
More Older Couples Stay Together Because They Live Apart - ytNumbers
https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-older-couples-stay-together-because-they-live-apart-11564311602?mod=rsswn
======
H8crilA
I think things get a bit harder once you have too much free time on your hands
(like retired folks do) and live with a partner. I've been travelling for
several months with my girlfriend now (after we quit our jobs), and it is not
as easy as when the daily routine of work and other duties is in place. Not
saying that it's not good, it is, but it sometimes creates weird tensions that
I didn't think about before. Some serious travellers that I've met on the road
had similar stories to tell, about themselves or their friends.

The root of the problem, I think, is that when you have a job you only really
spend 20-50% of your awake time with a partner. When you don't it gets to a
90-100% range, and it is harder. No single person can fill 100% of your time.

~~~
gumby
This is well attested over the years with stay at home wives unhappy with the
disruption of their routine when the husband retires (especially culturally
prominent in the salaryman class of Japan).

Hou can also buy a yacht cheaply in Fiji because of the number of people who
think it would be great to Sal together and, after a few months, realize it
would be better to stay together than to live on a boat.

My wife and I married after traveling together and I think in retrospect that
was smart/lucky....at least it worked for over 20 years.

~~~
MisterBastahrd
I had a period of time where I had to stay with my folks because of a period
of not quite making enough money following Hurricane Katrina, so because of
the shift work, I got a first hand view of my mom's routine as a housewife.
Basically, she'd mop, do some laundry, and start cooking about 4pm. Her
overall labor took about 1 - 2.5 hours a day, maybe a bit more if she needed
to go grocery shopping. Essentially, not much more than any single person
would do anyway, with a bit maybe shifted toward the weekends.

So then my dad retired, and he expected to behave like a retiree. He helps
out: mopping, washing clothes, even cooking occasionally. She's constantly
trying to find him extra stuff to do outdoors.

Why?

Because she enjoyed the domestic side of the domestic life of a housewife:
spending hours watching tv and / or gossiping with her friends in the comfort
of her home. For 30 years, she had a routine, and was essentially married to
the routine as much as the man.

~~~
mooreds
To be fair, things were probably a bit different when she had kids at home.

~~~
MisterBastahrd
Well, sure during the summer. But then the fall would happen and she would
have the place to herself again. The neighborhood was full of single-paycheck
households and the women were almost all the same age with similarly aged
kids, so the families basically all bonded through the mothers first, then the
kids, and finally the fathers.

The women largely learned how to get along, the kids all did, and the fathers
did to a degree but they had the largest separation in personality and past
times, probably because they had the least free time / most money and wanted
to make it count.

------
DoreenMichele
You know how people say you get less flexible as you get older? It's generally
true, and not just because you have limitations on adaptability as you age.
You also are wise enough to know some sacrifices just don't actually work, no
matter how much you wish they did.

Now multiply that by two. Two inflexible people, both unwilling to shoot
themselves in the foot for so-called _love_ , trying to find some means to
meet in the middle.

Besides, a lot of our relationship expectations are rooted in the idea that a
baby will or could be the result. When that stops being true, it gets a lot
harder to cave to convention and a lot easier to negotiate whatever terms you
two can privately agree upon.

Add in the fact that your parents may be dead. Who do you need to please or
seek permission from? Possibly no one.

Your coworkers or what not may have no idea you have some kind of
unconventional relationship. You may be well past the age where your social
circle is going to actively butt into your romantic life. If they do, you may
just dump them as friends rather than accept that.

~~~
Bartweiss
On the note of expecting children - I suspect there's also a broader idea that
the current state of affairs isn't permanent.

A lot of the petty frustrations of living together are transient. They change
when you change towns, change jobs, have a baby, have that baby grow up into a
kid, have your kid move out, and retire. But after all that, there's a long
stretch where people's schedules and lives don't necessarily change very much
beyond needing more support. That's not universal, people can make all kinds
of big changes well past retirement, but it's common enough that people start
asking "do I want to deal with this for the rest of my life?"

And that doesn't just mean younger people are putting up with bad
relationships out of hope for the future. They could potentially be very
compatible, making sound decisions like "your sleep schedule clashes with
mine, but I'll deal with it for now and it'll be a positive down the line when
we have to take care of kids at all hours of the day". It's just that the
standard for a 'good' concession to make is different when you're weighing
future circumstances against the present than it is when you're going to keep
doing the same thing indefinitely.

------
tw1010
This is part of some cynical narrative on HN. Don't buy into it
wholeheartedly. Plenty of couples stay together really long despite living in
the same apartment. True love does exist, even though the internet loves to
brainwash you into believing it doesn't.

