Sex, Love & Twice The Real Estate

After six years of dating, the author Antonia Crane married her boyfriend, Jed, last July. After the wedding, they did not settle down in a starter apartment to bicker over where to store that KitchenAid mixer they’d never use, like newlyweds have since the dawn of time. Instead, Antonia and her husband went home — her to Unit 10; him to Unit 20. A year later, they still inhabit separate apartments, one story away from each other, in the Highland Park building that Crane manages. Together and also slightly apart.

Call it the Just Enough relationship. Whether distanced by a flight of stairs or a transatlantic flight, these are long-term, committed relationships — often marriages — constructed with just enough togetherness to make each partner feel loved, supported, and less alone in the world, but not so much that, as Mating In Captivity guru Esther Perel has put it, intimacy “collapses into fusion.” Or, to borrow the immortal words of The Offspring, Just Enough couples are those that believe that to keep the magic alive, “you gotta keep ’em separated.”

Even popstars fantasize about the living arrangements pioneered by Just Enough icons Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. In May, Maren Morris noted her admiration for their Mexico City compound, in which two distinct domiciles — one painted blue, for her; one pink, for him — were connected by a footbridge stretched between rooftops, a physical manifestation of the relationship itself: deeply connected yet fiercely independent. “If I ever meet someone that I want to be romantically linked to, I’ll be like, ‘You can live next door’,” Morris told TZR. “That’s about as close as I want to be to someone.”

Over the course of 13 years, two children, and seven films together, beloved Hollywood eccentrics Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter technically lived together — but only Just Enough. Their two London houses were conjoined by one communal space. “My house looks like something out of Beatrix Potter,” Bonham-Carter once said, “but if you go over to his house, you’re in a totally different place. He’s got slime balls and dead Oompa-Loompas lying around, and skeletons and weird alien lights.”

“When I visit him, I’m on vacation. I’m not cleaning a toilet. We’re going out to eat. We’re going to go to the beach.”

“Think of all the things that you, all alone, don’t have to do,” wrote advice guru Marjorie Hillis in her blockbuster 1936 book Live Alone and Like It. “You don’t have to turn out your light when you want to read, because somebody else wants to sleep. You don’t have to have the light on when you want to sleep, because somebody else wants to read.” Radical advice, indeed, for a populace that Hillis termed “Live-Aloners”: the previously scorned or pitied single woman, whom Hillis exhorted to revel in her unmarried status. Presumably, in 1936, the only thing more difficult to imagine than a woman embracing singledom was a woman enjoying independence (and cordoning off a room — or an entire house! — of her own) while within a marriage.

Not so today. The most famous modern-day Just Enougher is, inevitably, Gwyneth Paltrow — is there a modern lifestyle choice for which Paltrow is not Exhibit A?—who, for a time, lived with her “crazytown handsome” husband Brad Falchuk only four days a week. In 2019, Paltrow told The Sunday Times that, when he was with his kids, Falchuk stayed at his own place nearby. This presumably eased the stepparent tension that Paltrow has admitted to (telling the press how difficult you find dealing with your teenage stepkids is, after all, a surefire way to lure them closer) but Paltrow said it also preserved the “polarity” that her “intimacy coach,” Michaela Boehm, recommends to keep sexual tension, um, taut.

Rumor has it, Naomi Watts and Billy Crudup, that most endearing of midlife pairings, also maintain separate residences. Good Morning America star Robin Roberts is two decades into her relationship with wife Amber Laign, who recently noted that while “communication, keeping it fresh, and trust” were important, their “true secret” was “separate apartments.” And 20 years into her relationship, Abbott Elementary’s Sheryl Lee Ralph is still sticking to bimonthly visits with her husband, Pennsylvania State Senator Vincent Hughes. “When I go to see him, I love to see him. When it’s time to leave, ‘Bye-bye. See you soon,’” Ralph told People. “I’m telling you, life is good.”

“Listen, wife is not always an upgrade. I’d rather be the girlfriend you’re always trying to woo.”

Dispensing with the obvious: yes, these are couples with piles of discretionary cash; decades of prior relationship experience and, it’s safe to assume, top-dollar couples therapists on call; and reproductive systems that have already put in the work. Even for the non-famous, Just Enough tends to require a certain amount of privilege; extra homes don’t come cheap, especially in a housing crisis. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us, stuck in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s, can’t fantasize about it. When I reached out on Instagram to find stories from couples who live happily apart, responses flew in — mostly from women who don’t live this way.

