Ted Audio Collective So, Selim, I have one last mission for you.
What you got? I've been thinking about how the is still like a pretty dominant narrative for long-term relationships, right?
You date, you fall in love, at some point between those two things, you move in together, and maybe you plan to get married.
I mean, is that a narrative that you're familiar with?
Oh yeah, I definitely see that a lot.
I also feel like I'm seeing this shift in all these little different ways around me.
My circle of friends is not necessarily hitting all those points in that order.
For example, I know a couple who bought a house together while they were dating.
It feels like we're in a moment where the order of a lot of these things are shifting around.
Absolutely. I think the thing that's interesting is I know that that's still the dominant narrative because I still feel like all of us who are doing something outside of that is considered a deviation from that path.
So that's the way that you understand your life is kind of relative to that clear cut sense of expectations.
Yes. And I came across a specific type of relationship that really steps away from that mold in quite an interesting way.
So this is called living apart together or lads.
And lads' couples are in long-term relationships, sometimes they're even married, but they intentionally decide not to move in together.
Oh, so it's like they skip a step on that traditional progress chart of relationships.
Yeah. And it's not that they're skipping and coming back to it later necessarily.
They might just be skipping it all together.
It's not a part of the equation that they're necessarily interested in.
How big a trend is this? Is it growing, wire people choosing to not live together?
What's it mean or not mean?
I just have a lot of questions.
Me too. I really, really wish I could tell you.
There's just not very much data on lads just yet.
And that kind of made me think more broadly about the things that we do measure and how those are so often defined by social norms and what we deem as important, right?
So, I mean, one of the things that comes up for me that I would really, really love for you to find out about is just like, why is this happening?
I don't know. I remember this, this really famous quote from Wuppie Gold, but where she was asked about living with a partner and she said something like, I don't want a man in my house.
And that kind of really resonated with me, honestly.
So, I personally am super interested in understanding this kind of evolution in a lot more detail as a potential lads person myself.
Oh, I'm exploring the dataless void into which you might be game to enter.
Yeah, exactly. Okay, so I'm going to try and find a lads couple, ask them about their experience.
What is like not having that step-by-step measuring stick and following a set path and see how it's working out for them?
And do me a favor, please, Celine.
Find me a nice juicy couple that haven't just got together and not moved in together.
I want to know that they really, really made this choice.
They've been together for a while and moving in together is just not on the horizon.
Can you do that? You're not making this incredibly easy for me, but I think with the team of producers, we can.
Obsoleme, Ressha Mwala, and from the Ted Audio Collective, this is a special season of Am I Normal?
So, the way that he asked me out, I wasn't sure that if I was going out with him or his family, his kids, I don't know.
I'm Susan Inglehart. I'm 59.
I'm a recently retired school teacher.
And I'm Mike Weber, and I'm 64, also a special educator.
I'm a school psychologist.
Mike's also retired now, but he and Susan worked at the same school for a number of years.
They were on friendly terms, but it wasn't until they both got divorced that they really bonded.
Still, when Mike asked Susan if she wanted to check out the Main Street Art Festival, she wasn't quite sure how to read the situation at first.
So, he just came to my house, and it was just him.
Then we walked around one's sure if it was a date still, exactly, if there's just a perfect, you know, just friends.
And when he took my hand and he held my hand, that, that is when I knew that we were on a date.
And then it kind of developed from there.
So we've been in a relationship for 20 years this fall.
Mike and Susan live in Fort Worth, Texas.
They've passed that 20-year milestone by the time you're here in this, by the way.
Congratulations to both of them.
And instead of sticking to the relationship narrative that Mona and I were talking about, they've chosen this other route.
They aren't married, and they live apart together, meaning they each have their own separate place.
I was curious whether their decision to be in a Lat relationship or LAT, as you'll hear them call it, was intentional from the get-go, or whether they just kind of slipped into it.
Like everything with us, it kind of slowly evolved.
Like when we first were seeing each other on a very regular basis and knew it was going to be a serious relationship, I had teenage kids, so I was pretty involved with them.
Susan, she loves my kids and has been involved, but never, you know, she intentionally has not had kids.
And so I don't remember an exact time when we said, this is the way it's going to be.
We're going to live separately, but I think we always knew that we're both pretty independent people.
We both like our homes that we live in and are comfortable in them.
We just live a mile apart.
And then after a while, we're just like, hey, this is going so nicely, there's not really a reason to change anything.
Oh, yeah, a mile apart, that's not a bad distance.
No, no. In fact, we walk pretty regularly and we meet halfway.
And we call it our corner.
Yeah. It's our corner. I should clarify it.
At one point, we did briefly talk about maybe moving in together.
I think financially it would have helped at one point, but I think kind of time just proved that that was not going to be a great situation for us.
And Susan, what are those conversations like for you?
I guess more from my side, it was kind of scary to think about moving in together.
I'm very independent and do like living in my own house.
