I’m wondering what it’s like to be a long term couple that doesn’t cohabitate. What have your experiences been?
What are the challenges? How have you handled them?
What are the advantages?
What made you decide to form a non-cohabitating couple?
My husband and I dated for a few years before we got married. We each had a house and two preteen/teenaged children. We knew that getting married would be a Big Hairy Deal as far as combining the two, so we took our time and laid a lot of groundwork before my kids and I moved in out here. We also had to extensively remodel this house to take it from a 3 br/2 bath to a 5 br/4 bath.
We went ahead and got married about 10 months prior to the actual moving-in time.
So, it was more like a phase of the relationship rather than a long-term thing.
Challenges were mainly logistic in nature, such as “should we eat over here or over there?”. Another thing we did was to put the same set of rules in place at each home before we all lived in the combined home. It was a bit of a challenge coming up with that set of rules.
My husband and I didn’t live together before we were married. I never thought of it as being a challenge. After all, we had never lived together before. The challenge was coming home after the honeymoon to a place that was new to both of us and learning to live together.
The choice to wait to live together (and have sex) was due to religion. We are both atheists now, so we wouldn’t do it that way again.
My wife leaves for work on Monday morning and returns Thursday night. This has been the case for about 25 years. She does something for the government. She cannot say what and I am expected not to ask. It is a most delightful lifestyle. I just love it.
janeslogin - that sounds about perfect! I guess you don’t have kids though. And, if Hollywood is to be believed, you’ll get quite the surprise one of these days 
Our relationship has run into a slight obstacle: Kelly Hu is not aware that we are a couple. But I plan on informing her of this if we ever meet.
We’ve been together for 6 years and we don’t really live together. But we do sleep in the same bed every night. There are no drawbacks I can think of - each of us having our own space, stuff, and to some degree, life, eliminates a ton of potential sources of conflict.