How To
Coexist

To me, distance—the right amount of it—suggests a kind of sensual friction; if your partner is not in the next room, you have to work a bit to get to them.Take a couple of subway trains, walk some city blocks, wait for them outside their apartment. Anticipation builds along the way.

The space between two partners isn’t just a reservoir where loving feelings might accumulate. To me, it is love itself: permission for each other to explore different interests, meet different people, become distinct individuals. Besides: going out into the world on one’s own makes it more exciting to come home to a significant other. We return with small treasures—good gossip, funny stories, new insights—and give them to our partners as tokens of affection. We say, “I saw something that made me think of you.” The gossip and stories and insights are remade when we convey them to someone we love, tailored to their interests, reassembled to make them laugh.

We might say that our desire to keep things to ourselves, for ourselves, is always in tension with our desire to share them with a partner. The former preserves our sense of individuality and self-determination; the latter brings us closer to the people we love. It’s easy to hold the line taut when we’re talking about things, but much harder where physical space is concerned. We’re used to dealing in absolutes: You can either live with your partner or live apart from them. I have been given, lately, to wondering, What if there was something in between? A way of living intimately apart, or living together such that one might enjoy the solitude and independence formalized by distance.

At some point, a few years ago, I began to collect stories about couples who lived apart not by circumstance, but by choice. I was fascinated by the idea that sharing a life did not in every case mean sharing a home, and the kind of relationship that might become possible with such an arrangement. It began with a New Yorker profile of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. She and her ex-husband, Cass Sunstein, had kept separate apartments while they were married to each other, though Rachel Aviv notes in the same sentence: “each one’s work informed the other’s.” I liked the image this created: of thoughts, as if by their own will, floating from one person’s head—through walls, out of the front door, down streets—and into their partner’s. (And vice versa.)

Such a feat could certainly be achieved if you lived with your partner, but it was more impressive, more romantic, across distances. I imagine the separate homes of couples not as precise mirrors of each other, but rather as complements. One person has the nice Dutch oven for making stews and enormous pots of pasta. One person’s apartment is too hot in the summer; the other’s too cold in the winter. Such things quickly establish themselves as immutable facts in a relationship—in friendships and in casual dating as well as long-term arrangements—even when we know we could just as easily change apartments, move cities, and thereby introduce a new set of facts. There may be, of course, some doubling also. Two copies of Middlemarch, similar plants, identical toys for the cats, perpetually strewn on the floor.

I treasured independence, or the illusion of it, which for years meant the tiny room in the apartment I shared with one or more roommates; the order of my books on their shelves; occasionally eating dinner in front of my laptop screen; the option of letting a text to go unanswered for an hour or so. It is the only apartment I’ve ever had in New York, and so its only foils have been apartments of friends, friends of friends, and people I’ve dated, or those belonging to strangers on StreetEasy. My friend Anna, an incorrigible Zillow obsessive, will every couple of weeks or so text our group chat a listing for a beautiful old house somewhere remote, in Vermont or Maine maybe. We’ll each pick our rooms, narrate what we’re doing in the house at that moment—reading in the window seat, baking scones—choose different jobs, describe different lives.

Though the same internal conflict often presents itself with roommates—how much space do I want for myself and how much do I want to be around other people?—it becomes less a matter of preference and more of a statement in a romantic relationship. If you were both intent on maintaining your spatial boundaries, might that be a sign that you would not allow certain emotional ones to be dissolved, lovingly, by your partner? No, I didn’t think so.

One winter morning, I watched movers carry 34 boxes of my boyfriend’s books into my third-floor walkup, along with his desk and five bookcases. David and I were both a bit giddy—neither of us had done this before. We had been together for three years, and we’d liked living apart for, I think, similar reasons: We appreciated the alone time, the different emotional valences of our separate apartments. But in the end, it wasn’t a hard decision to move in together. Last December, I had the option of breaking my lease, finding a new roommate, or living with the person I loved.

The 34 boxes of books verged on absurdity, but they were as precious to me as they were to David, a physical reminder of one of the things that drew us to each other. I could have filled a half dozen of my own boxes with the books he had given me alone. But at the moment, a white IKEA bookcase of his was being placed perpendicular to a white IKEA bookcase of mine, causing me to realize one had slightly yellowed. I suggested how he might display some of his books artfully on the mantle of the beautiful fireplace of his office, which had been my bedroom, but instead he stacked three large crates in front of it. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t, in that instant, feel that my space—my space, I thought to myself guiltily—had been slightly intruded on, as much as I knew David belonged in it. And I imagine he must have found the situation uncanny as well at first, moving into a familiar place that had gone from being mine to ours overnight.

Overcoming this slight change in our relationship—and it was slight, really, considering what was going on around us—indeed took a kind of negotiation. Bargaining in good faith, if you will. Though usually I was bargaining with myself: How much space did I need to maintain my sense of independence, of living on my own terms? I was not always sure. But I knew that this “self” I thought to be so stable relied as much on letting other people in, drawing people close, as it did on cultivating solitude. The same was true of making a home.

In our apartment together, there are two writers, two cats, and two offices, separated by a narrow hallway. In the morning, David and I usually sit at the kitchen table and work together. In the winter, David would make a full pot of coffee and pick out a mug from the cabinet for me to drink from. I would watch him make the decision, the aura of each one subtly transformed by his act of choosing it. After an hour or so, David might repair to his study, the low noises of house music I could never write to gently pulsing through the door.

When David is out and I need to retrieve something from his office, I often pause to admire the way his objects project him into the room. I think about how idiosyncratic David’s mess seems to me now, and suddenly my own compulsion toward neatness seems to be an annoying character flaw. The crates in front of the fireplace, I realize, contain items of David’s waiting to be revealed to me. I look at the pile of coins on his desk, the scribbled note on his employer’s letterhead, the characteristic empty coffee cups, and the Polaroid photo of myself, eating a peach, displayed on the mantle. I remember the quote in Mating about love being like a series of rooms, or apartments, and realizing each one is better than the one that came before—“larger, more floorspace, a better view.” I think about all of the apartments ahead of us, and how much I like the one we’re in right now.

Marie Solis is a writer based in New York. She has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, and other publications.