~~~
nkrisc
Why do you believe co-habitating is a prerequisite of "true love" (good luck
defining that).

Tangentially, you claim there's some narrative trying to brainwash people into
believe "true love" doesn't exist, but we're just supposed to take your word
for it that it does?

~~~
watwut
He said that "they stay together despite living in the same apartment". How
would you conclude he thinks co-habitating is a prerequisite?

------
glangdale
It seems regrettable that after having endless subsidies and encouragements to
buy a family home, that people are insisting on keeping them long after
there's any point in having a large house. Given the housing shortage in so
many markets, this seems like another nifty way for the Boomers to pull the
ladder up after them.

~~~
lm28469
I don't have a strong opinion on the subject but I recently read an article
[0] that tells another story. You might find it interesting.

[0] [https://www.businessinsider.de/millennials-vs-baby-
boomers-b...](https://www.businessinsider.de/millennials-vs-baby-boomers-big-
houses-real-estate-market-problems-2019-3?r=US&IR=T)

~~~
javagram
The article also says “Millennials buying their first home today are likely to
pay 39% more than baby boomers who bought their first home in the 1980s”.

Real estate inflation has been dramatic over the last several decades. If
there were really a glut of old people attempting to offload their paid-off
homes on the market, the prices might drop to more historically normal
levels...

I’m not sure how the statistics actually work out but if single or married
people are staying in oversized homes for longer without kids, it does seem
like that could affect the supply of homes for families with children. I know
the UK had a controversy over a “bedroom tax” that tried to address this
issue.

~~~
lotsofpulp
There’s a glut of homes for sale, in places with either no economic prospects
or low desirability to live. More and more higher income people competing with
each other in less and less land area = higher sale prices.

~~~
brewdad
This. My Dad's home in a lagging industrial town in the Upper Midwest is
probably only worth about 1.5x what he paid for it 40 years ago. He has well
over an acre and the house is in great shape. No one wants to move there
though, so housing prices are depressed.

He'd like to move, but would have to take on a mortgage in his 70s, so he'll
stay put and my sibling and I will sell it for whatever we can get when he
passes.

------
bitcoinbutter
It's unfortunate the way that sexual relationships are intertwined with
finances. Gone are the days where women have little/no earning opportunities.

People should be allowed to keep finances separated unless explicitly deciding
otherwise.

~~~
huffmsa
It's almost like there were good reasons for strict legal and religious
positions on monogamy and marriage for thousands of years all around the
globe.

Not to say your statement is invalid or that it's time for a shift, just a
reminder that this is a well trodden field.

~~~
winchling
These traditions developed around families with children.

The situation now is that divorce and childlessness are common and people are
adapting accordingly.

Personally, I think it's sad. Long-distance relationships don't work. Yet, as
I see it, short-distance relationships _do_ work, though a period of
adjustment may be required.

Medium-distance relationships are stuck in the middle!

And, to put a cynical hat on for a moment, the powers-that-be may be just fine
with this. They want people isolated in separate dwellings for purposes of
taxation, property pricing, general conformity to their agendas, etc.

~~~
groby_b
"Long-distance relationships don't work"

I don't think that holds as a blanket statement. (I have multiple
counterexamples in my immediate circle, at least. Some of them on the decades
scale)

Is there specific evidence, or is this simply an assumption you're making?

~~~
kemayo
Although I disagree with the grandparent post, I'd be fine with saying that
long term long distance relationships are harder to make work. Mostly this is
because there's a lack of cultural guidelines for how to handle it; if you're
living with or near someone there's a cultural script to follow which mostly-
works, but in a LDR you can't count on that and you need to put the work in to
build your own system.

Of course, relying on the default cultural script for local relationships
often falls down as well when it turns out that you disagree about the
details. But we accept that relationships fail all the time, and don't tend to
say "local relationships don't work" just because many of them fail. :D

~~~
groby_b
That (harder to make work) matches my anecdata :)

To be clear, I'm not saying "GP is wrong" \- I was genuinely curious if maybe
they had some data/studies on the subject, since all I have are personal
observations, and I'm curious about the issue. I.e. How _much_ harder are
LDRs?

