Married and Still Living Apart: LAT After the Wedding

Karina Marais and her partner lived apart together for 18 years before they married, on the beach at Paternoster in October 2022. The wedding changed their status and left their house exactly as it was: his bachelor pad upstairs, her retreat downstairs, and a knock before every visit.

Married couples who live apart are less unusual than they sound. In the US, one newlywed in eight was living apart from their spouse in 2023 for a reason other than separation. This guide explains what married LAT is, what the numbers show, how Karina’s own story went from a spreadsheet proposal to vows in Afrikaans, why couples keep their separate spaces after the wedding, and what married LAT couples need to agree on.

What married LAT is

Married LAT describes spouses who stay committed to each other but choose to keep separate homes, or separate spaces within one home. The term LAT, short for Living Apart Together, usually describes unmarried couples; as the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University notes, some researchers also include married couples who choose to live apart.

It is not a separation: a separating couple may share a roof for a while, but their relationship is ending. It is also different from spouses who are apart only because a job or other circumstances demand it, although surveys such as the one below count both.

How many married couples live apart?

The best recent figures come from the US.

The BGSU profile, by Natalie Bankey, defines newlyweds as people who married in the past year, and uses the American Community Survey. Some of its other figures are surprising. Newlyweds in a first marriage were more likely to live apart (13.1%) than those in a second (10.6%) or third or later marriage (10.2%). The youngest newlyweds, aged 15 to 24, were the most likely of all (26.6%). Because the measure counts any reason other than separation, it includes couples apart by circumstance as well as by choice. Census figures cited on Wikipedia also show the share of married couples living apart rose by a quarter between 2000 and 2019.

Eighteen years apart, then a beach wedding

Karina’s path joined her partner’s in 2004, a year after her divorce. For the next 18 years they lived apart together, and from 2008 in the house they still share: his rooms upstairs, hers downstairs, a pink staircase in between. Then, in October 2022, they married on the beach at Paternoster. “We got married on the beach after Living Apart Together for 18 years,” she writes on her lyrics page.

A proposal with a spreadsheet

The proposal came with a spreadsheet. “From an Excel spreadsheet proposal to standing here, the journey felt surreal,” Karina writes. Her memoir tells the story in chapter 11.2, “Excel-ing at Holiday Planning”, which also takes in their first trip abroad after lockdown, in late 2021: 15 days in Mexico before visiting her youngest son in New York. The song placed in that chapter is “Cherry Blossoms”.

Vows in Afrikaans

They made their vows in Afrikaans, and Karina has published both. Each promised to keep living life to the full with the other, as they had for the past eighteen years. She promised to keep pace beside him; he promised to care for her on every level. Both vows end on the same image: loving each other until all the cherry blossoms have fallen. That image gave the wedding song its title.

On the day itself, she writes, “I rushed toward him, so eager to get married that I nearly broke the old tradition of not kissing him right then and there.”

Why nothing changed at home

The marriage did not move anyone upstairs or downstairs.

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We said our vows, married at last – the beginning of an even better life, together but still Living Apart.

Nothing changed after the wedding, she told Get It magazine in January 2026. The two floors, the knock-knock rule and the weekly dates stayed as they were, and so did the courtship: he has been dating her for more than 20 years. How the house itself works, floor by floor, has its own guide.

Swans became the couple’s emblem. At the Dare2Dream dinner, the launch programme began the evening with a photograph between two golden swans, the spot shown at the top of this page, which Karina’s culinary guide calls “Symbols of a Lifelong Bond”. At home, the emblem is a pair of cups: the Swan Cups, one cobalt blue and one lime green, sharing a single saucer. She describes them as “a perfect reflection of our relationship: two hearts, two homes, yet always connected.”

Why stay apart after the wedding?

Staying in the dessert phase

Karina’s reason comes from a film.

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In the movie The Taste of Things, marriage is compared to a dinner that begins with dessert—the honeymoon phase.

Living apart, she writes, lets them keep indulging in that sweetness: the romance stays, and the strains of sharing every room do not. The idea runs through chapter 7.6, “Love’s Logistics”, and through her song “Dinner Starts as a Honeymoon”, filmed around a dessert of purple pears in a ring of pomegranate. At the Dare2Dream dinner, the purple pears come fifth of eleven courses.

