Books About Living Apart Together: A Reading List

Few books deal with Living Apart Together directly, and those that do are mostly practical guides. Here are six worth reading, with what each one is, who it suits and what it teaches: three about Living Apart Together itself, one that rethinks marriage, one about desire, and a memoir from South Africa.

One thing to know first. This blog is part of Karina Marais’s own website, and the last book on the list is hers. It is here because it is the only memoir on the list written from inside a LAT relationship, and it is marked clearly so that you can weigh that.

How the list was chosen

The list covers books about Living Apart Together itself, and books on the two questions underneath it: what a marriage is for, and how desire survives closeness. Each title was checked on its publisher’s, bookseller’s or author’s own page on 28 September 2026, and the descriptions below come from those pages. Where a page gives no year or page count, the entry says so. The books are not ranked, because they do different jobs, and the formats listed are the ones those pages show.

Six books

LATitude, Vicki Larson

LATitude: How You Can Make a Live Apart Together Relationship Work was published by Cleis Press on 9 July 2024 and runs to 210 pages. The author, a long-time journalist, wrote it after years of research and interviews, and it is a practical guide. It covers the day-to-day details as well as the stigma and judgement LAT couples meet, sex and legal concerns, and the myths about the arrangement. It also looks ahead to the next phase, for couples who become empty nesters or carers, and presents living apart together as a new family form: not a threat to traditional partnership, but a valuable addition.

• Who it suits: couples thinking about LAT, and couples already in it who are facing a change.
• What it teaches: how to make the arrangement work in practice, from the legal questions to the conversations.
• Formats: paperback, and a digital audio edition.

Living Apart Together, Anne L. Watson

Its full title is Living Apart Together: A Unique Path to Marital Happiness, or The Joy of Sharing Lives Without Sharing an Address (Shepard Publications; ebook 2014, paperback 2016, audiobook 2023). Watson writes from experience. She and her partner met in 1998, tried to turn two connected flats into one home, gave up after six months, and each took a flat. They got back together without merging their homes, married in 2004 and, she writes, have lived happily apart together since.

The book is organised as a tour of the house: the living room, the kitchen and dining room, the bedroom and the bathroom, each with the common drawbacks of two people sharing it. It then turns to housekeeping, money, children and elders, pets, expectations, compromise, and time alone and together, and it is candid about a few disadvantages as well as the benefits. Watson also draws on her working life: designing restorations of historic buildings, she learned that a typical mansion was a shell around private apartments, most with one suite for the husband and another for the wife.

• Who it suits: couples who love each other but not each other’s habits at home.
• What it teaches: that a couple can decide, room by room, what to share.

Living Apart Together: A New Possibility for Loving Couples, Linda Breault and Dianne Gillespie

Available from FriesenPress as an ebook (epub, mobi and PDF), this book follows partners who looked for alternatives to the idea that a couple must live together to count as a couple. The publisher’s page does not give a year or a page count.

• Who it suits: professionals juggling a career and a relationship, empty nesters who want the romance back, and single parents who want an alternative to a blended family.
• What it teaches: that independence can bring stability to a relationship and keep the romance alive.

The New I Do, Susan Pease Gadoua and Vicki Larson

The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels (Seal Press, 23 September 2014, 256 pages) sets out models of less traditional marriage, from a parenting marriage, intended for raising children, to a comfort or safety marriage, entered for financial security or companionship. The publisher’s description does not name living apart among its models, so read it as a book about designing a marriage rather than a LAT manual. Larson went on to write LATitude a decade later.

• Who it suits: couples deciding what their marriage is for, before or after the wedding.
• What it teaches: that a marriage can be built around a purpose the couple chooses.

Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel

Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence came out in 2006. Drawing on the author’s clinical experience, it explores the complexities of sustaining desire in long relationships and asks whether a couple can want what they already have. It is not about living apart, but it describes a tension that some couples answer by living apart. Karina Marais names the same goal when she explains her own arrangement: staying in what she calls the “dessert phase”, with the romance of a new relationship intact.

• Who it suits: couples who share a home and want to understand what closeness does to desire.
• What it teaches: how desire can survive in a relationship that is also a home.

Upstairs Downstairs: A Musical Memoir, Karina Marais

The memoir on this list is Karina Marais’s own, and this is her website. It was published in January 2026 as a paperback from Reach Publishers and as an ebook, and there is an audiobook she narrates herself. The back-cover blurb sums up the arrangement at its heart: “his bachelor pad upstairs, her retreat downstairs”, with a staircase between them.

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This memoir is about chasing dreams and embracing a Living Apart Together (LAT) relationship for over 20 years.

The story runs from a happy childhood and her parents’ divorce, through a 20-year first marriage and reinvention as an entrepreneur, to finding a new partner in her mid-forties, building a life of rituals, food and travel on two floors, and marrying on the beach after 18 years. Two of its twelve parts are about the arrangement directly: Part 7, “The Anatomy of a LAT Relationship”, and Part 9, “LAT Rituals, a Fallout, and Other Insights”. It ends with “Dream, Final Purple Cow, Action”.

It is also more than a book. Its 32 tracks, including a medley, are spread over three albums on Spotify, and each song is placed in a chapter; the lyric readings and videos add more, and the story now has a restaurant. How the book, the songs and the dinner fit together has its own guide.

• Who it suits: readers who want to see Living Apart Together lived over decades, including after a wedding; anyone starting again after 45; readers who like memoir with music.
• What it teaches: specific house rules, such as announcing every visit and keeping one’s own beliefs; a weekly rhythm, from coffee on Monday evenings to dinner downstairs on Tuesdays and coffee in a glass folly between the treetops; and the case that an unconventional arrangement can include marriage.
• Where to buy: the book page lists the stores, including Takealot and Amazon, and it is sold in person at Forum Homini Boutique Hotel. The recommended retail price at launch was R295.

The Sunday Times published its closing chapter as an extract on 3 March 2026, and Karina spoke on a memoir panel at the Kingsmead Book Fair on 23 May 2026, with Melinda Ferguson, facilitated by Eva Mazza; both are listed on the press page. The book’s title song, “Upstairs Downstairs”, topped her list of popular tracks on Spotify in September 2026.

Prefer to listen?

Four of the six have audio editions listed on their pages. LATitude has a digital audio edition, Watson’s book came out as an audiobook in 2023, and The New I Do is sold as an unabridged audiobook download. Upstairs Downstairs: A Musical Memoir is narrated by Karina Marais and runs 11 hours 26 minutes.

For something shorter, her lyric readings podcast has 12 episodes, an introduction and eleven readings of her song lyrics, all published on 17 March 2025. “Each lyric reading offers listeners a deeper connection to my experiences of love, loss, and self-discovery,” she writes in its description. And in the video below she introduces the book part by part; the video’s description lists every chapter with the songs that belong to it.

For the research

If you would rather read studies than books, three are a good start.

• Why more couples are choosing to live apart (opens in a new tab), by Simon Duncan of the University of Bradford, in The Conversation (2020). It reports survey estimates that around 10% of adults in several Western countries live apart together, and finds that many who prefer it are protecting themselves after being hurt.
• Lancaster University’s study of people over 60 (opens in a new tab) (reported in 2024). Around 4% of over-60s in the UK live apart together, with mental-health benefits comparable to marriage.
• Married and Living Apart Together (opens in a new tab), from Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family & Marriage Research (2025). In 2023, 12.5% of US newlyweds were living apart from their spouse for reasons other than separation.

To see these findings set beside one couple’s house rules and weekly rhythm, read the blog’s guide to how LAT works in practice.