“I f*cking wish.”

“I would just love separate bedrooms.”

“The. Dream.”

A friend from Boston wanted to know, “So are you just writing about the fantasy lives of midlife women now?” Which, maybe.

Don’t tell my husband, but I’ve low-key harbored my own Just Enough fantasy for decades. When my mother met my stepfather some 25 years ago, she was a financially and spiritually independent, well-travelled empty-nester with a (perfect) adult child and a demanding career in New York City. In her mid-40s, she had finally found the ideal counterpart: an adoring man who felt no need to clip her wings, and who had a home and a business of his own in North Carolina. Why would they even want to forfeit their home bases? For more than 15 years they enjoyed what seemed in many ways like a best-of-both-worlds marriage defined by grand romantic gestures, flying in to see each other every few weeks, and every time marking the occasion with popped corks, fresh flowers, dinner reservations. It was like they were dating… forever.

That’s exactly how a PR executive I’ll call Jeanette describes her marriage to a man who lives 2,500 miles away: “Like the first few months of dating, over and over for 17 years.” Jeanette, who requested a pseudonym, is known for hosting a steady stream of dinner parties for her friends and clients. When she met her husband, whose work and life were based in LA, they fell madly in love and quickly got married — without anyone giving up their independence. “Look, I need more than an extra bathroom,” she says with a little snort. Today, they talk every night, WhatsApp constantly, and fly back and forth every few weeks. “The little daily annoyances that can accumulate and make it, you know, less glamorous? We don’t have them. When it starts to happen, boom, we’re on different coasts.” When I tell her this isn’t the tone most married women I know use when describing their relationships, she issues a throaty laugh. “I know. My friends — more women than men — all say we have the best marriage ever. Everyone is always saying, ‘You have the key to [marital] longevity.’”

When Bridget Anderson’s long-term boyfriend, Charles, wanted to get hitched, she was hesitant. “I said to him, ‘Listen, wife is not always an upgrade,’” Anderson recalls. “I’d rather be the girlfriend you’re always trying to woo.” Anderson, who had emerged from an 18-year marriage that involved infidelity, was wary of backsliding into the traditional female labor of matrimony. She was not going to be anyone’s “taken for granted” wife. Eventually, they did get married, but Just Enough. Today, Charles lives six months a year in Siesta Key, Florida, while Bridget stays in New Jersey, flying down throughout the winter months for mini-breaks together. “When I visit him, I’m on vacation,” she says. “I’m not cleaning a toilet. We’re going out to eat. We’re going to go to the beach.”

“People are so close, it can kill a lot of good stuff. Your partner is your best friend, your housemate, your business partner, but they’re also supposed to be your lover.”

Technology has made Just Enough both more practical and more intimate. It’s not like these couples are waiting for weekly love letters to arrive in the post. In the era of FaceTime, they can be “together” — cooking, confiding, taking bets on Love Island — from anywhere on the planet.

What would Virginia Woolf, campaigning for every woman to have “£500 a year” and her own sacrosanct personal space in A Room of One’s Own, have to say about that? Last year, Woolf’s cri de cœur was echoed — and significantly expanded upon — for today’s perimenopausal set in Miranda July’s bombshell novel All Fours. July’s heroine, determined not to go gentle into that good night, and desperate for creative and sexual freedom from her tepid marriage, strikes out on a sort of avant-garde rumspringa. That book got women everywhere talking (to the extent that it’s admittedly almost a cliche to bring it up now) and, at least among my own group chats, the part that lingered was a heightened awareness of our own gradual loss of freedom — the multitude of ways, often so subtle they can’t be seen by the naked eye, that parenting and relationship obligations can eek away at both literal and mental space. Like me, most of the women I bonded with about All Fours had no desire to seduce the Hertz guy (IYKYK) or in any way endanger the relationships they already had. They just found themselves longing for… more. Or less.

