Dear Bess: He wants to move in together. I love him but I love my independence more. Am I being selfish?
I have a friend – I will call her Gloria, because she would hate that – who has been in a deeply happy relationship for eleven years. She and her partner have never lived together. They see each other four or five days a week, take holidays together, have met each other’s children, know each other’s histories inside out. They are, by every meaningful measure, a committed and loving couple.
They also each have their own bathroom. Their own kitchen. Their own Tuesday night television program that the other person has absolutely no opinion about. Gloria describes it as the best relationship decision she never consciously made. It simply evolved, and then at some point she realised it was working so well that changing it would be madness.
I tell you this because I want you to know, before we go any further, that what you are feeling is not selfishness. It is clarity.
You love this man. You have said so. You are not looking for an exit. You are not pulling away. You are a 63-year-old woman who spent decades arranging her life around other people’s needs – children, a husband, a household – and who has, in the years since, built something that is genuinely and specifically hers. A morning routine. A wardrobe organised the way you like it. A fridge that contains exactly what you want and nothing you don’t. The particular silence of a house that belongs to you.
And now someone you love wants to move into that life, and you feel guilty for not wanting him to.
Here is what I want to say: your independence is not a wall you have built against him. It is a thing of value that you have built for yourself. There is a difference.
What researchers now call “living apart together” – relationships that are committed, loving and consistent but maintain separate homes – is an increasingly common and genuinely thriving relationship structure among older adults. It is not a compromise. It is not a sign of ambivalence. For many people, it is simply the structure that allows both partners to show up as their best selves – because they each have somewhere to return to.
The question is whether he can hear that without interpreting it as rejection. And that depends on how you say it.
Not: “I don’t want to live with you.”
But: “I have built something here that matters to me, and I want to protect it – not because I don’t love you, but because loving you from a place of wholeness is better than loving you from a place of resentment. I want to keep choosing to be with you. I don’t want to start taking each other for granted.”
That is a different conversation. It is an honest one. And it is, I would argue, more generous than agreeing to something you don’t want and slowly making you both miserable.
You asked if you are being selfish. I would ask you to examine that word for a moment. Selfish implies taking something from someone else for your own gain. Knowing what you need and being honest about it is not that. It is the opposite – it is the kind of honesty that gives a relationship a fighting chance of lasting.
The selfish option, if we are being precise about it, would be to move him in, resent him quietly, and make you both miserable over a period of several years.
Gloria, by the way, was asked the same question eleven years ago. She thought about it for a week and then said: “I think we’re both happier this way. Let’s keep it.” He agreed. They still do.
Got a question for Bess? Write to her at community@startsat60.com.au