Would you prefer to stay together and live apart with your partner? ( Archived) (26)

Would this lifestyle suite you? It’s Not for me,

According to the report found in this web link more older couples stay together because they live apart.




An example Unmarried partnered adults between the ages of 57 to 85 were twice as likely to have separate homes as to live together, Jacquelyn Benson, assistant professor of human development and family science at the University of Missouri, found in a 2017 study. That arrangement appeals to men and women for different reasons, she found in an earlier study. Men want to protect their leisure time; women want to protect their autonomy, she said. But both “step up to the plate” when the other needs care.

These couples “are fulfilling a lot of the function of family for one another,” she said.

Twice a month, David Scribner, 64, drives three hours from his home in St. Johnsbury, Vt., to Montreal to spend a long weekend with his partner, Marilyn Bronstein, 71. She visits him one weekend a month, although she spent weeks with him after he had surgery. The fourth weekend they are on their own.

They don’t talk or text or FaceTime daily. They email when they must, usually keeping the message direct: “Bring the tent” in the subject line. “We mostly communicate with each other when we see each other,” Ms. Bronstein said.

The couple met at a bluegrass music festival in the mid-1990s. Both were divorced. Neither wanted to move because they had careers and, at the time, younger children. Now the kids are grown, but they still don’t want to move. She loves the city. He likes the quiet of the country. They are financially independent of each other and want to keep it that way.

Mr. Scribner says distance and compressed time together enhances their relationship. “I would prefer to be in a state of wishing I was there and being thrilled to be with her,” he said, “rather than living with each other all the time and turning into a grey, monotonous relationship.”

Barbara Leslie and Mike Nieters each had been in failed relationships and see living apart as a way of making this one last.

Ms. Leslie’s 17-year marriage ended in divorce when her husband left her and their four children. Several years later, she was in another relationship that lasted 14 adventurous years, including nine living together and doing things she had never done, like rock climbing. He left her. She was in her mid-50s. “I never thought I would see the world in colour again,” Ms. Leslie, now 78, said.