together and apart

cohabitation is not for everyone, and that's ok

Nicolae Maniu, The Morning of the Trends, 2003

I’m in LA this week, trying to finish my novel. I’m not the type of person who enjoys solo travel, which is strange because I love living alone, and some of my favorite activities are solo activities e.g., reading, writing, running. But doing anything remotely touristy in a new city without someone to experience it with feels horribly lonely. I think what it comes down to is this: I like having new experiences with other people, but I need a solitary routine to process those experiences and create art. 

Last year, my ex and I moved in together. At first, it felt like a dream, living in a gorgeous, pre-war apartment on a tree-lined street a few steps from Prospect Park. Some couples make living together look easy. Maybe they take for granted that it’s just the way things should be, so they don’t question whether it’s a net gain or loss. Maybe because both of our parents are like that, we were subconsciously imitating the kind of lifestyle we thought we should have.

Whatever fantasy we imagined wasn’t what it turned out to be. It wasn’t like we were having screaming fights all the time, but I wouldn’t say we were happy. Days and weeks passed in a routine haze. Our life together was governed by an unspoken sense of duty. We were doing almost everything together simply because we lived together. And if we weren’t doing something together, I found myself wondering if we should’ve been. Consequently, I felt less fulfilled doing the solitary things I normally enjoyed—working on my novel, spending a whole afternoon reading—because subconsciously, I kept thinking I should be doing something with my partner instead (or figuring out dinner plans). So I invested less time in those activities that had previously defined me. 

Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.

— Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity 

I used to be a very private person. During a long car ride from Chicago to Cincinnati, a friend said she would describe me as “mysterious.” Someone I dated said he felt like he was peeling away the layers of an onion. After six dates, he still didn’t know me. A very perceptive ex-boyfriend once said he thinks the reason I’m this way is because I keep a lot of myself to my writing. I can’t say “I have a rich interior life” without being a tad tongue-in-cheek, but it’s like this: in order to keep writing fiction, to sustain the level of obsession required to create something out of nothing, I need to not share too much of myself with the outside world. Otherwise, there would be nothing left to put on the page.

Writing fiction used to feel like a dirty secret. I was embarrassed to tell friends, and I certainly didn’t tell anyone at work (as a woman in tech, I didn’t want to be “found out”). I delayed sharing my novel with beta readers for as long as possible, until I felt like it was good enough. Listening to my inner critic prolonged an already-long feedback loop. These days, I’m a lot more open to sharing my writing. Instead of draft ten, I’m willing to share at draft three. I’m writing this substack, which, by its very nature, can’t be perfected. My boss knows I write fiction, and I’m O.K. with that.

Even though I feel more comfortable sharing my writing (and my identity as a writer) with the world, I’m still a private person in the sense that I absolutely need space to be alone. Anyone who creates art needs space. Besides the stint in cohabitation, I’ve lived in my own apartment in New York since 2015 and consider myself extremely fortunate. After returning to solo living and rediscovering my passion for reading and writing, I made a promise that I’m going to delay cohabitation as long as possible. I’m willing to give it another shot at some point in the future—I’ve certainly learned a lot from the first time—but I could just as easily see myself being in a relationship where we live in separate homes and spend time together intentionally instead of by forced proximity. I don’t need to live under the same roof as someone in order to feel deeply, emotionally connected to them. As Esther Perel puts it, “We need to be able to connect without the terror of obliteration, and we need to be able to experience our separateness without the terror of abandonment.” This state of being “together but apart” is to me the ideal of a healthy partnership.

Maybe I’ll change my mind down the road, but today, I can confidently say that I want a partner I can go on adventures with, not someone who can meal prep and do laundry with me. The routine stuff we can handle on our own. When we come together it’s to experience new cultures, new art, new food, new movies, new music, new perspectives—the whole gamut that life has to offer.

I’m aware that this may be a controversial view. Conventional wisdom says your life partner should be someone you can be with through the highs, the lows, and the mundane. But this is just one way to be in a partnership. It’s the way our parents and grandparents passed down to us. It’s the way of the traditional family unit, which was optimized for raising children. And even if child-rearing were the ultimate goal of your relationship, I would argue that cohabitation isn’t necessarily the best—and certainly not the only—possible living arrangement.

My ex and I tried very hard to make cohabitation work. I remember thinking, this thing should work—why is it so hard? The truth is, it can work, but it’s not going to work well for everyone. People see it as a rite of passage, but if you fail at it, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you or that you’re necessarily with the wrong person. It’s not the only way to be in a partnership. There are benefits to living together (financially, for one), but it also comes with sacrifices. The most important thing is to understand the tradeoffs and know how to make cohabitation work better or find a different lifestyle that truly optimizes for what you value. 

Esther Perel is right: Too much proximity destroys eroticism. Too much proximity makes it hard to create art. And ultimately, I want to create art.