It comes as a surprise to no one that a smaller share of American adults are married today than they were half a century ago. Barely half of all United States households consist of married adults, down from over 70% in the late 1960s. Cohabitation explains some of that decline: the percentage of households consisting of cohabiting adults has gone from under 1% to more than 8%. Meanwhile, the share of one-person households has more than doubled, growing from 13% to 28% of households.
Scholars have responded to these changes by exploring whether and how to extend legal consequences to nonmarital relationships. In the United States, these efforts have largely focused on cohabiting relationships. Relationships between people living in different households have received comparatively little attention. This oversight is troubling given that the number of adults in significant relationships with noncoresidential partners likely exceeds the number of cohabitants.
Cynthia Grant Bowman's recent book, Living Apart Together, makes significant progress toward filling this scholarly gap. As Bowman notes, adults who live apart together (“LAT”) have received substantial attention in Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. For the past several decades, scholars in those countries have attempted to determine the number of LATs in the overall population, information about their economic circumstances, the reasons for living apart, their subjective attitudes about their relationships, and various ways in which they arrange their economic and social lives. Bowman seeks to create a comparable body of knowledge about American LATs.
The centerpiece of the book, and critical contribution, is Bowman's own empirical investigation of LATs in the United States. This work takes two forms. First, Bowman submitted a series of questions to two surveys, the Empire State Poll, which surveys respondents in the state of New York, and Cornell University's National Social Survey, which surveys a random sample of adults in the continental United States. Second, Bowman conducted semi-structured interviews of 21 people in a committed relationship but living in separate residences, identified through word of mouth. Through these interviews, Bowman sought a “thicker description of living as a LAT” among people who had committed to the lifestyle for a lengthy period of time (38).
In combination, these studies provide many insights about LATs that set the benchmark for what we know about American LATs. The two surveys found that 9% of the national survey respondents and 12% of the New York survey respondents reported that they were in a committed intimate relationship with a person with whom they did not live. If replicated on a national scale, this would mean that tens of millions of adults are LATs. While a majority of respondents in both surveys identified constraints like jobs or other obligations as their primary reason for living apart, over 26% of New York respondents and 15% of national respondents said that living apart was what they preferred. In many cases, these relationships were long-lasting and serious. About half of the national respondents and 60% of the New York respondents were in relationships that had lasted longer than 2 years. Two-thirds of respondents saw each other at least two times per week, and over 90% reported communicating by email, text, or phone on a daily basis. Bowman's data confirm that LATs tend not to arrange their finances in a way typical of married couples. Over two-thirds either split expenses 50–50 or alternated payment; only 5.5% contributed to a common pot. LATs are also half as likely to turn to their partners for physical caregiving as they are to turn to other family members. When it comes to emotional support, however, the figures reverse: they are much more likely to seek emotional support from a partner than a family member.
After painting this broad picture, Bowman focuses on several tantalizing questions. Might LAT be particularly attractive to women, allowing them to pursue their careers and interests while avoiding an inequitable distribution of domestic labor? Might LAT also be an especially attractive option for people in the “third age,” those over the age of 65, many of whom may have been previously married and have established separate lives, but who still desire intimacy and companionship? Bowman's answers confirm some aspects of existing research and challenge others. For instance, she notes, consistent with previous studies, that many women choose LAT to maintain a sense of independence and to focus on their own pursuits. However, she points out that her research subjects were mostly in egalitarian relationships and that the women in those relationships were not motivated by a conscious desire to avoid being shouldered with a disproportionate share of domestic labor, as others have hypothesized. Bowman's interviews with third age subjects echo studies suggesting the importance of freedom and financial independence but also show that LATs provide a significant amount of physical caretaking in addition to emotional support. In these and other ways, Bowman's research produces a textured account of LAT motivations and preferences that should be of interest to policymakers.
The final two chapters of the book examine the current legal treatment of LATs and the way that the law might better respond to their needs. In contrast to the rich account of the diverse array of LAT relationships, this part of the book left me wanting more. Bowman proposes that we should listen to LATs and provide them with the rights they prefer. But she says little about which LATs, and why we should consider their preferences but not others'. For example, Bowman dismisses younger LATs, people who are between the ages of 18 and 24, as well as LATs whose relationships are under 5 years in duration. She argues that they do not need the law to intervene in their relationships, and proposes to exclude them from the family leave, hospital visitation rights, status as next of kin for medical decision-making, and eligibility for coverage under the other's health insurance that she would provide to older LATs (161). Yet it seems to me that at least some of these benefits, like eligibility for health insurance coverage, could be critical for younger LATs and those in shorter relationships. Moreover, Bowman's focus on long-term LATs, some of whom have lived apart together for decades, leads her to neglect the ways that many LAT relationships are in flux. People start off as LATs but will often marry; others live together in marriage and then realize that they prefer to live apart while continuing to remain legally married. Still others are married to someone else, meaning that they may still be legally bound to their non-LAT partner. Along those lines, the chapter on gay male LATs features interviews with several married pairs, most of whom are consensually nonmonogamous. The book presumes they are “couples,” but one wonders whether they have to be. In addition, if they count as LATs, why define LAT as monogamous when it comes to heterosexual couples?
As these questions indicate, Bowman has opened the door to an important relationship form, one whose boundaries might be more complicated than Bowman acknowledges in her work. The regulation of LAT relationships deserves the same degree of attention paid to cohabitation in recent years, both by scholars as well as lawmakers. This book should be the departure point for that essential work.