For Antonia Crane, the newlywed with the Melrose Place apartment setup, rewriting the rules of conventional marriage was a no-brainer: she’s an academic and a queer sex worker who was marrying a trans guy who shared her feminist ideals. “Our marriage can look any way we want,” she says. Living apart made sense for both of them: A year before they started dating, Jed had suffered the loss of his first wife after a long illness; it felt right for him to spend some time in a room of his own, so to speak. (Plus, his apartment has a patio, perfect for his dog.) Meanwhile, Crane is in a Ph.D. program at USC. Her apartment holds all of her books and the abundant “psychic space” she needs to write — and that work isn’t just her priority, she says. It’s Jed’s too. “Prioritizing our own artistic rituals, our own goals… I don’t think we should let that be tugged away from us so easily.”

Kerry Lusignan, founder of the Northampton Center for Couples Therapy in Northampton, Massachusetts, acknowledges that there can be some very modern benefits to living apart. “We live in a time — and there are cultural, societal, historical, gender reasons for this — where people are so close, it can kill a lot of good stuff. We [can] lack healthy boundaries and have messed-up expectations of what a partner is supposed to be,” Lusignan says. “We rely on our partner, who we live with, in a lot of ways that other generations relied on communities, elders, extended family. Your partner is your best friend, your housemate, your business partner — because you’re sharing finances and parenting kids together — but they’re also supposed to be your lover, too.” Maintaining separate homes helps limit what home improvers would call “scope creep.”

Still, Lusignan is quick to point out that Just Enough is no magic bullet: all relationships are hard at times. This one just happens to be hard in different ways. (After all, even with all that square footage, Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton did eventually split.) When you’re not following a traditional blueprint, it’s all the more important to pre-negotiate the terms of engagement, discussing expectations and even eventualities that most couples — in the flurry of new love — aren’t in a hurry to consider.

“Our marriage can look any way we want.”

“How do we imagine this looking?” Lusignan says. “What bumps might we hit along the way, and how do we want to handle them when they occur? Do we want to try this for a certain window of time and then revisit it and see how it’s working?” Given that this tends to be a mid-life arrangement, there are aging factors to take into consideration, too: How would this work when you get older, when you retire, when one of you requires more care? To extend the blueprint metaphor, the stronger the plan, the more resilient the eventual home. “There’s a lot to be said for doing that in the beginning,” Lusignan says, “versus being like, ‘There’s $20,000 worth of damage in this house, and the contractor missed it, and the insurance company won’t cover it, and now we need to do all this in therapy.’”

For what it’s worth, the Just Enoughers I spoke with struck me as remarkably angst-free, though they admitted there were high-maintenance aspects to their arrangements. “Whenever there’s planning, it complicates things,” says Crane. And in her marriage, the planning never stops. She and Jed eat dinner and spend the night together most evenings, whether at her place or his. But lacking defined rules or traditional gender roles, there are no givens. It’s not one person’s job to make dinner or to clean it up. Which means, every day, over and over, “we make these decisions: Do you want to spend the night together? Do we want to eat dinner together?”

“The little daily annoyances that can accumulate and make it less glamorous? We don’t have them. When it starts to happen, boom, we’re on different coasts.”

My own lurking doubt about Just Enough, despite my idealization of the arrangement, has always been: Would it really be enough for me? Bridget Anderson, in New Jersey, relishes the break from having to take someone else’s needs or tastes into account. When she’s alone, she has complete autonomy over whether to go out, what to eat, what to watch on TV. Still, there are nights when she wishes Charles was there, on the other end of the couch. For both Anderson and her husband, who are in their mid-50s and have each battled health issues, the longer-term questions that Lusignan brings up are real. How would they manage living together full time, if they eventually needed to? “There are discussions about it,” she says. “I’m not going to lie, sometimes I avoid them, like, well… let’s just see.”

Over here, in my single-family home, we stand poised at the halfway point of our sons’ childhood. They have become freestanding individuals who can more or less dress, bathe, and feed themselves (if you count ransacking the snack drawer) yet have not reached the point at which they want nothing to do with us. For the first time since they were born, I can just about picture an era in which my husband and I will be in a position to redefine our lives together according to a new set of needs and wants. Sometimes, in my mind’s eye, this involves him retreating part time to his dreamed-of cabin in Vermont, and me to some sub, sub, subbasement studio in my beloved New York City (with frequent jaunts to our North Fork beach house and, oh yeah, the lakefront cabin in the Berkshires because it’s my fantasy, dammit, I’ll do what I want!). In truth, though, I don’t think I would actually want him hours away. But just around the corner in a twin manse, tethered by a footbridge? Now you’re talking.