LAT Relationships

4 Key excerpts on "LAT Relationships"

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  Families, Intimacy and Globalization

  Floating Ties

  • Raelene Wilding(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  LAT Relationships Since the 1990s, many scholars have turned to the ‘living apart together’, or LAT, relationship as a much clearer indication of the willingness and desire to create more equal couple partnerships. These relationships appear to be a clear alternative to the assumption that long-term committed relationships require co-residence. Instead, LAT couples are distinctive in their choice to maintain separate households, which they may or may not share with other people such as their children or parents (Levin & Trost 1999). Unlike com-muter couples, LAT couples do not have one person living in the ‘main’ household while the other person lives elsewhere for periods of time for work or study reasons. LAT couples maintain separate households in which they sometimes spend time together. They perceive themselves as long-term, com-mitted couples and are perceived by their close social networks as a couple, but this perception is not based on their co-residence. Levin and Trost (1999) consider LAT Relationships to be a new stage in the shift away from the dominance of a narrow definition of marriage towards a broader range of social institutions through which people organ-ize their long-term couple relationships. These shifts include the increasing possibility of having a sexual relationship, bearing and raising children and sharing a residence without getting married. Not only have the social stig-mas associated with these choices been disappearing, but as options they have been supported by new legislation that recognizes de facto relation-ships and parenthood outside of marriage, giving partners rights and obli-gations that were previously only instituted through marriage. These social, legal and cultural changes have produced new opportunities for people to reimagine their relationships, including being able to choose to live apart as a couple.

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  Reinventing Couples

  Tradition, Agency and Bricolage

  • Julia Carter, Simon Duncan(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  It is this substantive attribute that provides a source for social action, and in itself living apart from a partner has little causal effect. Living in different locations may hinder bedside care for example (see Duncan et al. 2012 ; de Jong Gierveld 2015). Or the minority of long distance LAT partners (only 17 per cent in the 2011 national survey lived more than 50 miles apart) might find difficulties in maintaining intimacy (see Holmes 2014). For this reason there may be more in common between particular social groups across categories than with different groups in the same category. For example, young ‘too early’ couples who live apart may well have more in common with their peers who remain single than with older couples who live apart. Or, put another way, behavioural variance within a category (like LAT) may be greater than variance between different categories (like LAT and singledom). Similarly, some women who live apart together may reflexively and purposively act to ‘undo gendered norms’, but so might similar women who are married or cohabit. The process of undoing gender should not be conflated with relationship form. Thus nearly all the interviewees appreciated the extra personal space and time that LAT usually provides. Similarly many of the women interviewees enjoyed relative autonomy from traditional divisions of labour and male authority, while some men could insulate themselves from non-compliant or threatening women. However, these ‘LAT effects’ had different significance for different groups. For the ‘constrained’ and ‘fearful’ groups of women interviewees, autonomous space and the relaxation in gendered norms was more in the nature of an incidental, if pleasant, by-product. For LAT remained second best in comparison to the ‘proper family’ of cohabitation and marriage and, for some, children

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  Changing Relationships

  • Malcolm Brynin, John Ermisch(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These developments mean that more people are spending time without a live-in partner. But to what extent are they without a romantic partner altogether? Most of us are aware of couples who have a steady relationship but do not live at the same address. While living at different addresses, they regard themselves as a couple and are recognised as such by others. This phenomenon has come to be called ‘living apart together,’ or LAT for short. The chapter addresses a number of questions. How important is the LAT phenomenon? For whom and where in the life cycle? Is it changing over time? What are the expectations of LAT couples regarding the future of their relationship? How does LAT relate to coresidential relationships? For instance, what role does it play in the formation of cohabiting unions and marriages? How long do LAT Relationships last? What conditions and events (e.g. job and housing market changes) facilitate the conversion of LAT into a coresidential relationship?

  We seek to answer these questions in a comparison of LAT in Britain and Germany. International comparisons of the phenomenon are extremely rare. There have been a number of studies of LAT in countries other than Britain and Germany (Levin 2004; de Jong Gierveld 2004; Milan and Peters 2003), but only two small British studies (Ermisch 2000; Haskey 2005) and three German studies (Schneider 1996; Traub 2005; Asendorpf 2008) have dealt with the issue. These studies do not provide an in-depth analysis of LAT. This chapter bases such an analysis on two sources of data. One is the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) that carried questions about LAT in 1998 and 2003. Using these responses and the other waves of BHPS data (1991–2005) we undertake analyses of LAT in relation to personal characteristics of partners and to past and subsequent patterns of coresidential relationships. The second source of data is the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which asked questions related to LAT annually over the period 1991–2005. In addition to permitting similar analyses to those based on British data (with of course many more observations), these data allow us to analyse the dynamics of LAT (e.g. how long do such relationships last, how do they end?) in more detail.

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  Intimate Relationships and Social Change

  The Dynamic Nature of Dating, Mating, and Coupling

  • Christina L. Scott, Sampson Lee Blair, Christina L. Scott, Sampson Lee Blair(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  Prior relationships also evoked older adult LATs in our sample to protect themselves from the risks associated with too much interdependence (e.g., loss of autonomy), much like the findings of Funk and Kobayashi (2016), which focused on middle and older adult LATs in Canada. Additional research is needed to examine how commitment is not only defined among older LAT partners but also how it functions as a predictor or outcome of relational maintenance. Another intriguing finding from this study is that participants attributed having a flexible mindset – regarding living arrangements and caregiving more specifically – to the overall success of their relationships. Given their deep desire to remain autonomous, it is curious that both the men and women in this study expressed a willingness to cohabit for caregiving purposes if refusing to do so meant that their relationship would end. However, de Jong Gierveld (2015) found among a sample from the Netherlands that older adult LAT couples held reservations about providing care to a partner. Yet when an illness emerged, the LAT couples provided care to one another. Therefore, a tenet underlying older adult LAT Relationships may be that living apart and being independent is viewed as ideal, until an event occurs (e.g., a partner needing care) that spurs a need to make changes in living arrangements and time apart. Partners may view that the only option for the relationship to continue is to cohabit and provide care. Wishing to remain autonomous for the sake of relationship satisfaction, and doing so by maintaining separate households, suggests that future cohabitation (if realized) would be unsuccessful in terms of sustaining the relationship and maintaining relationship satisfaction. Participants in the present study recognized that keeping separate homes was the simplest strategy for safeguarding their autonomy, similar to Karlsson and Borell’s (2005) findings

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