Happiness in marriage isn't a "one-size-fits-all" deal for every relationship. Every couple, along with their needs and desires, is different from the next. So who are we to judge for how people find their happiness? For this one married couple, that looks like living in separate apartments.
Author Bianca Turetsky recently detailed in an article how this arrangement works for her and her husband, Peter, who both live in New York. "I’m married, and just leaving my husband’s apartment to get back to my own," she shares in the first paragraph.
"I have a few sleeves of Nespresso and a roll of paper towels stashed in my bag from the front closet. I didn’t steal them; technically it’s 'our' Nespresso and 'our' paper towels, but it always feels a little questionable anyway," she continues.
"This is not what I expected marriage to look like," Bianca shares. "It’s so much better."
The author went on to explain that she and her husband got married a little later on in life, after both of them were already established in their own separate ways of being.
"Saying 'I do' for the first time at age 42 meant having my own life built already," Bianca explains. "My apartment, and the mortgage it came with, has been my home for over a decade: a studio in a converted schoolhouse in Prospect Heights."
"The apartment was my refuge after a hard breakup," she continues. "I bought it, I moved, I rebuilt my life. It has history. It’s a part of my family."
"And then there’s Cleo. When Peter and I first started dating, I told him about Cleo, my rescue cat from Queens," Bianca states, then noting that both Peter and his teenage son are severely allergic to cats. "She would never be able to be a part of a home with him, and I had no plans to have a life without her — no wedding ring was worth giving her up. She was a smaller, furrier version of my apartment. She was also a part of my family, and she was there first."
"How could we make this marriage something that worked for all of us? Following the traditional playbook wasn’t going to make anyone happy. Why did we have to live by old conventions? Why couldn’t we make it up as we went along? Who says what a good marriage should look like?"
Eventually, they made the decision to get married, but live separately. "I think this living arrangement is the secret to our happiness," Bianca shares. "It’s become a cliché that the secret to a happy marriage is separate bathrooms. We’ve settled on separate boroughs."