Room for two ambitions

Separate spaces also leave room for two working lives. The book’s blurb describes a relationship “where love, ambition, and independence coexist”. Karina co-founded the educational NGO BrainBoosters, created the Running with Bulls financial-literacy board game and presented a KykNet television series on children and money, and she is a non-executive director of Eureka DIY and Forum Homini Boutique Hotel. Part 8 of her memoir covers what she calls “the boldest dream I’ve pursued with the new man in my life”.

Ambition works both ways. When Karina dreamed of a restaurant built for her memoir, her husband found the site, a clearing where a tree had fallen, across a little bridge, and the dome opened four months later, Get It reported. It is now the Dare2Dream Dome at Forum Homini.

Love after 45: LAT later in life

Karina’s divorce came in 2003, at 45, after a 20-year first marriage. Writing about it later, she “reflected on those moments of pain, growth, and healing while also acknowledging the goodness in my ex-husband despite our falling out of love” in the song Wings of Words.

Dating in her mid-forties taught her something she wrote into A Man in a Million, a song she wanted sung by a female rapper: that “the strict criteria we set for meeting someone—whether about age, qualifications, or ticking all the right boxes—can sometimes prevent us from experiencing the delightful unpredictability of human connection.” She was new to dating, she adds, “but I was learning fast—very fast.”

Research suggests the arrangement can suit later life. In the UK, around 4% of people over 60 live apart together, according to a study reported by Lancaster University in December 2024. They reported less mental distress and better wellbeing than single people of their age, a benefit comparable to marriage or living together, and women and men benefited alike. For older people starting a new relationship, the researchers call LAT a balanced option: a marginally smaller gain in mental health than marriage, with far less exposure to risk. In the US, 13.7% of newlyweds aged 65 and over were living apart in 2023.

There is a caution, too. Simon Duncan of the University of Bradford found that the people who prefer to live apart over the long term are mostly older and have been married or lived with a partner before, and that many were protecting themselves after being hurt, financially as well as emotionally. It is worth being honest about which of those describes you.

Karina, now in her sixties, describes the result in the closing song of her memoir, Content, Complete in Every Way.

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I dared to love in a way that defied convention, Living Apart Together while daring to dream and live fully, not waiting for happiness to arrive but creating it along the way.

What married LAT couples agree on

Every married LAT couple draws its own lines. These questions, drawn from Karina’s arrangement and the research above, are the ones worth settling out loud. They are prompts, not legal advice: marriage, property and tax rules differ from country to country, and those questions need a professional.

1. Time. Which days are shared, and how are they booked? Karina’s week has fixed dates: Monday coffee, Tuesday dinner and a sleepover.
2. Space. Whose space is whose, and which spaces belong to both? Their glass folly between the treetops is reached by a walkway from each level.
3. Visits. Is the door open, or do you knock? They knock.
4. Money. Who pays for which household, and what do you share?
5. Family. How do children from earlier marriages fit in? Karina and her husband raised their children separately, she told Get It.
6. Beliefs. Can each of you keep your own views? From the start, they agreed not to try to convince or convert each other.
7. Holidays and celebrations. Who plans them, and how? One of her chapters is called “Excel-ing at Holiday Planning”.
8. Later life. What happens if one of you needs care?

Hear the vows: “Cherry Blossoms”

“Cherry Blossoms” is track 10 on her album Upstairs Downstairs (Songs from my Memoir), 4 minutes 54 seconds long, with lyrics by Karina. Her brief to the composer was “to capture the ambiance of that special day on the beach in Paternoster in October 2022—the breaking waves, the seagulls, and the beautiful strains of the violin.”

Her story of the day, the vows in Afrikaans and the lyrics in English are in her notes on Cherry Blossoms, and she reads the lyrics herself in the tenth episode of her lyric readings podcast.

The wedding closes the love story of Upstairs Downstairs: A Musical Memoir: chapter 11.3 is called “A Love Story Wrapped in Waves”. For the years before it, start with how their arrangement worked before the wedding. And if you are planning an anniversary of your own, the blog has a plan for a day and a night in the Cradle of Humankind, built around the Dare2Dream dinner.