So I think it's great to have our own separate lives, but then our lives together are just like, it's just that much more special.
And we are lucky that we just live a mile apart.
I'm curious if you feel like you avoided some of the power struggles that couples go through when they start living together?
I think you're very practical things of like, you know, maybe somebody keeps hitting the snooze button in the morning.
And that really messes up someone else's sleep.
What are the pros and cons of early stage relationships living together or not living together?
I think it's the pros about not living together.
You don't have to feel like you have to change for that of the person.
You don't have to little mundane things.
And the toothbrush or the snooze alarm or the way they do laundry.
Yeah, I think it's one of the absolute benefits of having this type of relationship is that we don't have to divide up labor.
We don't have to worry about the other person getting on our nerves because they've overstayed their welcome or they have habits that are just too, you know, not in sync with what you're doing.
I was telling Susan, I ran into a friend of mine this morning when I was walking and he was saying that his wife had been out of the country for three weeks and he goes, man, I'm just tired of eating cheese sandwiches.
I was like, come on, dude.
Your wife's out of town for three weeks.
You could get on YouTube in one day and teach yourself how to cook.
This is ridiculous. Did you have any hesitations around the idea of living separately?
So you mentioned that it went pretty smoothly.
I'm curious what, if any really specific conversations happened of, let's chat about what is going to look like moving forward.
And did you have any doubts along the way?
You know, it wasn't so much that we had doubts between the two of us.
His children accepted everything just the way it was.
They never bothered us and said, I had plenty of pressure on us.
But, you know, some of the more relatives would say things like, what do you mean you've been dating for 16 years?
What are you going to get married?
Or when are you going to get engaged?
That's the next step. You know, that's so weird.
So we did get that. And we just shrugged it off and said, well, this is the way it is.
And now, through the LAT Facebook pages and all these articles about LAT couples living apart together, we've been really happy to see that.
Because we know, yeah, we're down here in this Southern United States.
So there's all these expectations about what step, step, step, that you have to do when you're in a relationship, you have to go from one step to the next step to the next step to the next step.
And this amount of time, and we weren't going to do that.
So now, if we feel more validated, it, like Susan said, it's been very empowering to know that there is a growing movement out there of people that are, and it seems to be more people coming together.
More people kind of our age, you know, been through the marriage thing, been through raising kids kind of thing.
And then all of a sudden, they're finding themselves where like, you know, we've got a lot more freedom than we know.
And we can kind of choose to sculpt our relationship however we want.
It's just, it's been really nice to kind of have that validation.
Even though we felt comfortable along, we never felt a lot of pressure to like, we couldn't be doing this.
This is crazy. It never felt like that.
We knew all along our relationship was so solid and it just kept getting better every year.
And I think people, when they saw that, they were like, yeah, exactly.
You guys seem really happy.
More power to you. And we both have married friends and single friends.
And so many of our friends say, wow, which we could just be like you and Mike, which would be like you and Mike.
You know, young and old.
What do you think makes people sometimes feel a jealousy around?
You know, I'd say that a light-hearted way.
But what do you think people wish they could pull off?
Well, it's just like a first date all the time.
Don't you think? Yeah. You don't have to talk about the dishes.
You don't have to talk about finances.
You don't have to talk about, you know, what Little Sally did at school.
You just get to have quality time.
Yeah, it like we talk every day, but we don't see each other.
But maybe a couple of times a week.
And so, you know, I'm just excited when I hear her car drive up the driveway.
It's just, I feel like kind of tingled in my spine.
You know, and yeah, it's, you know, it's like when you're first dating, to kind of keep that going for 20 years.
It's just, yeah, I'm still just continually amazed by it.
It's kind of wonderful to hear Mike and Susan talk about the freedom they've gotten by creating their own relationship.
It's also interesting that for them, the biggest challenge isn't navigating the living apart separate homes aspect.
They've got that figured out.
The biggest challenge in their eyes is dealing with other people who expect them to move in together or get married.
After the break, I talk to Mike and Susan about whether they wish there was more visibility for LAT couples.
And about what the future holds for them.
Stick around. You know, there was one thing you said Mike that you felt like the relationship was getting better and better over time and that you were going closer.
You know, from the outside, I think people are often wanting to see something quote unquote progress.
So they want to see something go through stages externally.
Right. I'm curious within the relationship, what were the signs for you?
Just on pure happiness, you know, just on how satisfied you feel.
Which I think that's the only measure that really matters is how happy you feel with the other person.
And I think, you know, as time passes and we're like, hey, this has been, you know, particularly like this year is a milestone for us 20 years.
And to think that we're at 20 years and things still feel like they're growing.
I'm still looking forward to things.
I'm still optimistic about our future.
You know, LATs aren't really reflected in the census or any kind of official survey that collects info about relationships.
So they're almost a kind of invisible relationship in certain ways, in certain yeah, officially measured ways.
