My Husband and I Moved Into a New Apartment Last Week, but This Time We Will Live Apart

The Unconventional Separation of an Unconventional Marriage

On Saturday, my husband and I moved into a new apartment together. While dear friends watched our two boys, we carefully loaded a U-Haul with boxes of books and kitchen utensils and photos of our family.

In the 18 years we’ve known each other, we have moved objects like these over and over again. We once moved garbage bags of my belongings by bicycle, riding back and forth across the city, when I moved into his basement apartment during our first year of courtship.

We carried mattresses and dressers up narrow stairwells in a 4th floor walk-up when I moved into law school in 2010. Ten years ago, we loaded a van with all of our belongings on the coldest day of the year to move into the first and only home we have ever owned together.

But this move was different.

This time, we were moving into an apartment we would share as roommates, not as a married couple. We were moving into our “nesting” apartment, the place we will alternate living when we are not parenting our children in our family home.

“Nesting,” or “bird nesting,” is a family arrangement after divorce or separation that allows the children to remain in the family home. The parents do the heavy lifting of moving in and out of the home, while the kids remain there. In our case, we will share a 2-bedroom apartment and alternate living there alone and living with our children in the home we still co-own.

Of course, this arrangement requires intense coordination, patience, and financial planning. But it’s the only solution that felt right for both of us.

We decided to separate in April, one month before our ten-year wedding anniversary.

My doubts about our future had nagged at me for years before that moment. We tried an open marriage. We tried years of marriage therapy. But nothing could shake the feeling in my gut that we had simply outgrown our love for each other, that we had spent so many years living in the drought of a loveless marriage that it was impossible to sprout something new together.

The spark was there at the start, during those early years when we carted my belongings by bike across our city. But back then, we were still just beginning the journey to adulthood. The world was open to us both, and all of my belongings could fit on a bike ride or two.

Over time, those bags got heavier. We added two children. Any intimacy or passion we had felt for each other wilted and died. He thought we could revive it, but I didn’t.

In all of the years we’ve spent together, we have never held too tightly to convention. Our engagement was the result of a careful discussion, not a passionate proposal. We spent over six years before that living in different cities, sometimes for extended periods of separation across countries and continents. I have never really worn a wedding ring.

And like so many other pieces of our rather unconventional relationship, we have shaped this major life change in a way that has surprised most of our friends and family. Most don’t quite understand why we would choose a new living arrangement that keeps our lives so tightly wound together. Most don’t really understand why we are separating in the first place, since we still smile and laugh openly in each other’s presence. We still parent our two boys without skipping a beat. On the outside, it doesn’t look like much has changed between us.

You see, our decision to separate was not the result of upheaval or intense conflict. Our marriage did not shatter into a million pieces on the floor. The tiny cracks formed quietly, slowly.

They began to appear during those first anniversaries that passed without the exchange of cards. They spread and multiplied with every decision to turn away instead of toward each other, every moment of need that went unfulfilled, every missed opportunity for sex or a loving embrace. Eventually, all I could see were the cracks.

But now, with moving boxes of our belongings still standing in the middle of this new apartment we’ll share together, the cracks don’t matter anymore. We are lighter now, because we’ve freed ourselves from the obligations of marriage.

And with that newfound lightness, we are smiling and laughing more freely than we have in years.

We both know this new life will take time to adjust to. But for now, we will simply move forward. We will unpack these boxes, one by one, and place each object in its place in this new nest we are building together.