I’ve never lived with a man I didn’t marry: Tweedledee, 1979–1984, and Tweedledum, 1984–1995. (The names have been changed to irritate the pair of them.) So when I left my second union and moved to Brighton to chase the man who is now my third (and hopefully final) husband, I was keen to establish and keep separate households. I was quite pleased to find that not only was I having a blast seeing Daniel while maintaining a maverick social life (he didn’t want to be in a swimming pool full of drunken, shrieking girls’n’gays any more than I wanted to be in a room full of game-playing, beer-drinking men) but was apparently part of a growing social phenomenon.
A 2005 study from Oxford University found that the UK had two million ‘Living Apart Togethers’ (Lats — unfortunate name, making us sound like some tardy, overpriced beverage); poster children for this trend soon emerged in the somewhat wearyingly eccentric Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter, who lived in two adjoining townhouses in north London.
They were, truth be told, a welcome replacement for and distraction from the previous holders of the honour, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, whose Lat union had started out so bravely. As the New York Times had it, in 1991: ‘They are not married, neither do they live together; their apartments face each other across Central Park. When they began to date, they would wave towels out the window as they spoke on the phone, delighting in saying they could see the other.’
O tempora! O mores! What began as a brave new sunlit experiment, a stroll in Central Park, a dream of artistic and personal freedom and fidelity, ended in swerving, perving and tears before separate bedtimes when Woody made free with Mia’s daughter — a young woman, one notes, who despite her tender years and empty pockets broached no silly modern concepts such as Latting when she bagged Allen.
That both Farrow and Bonham Carter (who has now separated from Burton) were somewhat indebted to their boyfriends for work in an industry which is not kind to older actresses adds an additional air of retrospect-ive desperation to both set-ups.
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