------
ramijames
I wish that me and my wife could live apart. We get along well on a personal
level but are terrible fucking roommates.

~~~
asark
I sleep better alone. Wish I could at least most nights without it becoming an
issue.

My dream house (kids aside—that makes an already infeasible dream even less
realistic) would have my wife and me in separate bedrooms with our own
separate bathroom _and kitchen_ and a living space, then one or two shared
rooms in between us.

~~~
teshier-A
Separate bedrooms are common enough, bathrooms I can somewhat understand, but
kitchens ? Why does your dream have this ?

~~~
asark
Very different ideas of what and how to cook, where and how to store foods
(especially, what goes in the fridge and what doesn't), and so on. Instead of
one kitchen with both our stuff in it and little shared, we could have much
more orderly separate ones with only a little duplication.

It'd be fine if only one of us ever cooked, and if either of us didn't find
the other's methods and tools frustrating to use at best, but that's not the
case, so here we are.

Examples: my ideal kitchen would contain a rice cooker and zero crock pots.
Hers would have zero rice cookers and at least two crock pots. Mine would have
at most two non-stick pans of any kind—really, I could live with just one—but
several cast iron pieces, and some steel. Hers would have exclusively non-
stick. I'd be entirely content with a single short built-in oven to save
space. She'd want a full-size double oven. That sort of thing.

[EDIT] also, whether it's OK to leave any small appliances on the counter
full-time or they must all go in cabinets when not in use. We finally, after
years, compromised on the stand mixer and we're up to a 4-slice toaster now so
it's just too damn big to store, but the rest...

~~~
mrfusion
For some reason I’m really curious to hear about the difference in
refrigeration preferences.

~~~
asark
One of us thinks that pretty much everything that's not refrigerated at the
store doesn't belong in the refrigerator at home (onions, apples). The other
disagrees.

~~~
disfadbish
you shouldn't put apples or onions in the fridge, they go bad faster. Apples
also release ethylene gas which makes other produce rot faster.

------
parsimo2010
Sometimes I am amazed at the cognitive flexibility of a writer to turn
something into a story. Couples that aren't married and live in different
houses? So... dating? This is a story about old people dating? Where a lot of
them are divorced so they're maybe a little hesitant to move in together and
get married? And there are a few long distance relationships as well?

I know this is the kind of pessimism that attracts downvotes, but I can't hold
my tongue. The WSJ not only paid someone to write this, but it actually made
it into the print edition.

~~~
maaaats
It's disingenuous to refer to their relationships as merely dating, when they
have lasted for more than a decade. And when it's not dating, you don't really
have a point.

~~~
lr4444lr
What's disingenuous is the editor's hijacking our cultural assumption that the
headline means couples who were happily married for decades have begun living
separated in burgeoning numbers. If these are romances that only began in a
later life stage, that should be transparent in the headline, not buried in
attempted cleverness to get a page click.

------
nugga
I saw some articles somewhere that some people, despite living together in a
relationship, sleep in different beds or even rooms.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
I honestly can't imagine sleeping in the same bed as someone, personally. For
a bunch of various reasons...

1) I need to be very cold to sleep and don't want to be disrupted by someone
else's warmth

2) I'd be woken up when the other person shifts around, and vice versa

3) What if my partner snores, has sleep apnea, mutters in their sleep?

4) What if we just have different circadian rhythms? I like to be up at 6am,
which means bedding at 10pm. But my partner(s) have historically been night
owls.

~~~
throwaway8879
Agreed. I've been keeping a 3:30am-9:30pm schedule for a couple years now and
I don't see it working if I had to share a bed, or even a house with a
partner. I suppose people have to make certain adjustments if the relationship
is worth to them, and most people end up doing so.

------
coldtea
> _Many couples who begin relationships later in life are keeping separate
> homes because they cherish private space and financial independence_

Where by "many" the author means "some in my affluent circles of the 10
percenters and up".

~~~
Bartweiss
> * Mr. Demetre, a 63-year-old retired draftsman who spends several nights a
> week at her apartment because it’s bigger.*

> _A roofing contractor, he had repaired her roof a few times... He lives in
> the big house that he built on 60 acres in the country, with tractors and a
> satellite TV for watching sports. She lives in a brightly decorated home
> with no satellite TV in the college town of Columbia, Missouri._

> _Mr. Pastoret moved from his family home to an apartment 250 steps from
> hers. He comes over every evening for a supper of fruit and sandwiches. He
> washes the dishes. She dries and puts them away. They watch the news and
> “Wheel of Fortune,” holding hands, then go out to the front porch._

Do those really seem like stories restricted to the upper crust?

