How Spending Time Living Alone is Changing Romantic Relationships

For many women, it heightens their desire for equality

For a long time, more of my life was spent living with a romantic partner than living solo — first for four years with the man who became my first husband when I was in my early 20s and then for 17 years with the man who became my second husband when I was in my early 30s.

I have now spent the majority of my life not living with a romantic partner, mostly since my second divorce nearly 20 years ago.

When I dropped out of college at 19 to follow my boyfriend to Colorado, where he was attending college, I hadn’t lived by myself for very long.

Would it have made a difference in my romantic life if I had spent a few years living by myself before moving in with my boyfriend? According to a recent study, yes.

It might have led to more equitable partnerships, according to sociologist Lynn Jamieson, who conducted a study of 140 men and women aged 25 to 44.

“Living alone slows down the process of becoming a co-resident couple when both parties live alone, but it may also result in a more considered exploration of fairness and equality in couple relationships. More honest dialogue ‘between the couple and living alone’ is in support of gender equality.”

In light of the recent memoirs excoriating heterosexual marriage, perhaps this is something to pay attention to.

One of those memoirs is Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife. She was just 22 when she wed. Raised in a religious home, she was also a virgin.

Marrying young is something conservatives often promote. But, at what cost to the woman?

An equitable marriage, for one.

That’s the kind of marriage Lenz wanted. But she didn’t actually get that until she divorced after 12 years and had 50–50 physical custody of their two children. That was my experience, too, and boy did that time to myself make me a better mother, friend, journalist, and romantic partner.

As Lenz writes,

“I was 33, a mother of two, and bone-tired. I didn’t want the laundry and chores to be the rest of my life. I didn’t want to always be drowning in work and childcare and housecleaning and dinner, bearing the brunt of the labor. I’d spent the past two years begging for help with the kids and housework, only to be told that I could just quit my job if it was all too much. ‘It’s not too much,’ I’d said over and over. ‘It’s just not all my job.’”

One wonders what might have happened had she spent a few years living solo and marrying later as so many people are doing nowadays. The median age for a first marriage is 28.6 years for women and 30.4 years for men.

Not to say that six more years of being single would have made a difference in Lenz’s marriage, but it might have, according to Jamieson’s study.

“When a couple come to live together, awareness of the pleasures of living alone can heighten efforts to attain fairness and awareness of the need to equalize belonging, ownership and autonomy in command of space and time within their home and their relationship. If women experience living alone prior to living with a male partner, awareness of the balancing acts between self-identity and identity as a couple may help to enhance the gender equality of heterosexual relationships or at least heighten awareness of ‘falling into gender’.”

Feminists in the 1970s observed that some women who wanted a romantic relationship were often aware that they were entering into an arrangement that was fundamentally unequal. Others were blindsided. A common refrain at the time, Jamieson notes, is the adage “It begins by sinking into his arms and ends with your arms in his sink.”

A desire to not “fall into gender” is why more women are embracing live apart together (LAT) relationships, especially after divorcing or becoming widowed.

“For some women, fear of falling into conventional gendered divisions of labour makes co-residence with any man a risky future; they do not wish to extend their domestic work to looking after another adult nor to reduce other commitments such as their focus on their career.”

But women who can’t wrap their heads around changing the form of a romantic relationship can be complicit in the continuity of the inequities of a heterosexual cohabiting relationship despite a desire for equity — a situation that can prove exhausting, requiring ongoing vigilance and conversations (or nagging and fighting) to make things fairer.

All of this changes, however, once a woman hits menopause, she observes.

“Once having children is off the agenda, women’s tolerance of ‘falling back into gender’ may be reduced and their wariness of co-residence enhanced.”

In other words, some of the older women in her study feared that living together with a man would “carry a risk of becoming her partner’s domestic servant,” and they had little interest in that.

And many older women also aren’t too interested in giving up their freedom.

Living alone allows you to control your time and use of space. Moving in with a romantic partner requires some adjustments and negotiations. Not to say that you can’t have freedom within a cohabiting relationship; it’s just going to take a lot of time, effort, vigilance, conversations, and agreements.

Jamieson believes that as more people spend more years living alone, “the weight placed on having a co-resident partner may wane.”

“Also, any experience of living alone may modify subsequent partnership, including expectations of the relationship, the pace and complexity of making any move to co-residence, and the desired balance between sustaining a sense of autonomy versus investment in an identity as a couple.”

Does that mean fewer people may choose to live together? Maybe. Does that mean more people might stay happily single? Possibly.

On the other hand, taking a slower approach to romantic relationships and being more conscious about what we want from them and more intentional about how we create them just may lead to better relationships.

And who doesn’t want that?

My book on changing the narrative about aging as a woman, “Not Too Old For That: How Women Are Changing the Story of Aging,” was named a “Best Book of 2022” by Take the Lead, and my forthcoming book, “LATitude: How to Make a Live Apart Together Relationship Work” will be published July 9, 2024. Follow me on Medium, Threads, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. If you want to support my work and have unlimited access to the writing of all Medium writers, please become a member here.

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