Do you ever wish that it was a box you could check somewhere?
Yeah, that's an interesting one.
We always run into that like what like, Susan, I've grappled with what we call each other.
Like when you're 64 and you know, you say you got a girlfriend, it's just, it sounds a little, little point.
You know, so we've not really come up with, with good terms to call each other.
And you can say, I'm in an LAT relationship.
Yeah, nobody really knows what that is either.
So I'm curious for you all.
Do you think you'll live together in the future?
You know, it may happen.
It may not. You know, I guess as we get older, you know, one of us may have some health problems.
And we wouldn't hesitate putting our heads together on that, figuring out what we need to do.
If we had to sell both of our houses and get a new house, I'm sure we can make that work and we'd be okay.
So it's not out of the realm of possibility.
We're not gonna flat out saying no.
Susan, I heard you are thinking of what a house for an LAT couple would look like.
It threw me off for a second because living apart together, I don't first think about living at a house together as living apart.
But tell me a bit about what you're envisioning when you say a house for an LAT couple.
I think they should design houses for LAT couples who are finally going to live together under the same sort of roof.
You know, mainly because, you know, I'm visual, he's auditory.
So he loves his records.
He's got a big, big, big record collection.
And I'm more visual. I watch a lot of, you know, documentaries.
And we're gonna need two living rooms on the opposite sides of the house.
I think you should have two living rooms, one communal kitchen, a communal, you know, sort of outside patio area.
You wouldn't have to have two of those.
And then, you know, we've always been fascinated with the free to callo and Diego Rivera.
They had a house. And it was two standalone kind of houses with a little bridge on the second floor that went back and forth into each other's house.
And I thought that would be great too, especially if we were older.
So what do you think? I see people talk about it.
You know, people talk about like buying a duplex and having, you know, each live on one side.
I've even seen somebody posted some pictures of like, two tiny houses together that were on the same property that were connected.
I don't want to live in a tiny house, but, you know, yeah, I mean, I could, I could see that.
Or yeah, if you could design your own, that could be a possibility too.
Well, if there's any architects or developers listening, it sounds like there might be a market for this at some point.
I love that bike and Susan have figured out their boundaries and their own goals.
I mean, they're even starting to dream up literal blueprints for a house that could contain their relationship.
Since this is the last episode of our special season, I wanted to bring Mona back in to help wrap things up.
Hey, Mona. Hi, Selene. I am back.
What have you learned? Okay, so big picture.
A lot of times we think about statistics as an answer.
Sometimes it's literally an answer like on a multiple choice test.
But in the real world, it kind of isn't the answer lots of times.
It's more of a point of departure.
Even when you have a data point that seems to reflect some aspect of your life, that number alone can't communicate or contain delightful, complicated, messy reality.
Totally. Like, data is so good at telling us this kind of clean and sanitized version of the what.
But it rarely tells us why something is the way that it is.
So now I've got a tricky question for you.
Okay, I've had so much fun doing this, but there's been something in the back of my head through this experiment.
We have had a whole team of producers and researchers and fact checkers to consult with.
We've had the time to find a person who fits a data point to schedule and perform an in-depth interview with them.
Right. And I've had you to help me think through what data is and what it isn't.
But now that this special series is over, and I won't have you or that team with me all the time, what do I do when I come across interesting data points in the wild without all that help?
How can I keep good practices around, you know, remembering how to use the data of learning?
I would say my advice would be to think of someone you love.
And if you think about someone that you really, really care about, the idea of them kind of just being distilled to a set of percentages and decimal places feels like it just doesn't come close to capturing everything about that person, including the things that make them special and unique.
And I think that when you hold someone that you love in your mind and go out into the world with a set of questions, they're aimed at better understanding them.
Hopefully the end result is that you understand a lot of other people a whole lot better.
Oh, I love how actionable that is.
I love this idea that when I see a data set, I bring in someone I love into that equation and soften some of the assumptions I might be bringing to it.
I love that. Softening assumptions is exactly right.
We are all outliers in all kinds of ways and the statistics just don't tell you everything that you need to know about the world around us.
And thank you for helping show that this season.
Thank you so much. It's been a gift to be a part of it.
And here we go, everybody.
Let's move through the world with slightly softer assumptions.
And my normal is part of the Ted Audio Collective.
This special series is hosted by me, Seleme Reshamwala.
The episode was produced by Daphne Chen and edited by Sarah Nix.
Our team includes Joed D'Aluna, Constanza Gayardo, Michelle Quint, Van Banceng, Roxanne Highlash, and Jimmy Gutierrez.
Jennifer Namm is our researcher and fact checker, original theme song by Susami.
Sarah Brueger is our mix engineer, special thanks to Sharon Hyman, Vicky Larson, and members of the LAT Facebook group who spoke with us for this episode.
And huge thanks to Mona Chalabee for bringing me on this data scavenger hunt.
It's been a joy.
