We’re Basically a LAT Couple

Living Apart Together, LAT for short, is the latest acronym for couples who are romantically involved but choose not to move in together. After yuppies and DINKs, now we have LATs.

I sometimes wonder why this wasn’t a thing when I was young and just assumed you moved in with a boyfriend as 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.

Here’s what nobody points out: divorced co-parents are already living some 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 compromise, and we show up for the same goals and events from two separate addresses.

Which got me thinking about actual LAT couples, the ones who want the relationship without the shared roof. This seems to show up most among people who’ve already been divorced once. Once you’ve lived through that particular type of hell, you understand exactly why you might not volunteer for round two. Being divorced doesn’t mean you’re sentenced to being single forever, but it also doesn’t mean cohabitation is the only legitimate way to be in a relationship.

Living apart cuts out an enormous amount of the friction that comes from actually sharing space. The toilet seat. The shoes colonizing the closet. Whoever never loads the dishwasher. Keeping two addresses means skipping most of that entirely.

So why doesn’t everyone just do this?

Money, mostly. It’s expensive to be a single adult, and the math gets tempting fast once you’re spending real time with someone who’s also paying rent or a mortgage somewhere else. Combine two incomes, and suddenly there’s room to actually save, or go out more, or just breathe a little. In a city like Vancouver, that math isn’t really optional for most people; it usually takes two incomes under one roof just to stay financially stable at all.

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 having to solve the financial math of merging two households, because we’re not 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.

Renée

Renée

My days these days are mostly advocacy, with my kids always first, and hiking, biking, and cold plunging worked in whenever I can. Winter cold plunges aren’t for everyone, but there’s a strange kind of beauty and calm in it that I’ve come to need.

Separation was a journey. It took time, and it taught me most of what I know now.

I write about what I learned along the way, and about the family justice system I ended up spending years inside of.