characteristics that considerably affect coexistence, things as basic as the fact that one is a night owl and the other person is not, or one is orderly and the other is bothered by disorder, he warns. And he adds: “You can really love a couple a lot, but these types of issues in coexistence are very annoying, and if you don’t live together you don’t care because you stay for a few days or sleep in that place and then you leave and you can share with that person, without focus on those differences”.
[Algunas personas de este artículo pidieron no aparecer con su nombre].
