Living Alone Together (LAT), why my partner and I decided it was right for us

A question my better half and I get a lot is, how we decided “living alone together” (LAT) was the right relationship format for us. This is a short version of how we got to that conclusion.

As a note, I am assuming you already have a full understanding of what LAT relationships are. If you don’t and want to know more, you can find it here.

How my partner and I got to “Living Alone Together” (LAT)

My partner and I have been living alone together (or in a “LAT relationship”) for more than 6 years now. We met some years ago while she was visiting some friends we have in common. We struck up a conversation and things took off from there. When she first told me she lived an hour and a half drive away, I gulped. I thought this was never going to work. But first things first, let’s see how it goes the first couple of months, and we’ll take it from there.

This simply was the result of us having met at a point in time where you already have your life sorted out.

We saw each other every weekend. I would go to hers, and the next weekend she would come to my place. During the week we would keep in touch via texting and the odd phone call every now and then. I have to say, after the first month, I didn’t feel as if the distance between us was a factor. If she would have lived 20 minutes away, we would still see each other with the same frequency. Both of us having very demanding jobs didn’t leave a lot of time left during the week anyhow.

Six months into the relationship everything was going great, and we took our first holiday together. This was the first time we would be with each other without the Monday-through-Friday in between. And we loved it! We could stay up as late as we felt like, sleep in as long as we wanted, we had so much time to do all the little things we loved doing together without having to look at the clock or think about commutes.

Do we need to leave our lives behind to go into this new chapter that we both want so much?
For some people the answer is “yes”, but for us, it was different.
We could indeed have it all.

When we got back after our first vacation, we felt the need for the first time to talk about our living arrangements. A tip for those of you that might come across this situation… Having a talk about moving in together right after a gorgeous holiday, will very likely produce this outcome:

“Let’s move in together!”

This step would really show us a lot about ourselves, so much more than we knew at that point. The first topic was of course, where are we going to live? Am I moving in with you? Are you moving in with me? Are we going to an entirely new place/location altogether? The answer to this question would take us more than a year to come up with.

It was about trying to hold on to those things that made up our lives

She lives in a place outside the city center, towards the green forest areas. Her location is gorgeous, and as I have told her many, many, many, times I would love to move to a place like this in the future. And I mean it, the place is just a dream, and her house is the coziest bubble in the universe. The problem is, there is no work for me in that area. At some point I remember saying, “…if you are OK with me sitting around the house like an unemployed zombie doing nothing while you bring home the bacon, I’ll move in with you…” …and to my absolute surprise she said, “I’m totally fine with that, go and grab your stuff!!” I cannot tell you how long it took me to get out of that.

All and all, it wasn’t about getting a free ride. It was about trying to hold on to those things that made up our lives, and work is a truly central point for me at this point. This will not be forever, but while it is, I will do what I can to keep it the way it is.

On her side, she simply didn’t want to move to my place because it was too close to the city. She would miss her view of the green forest hills, her beautiful lake, and most of all, the silence. Most of her work was online so she didn’t have the “job” excuse, it was purely location…but I understand it was more than “just” that. It was that whole world she had become a part of. We tossed ideas back and forth on how we could make this work, but the more we discussed, the more it became apparent -the solution would have to be to move to an entirely new place.

And before we knew it, we were in the real estate circus. It always seems so deja-vu-ish when you are looking at new homes again. We saw some beautiful houses, with excellent locations, and well within our investment range. But as we then realized, the problem wasn’t the home offering. Actually, there wasn’t a problem at all. We simply didn’t want to move from where we lived. This in no way meant that we loved each other any less than couples that did live together. This simply was the result of us having met at a point in time where you already have your life sorted out. Do we need to leave our lives behind to go into this new chapter that we both want so much? For some people the answer is “yes”, but for us, it was different. We could indeed have it all. Keep our separate homes, keep the lives we had built, and live the love we had found for each other.

And this is how we came to the decision that living alone together was the right call for us. Six years and counting, we are in love with each other, and in love with our lives.