We’re Basically a LAT Couple

Living Apart Together, LAT for short, is a relatively new acronym for couples who are romantically involved but choose not to move in together. Along with yuppies and DINKs, we have LATs.

I sometimes wonder why this wasn’t a thing when I was young and just assumed moving in with a boyfriend was the next obvious step. My wasband, that’s the past tense of husband, and I might still be married if we’d never combined a household in the first place.

And have you noticed? Divorced co-parents are already living a version of a LAT relationship, minus the romance. My wasband and I have weekly meetings about the kids, their homework, their schedules. We have more genuinely constructive conversations now than we ever managed while married. We coordinate, we collaborate, and we show up for the same goals and events from two separate addresses.

Actual LAT couples, the romantic kind, tend to be people who’ve already been divorced once and know exactly what they’re avoiding. Living apart cuts out most of the friction that comes from sharing space, the toilet seat, the shoes colonizing the closet, whoever never loads the dishwasher, but it usually comes at a real cost. It’s expensive to be a single adult, and combining two incomes under one roof is often the only way to actually get ahead financially. In a city like Vancouver, that math isn’t optional for most people. So most couples eventually move in anyway, not because they want to, but because staying apart is a luxury.

Which is exactly why the co-parenting version is worth noticing. My ex and I get the real benefits of LAT: low-friction collaboration, real partnership on the things that matter, without ever having to solve that financial math, because we were never trying to be a couple. We’re just two people who figured out how to run a shared project well from a distance.

Turns out you don’t need romance to make LAT work. You just need a good reason to stay coordinated, and enough distance to skip the toilet seat argument entirely.