The Living Apart Together Trend: What Nashville Couples Can Learn From It Even If They Live Together

Brittney and I have never lived apart. Three kids, one house, two careers, and the full beautiful chaos of a shared Nashville life — we are, by any measure, firmly in the together-together camp.

But I've been paying attention to the Living Apart Together trend — sometimes called LAT — and the specific research behind it, because the findings reveal something genuinely useful for couples who share a home and have no intention of changing that. Not because I'm recommending that anyone move to separate residences. Because the specific qualities that make LAT relationships work — the intentional presence, the protection of individual space, the deliberate choosing of each other rather than the passive default of proximity — are qualities that any couple can cultivate regardless of their mailing address.

According to 2022 Census data cited by Psychology Today, approximately 3.89 million Americans are currently living separately from their spouses by choice — nearly 3% of all U.S. marriages. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a measurable and growing relationship structure that researchers are increasingly taking seriously as a legitimate alternative to conventional cohabitation.

The question the LAT research raises for every couple — not just those living apart — is this: how much of your intimate connection is something you're actively choosing, and how much is simply the default output of sharing a space?

A couple stands apart, symbolizing the complexities of living together while maintaining separate spaces.

What Living Apart Together Actually Is

The Living Apart Together arrangement describes couples who are in committed, often long-term relationships — including marriages — who maintain separate primary residences by choice. Not because of career requirements or logistical necessity, but because they have found that the quality of their connection, their individual wellbeing, and their intimate relationship are better served by intentional time together than by the continuous proximity of shared living.

The arrangement is more common in Europe, where it has been studied for longer, but is growing significantly in the United States. New research from a U.K. household study cited by NPR found that older couples who decided to live in separate places show better mental health outcomes than comparable cohabiting couples — a finding researchers attribute to the way physical distance preserves individual identity, personal boundaries, and the specific sense of being a distinct person who chooses their partner rather than simply shares space with them. When time together is finite and deliberately chosen, both partners tend to invest in the quality of the connection differently than when togetherness is simply the continuous background of shared domestic life.

According to research published in the Journal of Marriage and Family and subsequent replications examining LAT relationships, couples whose arrangements required deliberate effort to maintain emotional intimacy showed stronger relational intentionality and higher levels of expressed appreciation for shared time than couples whose proximity made genuine connection effortless and therefore often unintentional.

Why Proximity Can Quietly Work Against Intimate Connection

This is the counterintuitive finding at the heart of the LAT research — and the one most relevant for Nashville couples who share a home and are navigating the quiet erosion of genuine connection that proximity can inadvertently produce.

Sharing a home creates the conditions for a specific and very common intimacy trap: the confusion of physical proximity with genuine connection. Two people who share a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom, and most of their waking hours can be profoundly disconnected from each other — passing through the shared space in parallel rather than genuinely meeting in it.

This is not failure. It is the predictable outcome of a specific dynamic: when two people are continuously together, the specific motivation that makes connection intentional — the awareness that this time together is finite and worth investing in — tends to diminish. Proximity becomes the background condition rather than a chosen gift. The encounter becomes default rather than deliberate.

Gottman's research on bids for connection — the finding that what most distinguishes flourishing from deteriorating relationships is how consistently partners turn toward rather than away from each other's small daily attempts to connect — reflects this dynamic precisely. In relationships where connection has become default rather than deliberate, bids for connection are more likely to be missed, dismissed, or not even recognized as bids at all. The ambient presence of the other person has dulled the specific attention that genuine connection requires.

What LAT Couples Do That Cohabiting Couples Often Don't

The specific practices that characterize LAT relationships are precisely the practices that any couple can adopt regardless of their living arrangement. What makes LAT intimacy different is not the physical separation — it's the intentionality that the separation requires. And intentionality is a choice, not a logistical necessity.

They choose each other deliberately and repeatedly.

In LAT relationships, every time together is by definition a choice. Neither partner is present by default. This specific quality — of being genuinely chosen rather than simply present — produces a relational dynamic that cohabiting couples can replicate through the deliberate practices of intentional presence. The choice to put down the phone during dinner, to give the arrival home genuine attention, to protect specific windows of genuine connection from the ambient logistics of shared domestic life — these are the equivalent of the LAT couple's deliberate choice to be together.

They protect individual identity within the relationship.

The LAT research consistently identifies the maintenance of genuine individual identity — the sense of both partners as fully themselves, with their own inner lives, their own pursuits, their own aliveness that belongs to them and not only to the relationship — as central to what makes LAT relationships work. This is the parallel intimacy principle I've discussed in another post: the quality of individual aliveness that both partners bring to genuine togetherness is what makes the togetherness genuinely alive.

Cohabiting couples who have allowed their individual identities to be fully absorbed into their shared roles — as partners, as parents, as managers of the household — can reclaim this quality by deliberately protecting time and space for individual pursuits, individual restoration, and the specific aliveness that belongs to each person as an individual rather than as half of a couple.

They invest in the quality of time together rather than assuming its availability.

LAT couples know that time together is finite and specific. This knowledge tends to produce a different quality of investment in that time than the ambient, unstructured togetherness of cohabiting life provides. The Nashville couple who treats a specific evening together the way an LAT couple treats a chosen visit — with genuine presence, genuine investment, the deliberate decision to be actually there rather than merely physically occupying the same space — is practicing the specific quality of intentional connection that the LAT research consistently identifies as the driver of relational health.

Three LAT Practices Worth Stealing for Your Nashville Marriage

1. The deliberate arrival.

Treat the moment when both partners are home together as a genuine arrival — not a continuation of parallel activity in shared space. The specific greeting, the genuine physical presence, the ten seconds of actual eye contact and contact — these are the embodied equivalent of the LAT couple's deliberate choice to show up. Practice it daily. Notice what it changes.

2. The protected individual window.

Each partner protects a specific weekly window — however brief — that belongs entirely to them as an individual. Not scheduled couple time. Time for the individual aliveness that feeds the relationship rather than being consumed by it. A run, a creative project, a solo evening with a book. The returning of each person to the relationship as someone with a full individual life produces the specific quality of presence that default proximity gradually erodes.

3. The chosen evening.

Once a week, treat one shared evening the way an LAT couple would treat a planned visit. No devices. No logistics. The specific quality of being deliberately together rather than continuously proximate. Not an elaborate date. Just a genuine decision to be actually present with each other for a defined window — and the deliberate investment in the quality of that presence.

Book a free discovery call and let's talk about what bringing genuine intentionality into your intimate connection could look like — and what becomes available between you and your partner when proximity becomes a deliberate gift rather than an assumed background condition.

And if you'd like to begin exploring what genuinely intentional intimate presence feels like in a guided context, Coelle offers audio experiences designed to help couples develop exactly this quality — the specific deliberateness that makes time together genuinely alive.

Scott Schwertly is a Nashville-based sex and intimacy coach, founder of Coelle, and co-host of Do You Feel That? with his wife Brittney.