The model coupling – the dream, if you will – was always Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton, or Annie Leibovitz and Susan Sontag: maintaining a marriage, de facto or real, across two separate households, so that you got all the benefits with none of the gross bits. You could keep the magic alive, extend the honeymoon period indefinitely and, by protecting your space and rationing your time together, create a scenario in which you were actually happy to see each other. Trends originating with celebrities tend to be fake, meaningless or massaged, but the appeal of this model has lingered on. Overlooking the small matter of money, what, exactly, is there not to like?
Or rather, what is there not to like for the women in any given couple? In the New York Times this week – sound the klaxon – a new trends piece drops on the growing numbers of women in the US who, post-pandemic, are opting to sustain the separate household model of marriage, established during lockdown by some families to reduce Covid transmissions, and proving so preferable to the norm, apparently, that they’re in no hurry to reunite with their husbands.
