'My husband lives in an apartment five blocks away'.

Annie Fox and her husband don’t live together. They live apart, together.

Before they got married they tried living together but they both hated it.

“It was a unique brand of hate—the type of deep displeasure that only exists when your two favourite things combine to equal something surprisingly shit. Like warm brie and a latte,” Fox says in a piece for Glamour.

And let’s be fair, living with someone is hard. Post continues after video.

Most people would think not being able to peacefully co-habitat was a red flag on a future marriage, Fox and her now husband had other ideas. She says she “wasn’t prepared to skip soft cheeses or say farewell to my favourite caffeine treat”.

So her husband moved into an apartment five blocks away.

A married couple not living together is hardly a new idea. There are books on the subject like “Living Happily Ever After — Separately” by Lise Stryker Stoessel and articles on Mamamia like ‘Why I love living apart from my partner’ by Kate Tate. But no matter how often you hear of a couple that sings the praises of having seperate space, it always seem strange.

Fox says their arrangement works for them, though she’s aware it probably wouldn’t work for most couples. By living apart, she believes she is better able to appreciate surprises and the little things her partner does for her. Things as simple as grabbing her a glass of water or handing her her phone when it’s just out of reach because these are things she regularly has to get up and do for herself.

Fox says she enjoys the luxury of time and space that having her own place affords her. Particularly because it means she can “regularly pull out all the stops” when she masturbates. “Plus, it gives me the opportunity to try out new things free from the anxiety that someone might come home early and walk in on me in an Elsa costume,” she explains.

Fox and her husband plan to have children in the future. Right now they say they plan to keep the two apartment arrangement when they eventually do.

“The idea, at this point, is to have him move into my apartment, and for his to be our mutual ‘safe house’ —a refuge to find a few minutes of solitude whenever we can get it (which might realistically be never),” she explains. She’s aware this is not a perfect plan and concedes that she and her husband are probably being “wildly naive because neither of us has any experience at all with kids”.

But she says she and her partner regularly talk openly and honestly to find solutions that work for both of them “no matter how strange it might seem to others.” Something, she says, they learned to do because of their separate living situation.

“Experimenting with your living arrangements requires a lot of money, time and energy (both emotional and physical),” Fox concedes. “But what better way to spend your effort if not in creating your own definition for a happy marriage?”

You can hear more about Fox and her husband’s unique living arrangement on the most recent episode of Glamours’s podcast Work Wives,