Living apart together

Arnaud Régnier-Loilier

Chapter Chapter 9 in Research Handbook on Partnering across the Life Course, 2025, pp 102-116 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Contemporary transformations of the couple and family paradigms constitute some of the most significant social changes of recent decades, particularly the pluralization of union forms. Living Apart Together (LAT which can briefly be defined as a non-cohabiting relationship) is part of the landscape and sometimes is presented as a new way of being a couple that would be likely to develop. However, being involved in a stable intimate relationship covers a wide variety of meanings according to the life-cycle period. In order to understand contemporary partnership and family processes, it is important to study how the phenomenon is addressed by scholars and what LAT actually means. After recalling the main specificities of LAT relationships compared to cohabiting unions and describing the diversity of individual situations, between stage and state, between choice and constraints, this chapter shows how researchers “make do” with the data due to a broad and imprecise definition of the term “LAT”. Finally, using data from three French surveys, we illustrate the complexity of the measurement of the phenomenon. This raises the question of whether and how we should rethink the way of approaching the phenomenon for future studies.

Keywords: Couples; Intimate relationships; Couple formation; Living Apart Together (LAT); Definition; Measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781803923376
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