High_Gravity
Belligerent Drunk
Apparently this is a new trend coming up for people who can afford to do it.
Divide and Conquer: Married But Separate
Staying Together By Living Apart - Read More About Marriage on ELLE.com
Divide and Conquer: Married But Separate
Whenever a newspaper runs a feature about a married couple who live apartwhich happens more often than youd think, at least every six monthsthe news crackles through the blogosphere, and my social circuit, on an electric current of raw, naked envy.
Oh my Godmy own space, all to myself? How do people pull it off? What a dream, sighs very happily married V. Were absentmindedly browsing the racks in a consignment shop while discussing the latest instance, a story about a man and a woman in Vermont who constructed two separate houses connected by an enclosed bridge, when Im overcome with déjà vu. Id had this exact conversation six months ago, with very happily married S., after an article appeared about a woman who built her own (tiny, adorable) gingerbread cottage for alone time and occasional overnights, located across a stream and up the hill from the home she shares with her husband. Each time its as if were struck anew by this most novel arrangement, as if weve never heard of it before, as if I hadnt been dreaming of it for a full decade, ever since Brooke Kroegers biography of the writer Fannie Hurst first planted the idea in my mind.
If youve never heard of Hurst, she was the highest paid short-story writer of the first half of the twentieth centurya prolific Danielle Steele type, but one who wrote about immigrants and shopgirls. She was the author of 26 books that were adapted into 31 films, and her death in 1968 earned her a front-page obituary in The New York Times. Equally glamorous was her private life, which was the most winning blend of prim and sensational: On May 4, 1920, the Times broke the story that everyones favorite author, heretofore considered single, was in fact married to a dashing musician named Jacques Danielson, and had been for five years, andI hope youre sitting down for thisthey lived in separate studio apartments in the same building on West 69th Street. The article opens:
FANNIE HURST WED; HID SECRET 5 YEARS
Sailed Into Matrimony With Pianist in a Bark of Their Own Designing, LIVE APART, THEIR OWN WAY Meet by AppointmentIts a New Method Which Rejects Antediluvian Custom.
In the story, Hurst explained that she considered nine out of 10 marriages to be sordid endurance tests, overgrown with the fungi of familiarity and contempt, and that by living separately from her husband, she was able to keep her most sacred relationship a high-sheen damask rather than a breakfast cloth, stale with soft-boiled egg stains.
The press went wild, with all sorts of sanctimonious editorials and letters to the editor, inciting the chivalrous Danielson to publish, three days later, a charmingly reasonable defense of their living situation as being both loving and economical. For those who seem to think that I am being cheated of the carpet slipper, fire-side aspect of domesticity, he wrote, whenever I find the ache beginning to set in for the comfortable sag of the patent rocker, I need only to drop in at Miss Hursts for one of the delicious homemade dinners her maid of five years permanency knows so well how to prepare. Convinced readers took note, and for a while, among those who could afford it, a Fannie Hurst marriage was much in vogue.
Staying Together By Living Apart - Read More About Marriage on ELLE.com