Subverting gendered norms of cohabitation: Living Apart Together for women over 45

Abstract

Living apart together (LAT) is the relationship term used to describe those couples who are in a committed, intimate relationship with someone who lives in another household. LAT for those who have chosen this relationship form is a political act that subverts and transforms the gendered norms of cohabitation. This paper presents the findings of the first qualitative study of LAT conducted in Australia, reporting on the private and public implications of LAT for the women in this study. The findings give added meaning to why, for the cohort of women over 45 who have chosen to live apart together, they make the choice to LAT, their LAT relationships tend to last longer than the younger cohorts of LATs and their motivations for being in a LAT relationship differ from the younger cohorts. Situated within a feminist discourse, the study demonstrates that LAT has the potential to change women's lives for the better.

Keywords::

• living apart together
• LAT relationships
• gender relations
• feminism
• ethnography
• composite narratives

Notes

^1. Educational opportunities have expanded to the extent that females are now outperforming males in both end-of-secondary-school achievement and in higher education study (in the 1950s, one in five university students in Australia was female, in 2011 57% of higher education students were female – Australian Bureau of Statistics 2012) Women's participation in the labour market has increased from 34% in 1961 to 59% in 2011 while men's has declined from 82% in 1961 to 72% in 2011 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011a). Without dismissing the evidence that those educational opportunities have not translated into equal numbers of post-graduate degrees for males and females, nor into equal-pay post-graduation (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2012), and without ignoring the stresses of an increasingly casualized workforce – the burden of which is mostly carried by females – Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011b – women are still able to participate in the workforce, acquiring economic capital in the process, much more than were their mothers.

^2. The HILDA survey is an Australian household-based panel study which began in 2001. It has been used to examine a range of issues, for example, the incidence of persistent poverty; assets and income in the transition to retirement; the correlates and impact of changes in physical and mental health; and an international comparison of wealth and happiness. The survey is widely used by Australian and international researchers in the fields of economics, social sciences and social policy and by the Australian Government. The HILDA survey is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne and is funded by the Australian Government.

^3. Summary of media release. Distance May Make the Heart Grow Fonder: Expert. More committed Australian couples are choosing to live in two houses instead of one – and a researcher at The University of Western Australia wants to know why LAT relationships are particularly attractive to heterosexual women. Assistant Professor Karen Upton-Davis of UWA's School of Population Health said one in four of Australia's supposedly single adult population lived in such a relationship. ‘About half of these are under 25 and still living at home with their parents but the other half, who are older, have chosen not to marry or live with their partner and are maintaining their own household,’ she said. ‘For my investigation of LAT relationships, I'm interested in delving deep and talking to women to find out how it affects their view of themselves and how it impacts on their partner, family and friends. I'm also curious about the impact on these women's dealings with the outside world – for instance with their workplace, financial institutions, government and community agencies and services,’ Assistant Professor Upton-Davis said.

^4. Chilla Bulbeck's study explored the changing grounds of sameness and difference within gender relations. Using Anne Summers 1970 methodology of asking a group of final year schoolgirls to write an essay imagining their futures, Bulbeck was able to compare the future possibilities envisaged by young women before and after the impact of women's liberation. Bulbeck broadened her study to include schoolboys' imagined futures, a survey directed at both young people and their parents exploring attitudes according to generation, gender, class and ethnicity, and face-to-face interviews with parents and their same sex child asking them to identify the ways in which their lives differed (or were similar) to the previous and/or next same-sex generation. Bulbeck's study revealed that the rhetoric of young women was that of equality; however, their practices were of gender, class and ethnic difference, expressed in often profound inequalities (2012, p. 8). In the face-to-face interviews with fathers and sons, Bulbeck ‘was struck by the absence of any kind of story by which to discuss generational change’ (2012, p. 71) finding fathers generally dumbstruck by the request to compare their lives with that of their father/son. ‘[While] mothers have bequeathed their daughters a progressive and empowering narrative of changed gender relations … fathers have not prepared their sons in the same way’ (Bulbeck 2012, p. 91).

^5. Flood (2005) in Mapping Loneliness in Australia reports that men are generally lonelier than women from young adulthood right through to old age. Using National survey data from the second wave of HILDA which in part assessed loneliness and social support, Flood compares both men and women's experiences across household type and age (25–44 years). The gendered contrast is stark. Data from the HILDA survey suggest that men rely on their wives or de facto partners for their emotional and social needs to a greater degree than women rely on their male partners, who instead draw on a wider source of support. Indeed, Flood goes on to report that not only are women a whole lot less lonely than men, but also that those women who live in a house-share situation are the least lonely, with barely a discernible difference between those in a shared-living household and those who live alone (who by and large still have supportive friendship networks), and that even those women who live with a partner draw on their wider social support networks (of mostly women) to satisfy their needs for intimacy, attachment, caring, self-disclosure and trust. In contrast, the loneliest men are those who live alone, with very little gain in social and emotional support networks for those men living in a house-share situation. The least lonely men are those living with a partner, who rely on those female partners for friendship and social support, leading to the conclusion that in the loneliness stakes, almost the opposite is true for men and women. Significantly, the HILDA survey did not investigate whether those who lived alone or in shared housing were in a LAT relationship.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Upton-Davis

Karen Upton-Davis is an Assistant Professor in the Discipline of Social Work and Social Policy at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests include the impact on gendered relations of non-traditional relationship forms, such as living apart together. She is currently researching on how LAT relationships affect men.