"these people who live in 'rent-stabilized' apartments never leave them"

Why should they? Why should anyone leave a home they like if they can pay for it and they want to stay? Where do you want them to go -- camps? Euthanasia centers?

"This means younger people who come to the city end up living in expensive hellholes."

That's not the fault or the responsibility of people who moved there earlier. Blame it on developers and landlords and city planners who don't create affordable housing.

Blame it on developers and landlords and city planners who don't create affordable housing.

There are only two ways to create "affordable" housing:

1) price it lower than cost - that means it costs the landlord more to maintain it than he gets in rent, basically forcing him to subsidize someone else's living arrangement or to raise the rent on non-subsidized apartments to an artificially high rate (Amy's scenario earlier).

2) build so much housing that the landlords are basically competing with each other for tenants - competing on price. Most cities don't want to do that because it involves increasing population density and allowing more high-rise buildings.

Otherwise, popular (and land-limited) spots like San Francisco and Manhattan will always have ridiculously high rents.

"That's not the fault or the responsibility of people who moved there earlier."

Right, JD!

"Blame it on developers and landlords and city planners who don't create affordable housing."

Wrong, JD! Blame it on politicians who distort the free market, mess with supply and demand, creating shortages and inviting people to game the system Think USSR. "Fair" prices for bread (and everything else) if you can find any on the shelves.

In 1992, Katha Pollitt mentioned Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) in her book "Reasonable Creatures." I can't find the whole thing online, but here's a sample:

"Dr. Johnson knew what he was talking about: He and his wife lived apart. And what would he think of our confusion of moral preachments with practical
solutions to social problems? Remember his response to Mrs. Thrale's long and flowery speech on the cost of children's clothes. 'Nay, madam,' he said, 'when you are declaiming, declaim; and when you are calculating, calculate.' "

I was in an eleven year relationship and we never lived together. It was perfect while it lasted - he had his house, I had mine, we saw each other an evening or two a week and on weekends. It's my preferred way to carry on a relationship - I like my "me" time.

If anything ever happened to DH, I would never live with another man. Been there, done that, don't need it again, thanks.

Plenty of women I've heard of in the last decade seem to take distance over an actual divorce. One went to Germany for a job and visited her hubby and grown kids on holidays, others have moved "to take care of a parent" and stayed. There's something to that, if you have older kids together. Holidays can still be everyone all in one place.

Of course, that assumes you aren't wanting to find a new serious love. Most don't seem to care to-this years new thoughtful man will be next years laying on the couch darting and watching football man. Why bother?

I applaud--and envy--those who figured out they're better living apart before they move in together and spoil it. I wasn't that smart.

If I live with a woman more than about two years, the relationship starts to disintegrate, and within another two years (if we stay together) I feel nothing for her. This pattern played out three times, with three very different women, before I came to understand the how and why of it.

The third of these women is my current wife. We've stayed together because neither of us wants to split up our stuff, but we long ago reached the point where we are, as Amy once put it, "roomies for life."

What haunts me, and always will, is that I had the chance to do it right. Between marriages there was a woman I lived with for a bit over two years. Things were just starting to fray around the edges when she moved out and took a job in another state. She wanted me to come with her. I didn't want to move, but I vacillated for almost a year, during which time we visited often and the relationship was fantastic. But it never occurred to me to just stick with what was working. I had it in my head that I had to either move back in with her or break up, and I wound up choosing the latter.

But it never occurred to me to just stick with what was working. I had it in my head that I had to either move back in with her or break up, and I wound up choosing the latter.

Posted by: Rex Little at September 15, 2013 6:01 PM

"When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision"

I have a husband whom I am very fond of. It is a loving relationship, and not one I would be willing to swap out for some short term sexual excitment.

That said, if I outlive him, i see no reason to ever get married,or live with anyone again.

Familiarity in the worst case, breeds contempt, and even in the best, bordom, and complacency.

Hmm...my husband and I live together and it works out quite well. We are both pretty independent so we each do things on our own and we both travel regularly for business, so we still get the experience of being excited to see each other again.

I think part of it is when you get together. As others have said above, I suspect I would be inclined to maintain my own space if I started a new relationship in my 40s and beyond.

Hmm...my husband and I live together and it works out quite well.

I'm sure most people are perfectly capable of living with their romantic partners, or the species would have gone extinct by now. The trick for those of us who are exceptions is to recognize that we are exceptions, and that what works for other people doesn't for us.

I think part of it is when you get together.

That may be true in some cases, but I was 22 when my ex-wife-to-be moved in with me. That relationship followed the same trajectory as both the later ones.

I like living with my wife. I have constant access to sex this way. Also she's very easy to look at, a pretty good cook, and makes a mean Old Fashioned.

Authors, Robert and Joan Parker used to live in a duplex. He had the downstairs apartment and she had the upstairs one. They could not live with each other and could not live without each other, so they found a way to make it work. Not for everyone, but it worked for them.

If anyone's interested, the 1992 Pollitt essay was "Why I Hate 'Family Values.'" It was mainly about the Murphy Brown "scandal," but it's far better than that.

Here's more from the same page:

"When pundits preach morality, I often find myself thinking of Samuel Johnson, literature's greatest enemy of cant and fatuity. What would the eighteenth-century moralist make of our current obsession with marriage? 'Sir,' he replied to Boswell, who held that marriage was a natural state: 'it is so far from being natural for a man and a woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives that they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.'

And earlier, on page 39:

"New Jersey's new welfare reform law gives economic coercion a particularly bizarre twist. Welfare moms who marry can keep pan of their dole, but only if the man is not the father of their children. The logic is that, married or not, Dad has a financial obligation to his kids, but Mr. Just Got Into Town does not. If the law's inventors are right that welfare policy can micromanage marital and reproductive choice, they have just guaranteed that no poor woman will marry her children's father. This is strengthening the family?"

Authors, Robert and Joan Parker used to live in a duplex. He had the downstairs apartment and she had the upstairs one. They could not live with each other and could not live without each other, so they found a way to make it work.

That's very interesting. Parker's fictional detective, Spenser, lived apart from his girlfriend Susan Silverman, even though they were more married than most married couples. I didn't know Parker based that on his own marriage.