These people aren't broke, to be sure, and it's worth recognizing that
pressure to live together to save money is part of how income affects divorce
rates. But most of the people in this story are widowed or divorced with kids
- they have property and maybe savings, but not enormous incomes. A house in
Columbia, MO is $200k, and several of the other people have apartments.

~~~
linuxftw
> Do those really seem like stories restricted to the upper crust?

Yes, most people can barely afford to maintain a single modest home, let alone
2 or 3.

~~~
Bartweiss
And these people are each maintaining a single modest home or none at all.

By my count, the story has four renters, three homeowners, and one unknown.
One of the renters even sold his home to make this arrangement more viable.
This is an age bracket with an 80% homeownership rate. (That's not the same as
% owning homes, but most people mentioned were divorced or widowed, which
shrinks the difference.) All of them appear to be either working or retired;
no one here is a stay-at-home spouse whose partner bought them a second house
for comfort. No _couple_ here even has three houses, so I don't see where that
enters in.

If these people were single, or just starting a relationship, would we look at
pairs of them as "owning two homes"? This is just a story about people who are
staying 'dating' instead of remarrying and moving in together, which is viable
for any demographic that isn't living with strangers to save money while
single - and that includes most of the middle class.

~~~
linuxftw
In the comments I replied to, there was no usage of the word 'sold' just
'left' their family home. So, that implies to me, they still have it, and now
the couple have at least 3 homes across them. I realize journalists are
exceptionally bad at being explicit, and editors were all fired because nobody
can afford to pay them, but it doesn't excuse a basic ability to convey an
idea with a minimum level of precision.

> If these people were single, or just starting a relationship, would we look
> at pairs of them as "owning two homes"?

Expand your circle. How many people do you know living completely singly vs
having room mates? Most of the people living in the US can't afford to have
their own place, and many couples in the US can't afford to have a place for
both of them, let alone children. Life is much different outside the ivory
towers.

~~~
Bartweiss
The article itself doesn't have anyone who left their home for a new house.
The part I quoted references a single person who "moved from" his home into an
apartment; that generally implies sold, but even if he is renting it out, he's
in an apartment now, as is his partner. Each of the people in the article have
0-1 home.

> _Expand your circle. How many people do you know living completely singly vs
> having room mates? Most of the people living in the US can 't afford to have
> their own place, and many couples in the US can't afford to have a place for
> both of them, let alone children. Life is much different outside the ivory
> towers._

I promise you I'm not surrounded by rich young Harvard grads buying houses.
Most of the people I know have roommates, a live-in partner, or both. But
looking at high-cost cities is every bit as misleading as looking at rich
people; most of the US spent decades subsidizing sprawl and single-family
homeownership, with predictable results.

Only 30% of American adults live with roommates (including family) outside
romantic relationships. For the 55+ demographic in question, who largely grew
up in an era of lower housing prices, that number is 10% (and skewed higher by
those who need family care). Meanwhile, 65% of American households and 80% of
over-55 households are owner-occupied, so the median American over 55 lives in
a home that they or their partner own. 4/3 renters to 3/4 homeowners, none
with roommates, is almost exactly what you'd expect for 7 Americans over 55.

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/31/more-
adults...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/31/more-adults-now-
share-their-living-space-driven-in-part-by-parents-living-with-their-adult-
children/)

------
huffmsa
This is undoubtedly contributory to the housing shortage. People wastefully
living by themselves in space which could house 2 or more individuals are
selfishly hurting both the younger generation and the environment.

I'd expect nothing less from the Boomers and Gen X.

And I'm only somewhat joking.

------
onetimemanytime
>> _Rather than marry or live together, many of them have separate homes and
see each other several times a week, or three times a month; they often say
they are highly committed to each other but want personal space and
independence._

In other words, they are not couples, just people that date sometimes. Next
story please :)

~~~
freddie_mercury
"she spent weeks [living] with him after he had surgery"

That's what you do with someone that you date sometimes? My dating life was
quite different than yours, I guess!

Also, why so dismissive of how other people structure their lives? _They_
don't describe it as "someone I date sometimes" so why do you?

~~~
onetimemanytime
>> _Also, why so dismissive of how other people structure their lives? They
don 't describe it as "someone I date sometimes" so why do you?_

do whatever you want, I just disagree with the label.

