Struggling to stay connected to your spouse? Forget separate bedrooms. Try separate houses.
A Brooklyn woman believes the secret to her happy marriage is living apart from her Manhattan-based husband.
Bianca Turetsky, 43, and Dr. Peter Bach, 58, tied the knot in September 2021 and subsequently surprised friends and family by bucking convention by maintaining their separate residences.
Turetsky, a best-selling author, was content living with her rescue cat, Cleo, in an apartment she had owned for a decade.
Meanwhile, Bach was similarly happy to stay living in the home he shared with his teenage son.
“Saying ‘I do’ for the first time at age 42 meant having my own life built already,” Turetsky explained in an essay for Today.
“Following the traditional playbook wasn’t going to make anyone happy. Why did we have to live by old conventions? Why couldn’t we make it up as we went along? Who says what a good marriage should look like?”
Turetsky says she initially realized she wouldn’t be able to share a home with Bach upon learning that his son was allergic to cats.
However, the teen has since moved away for college, but the couple has continued to live separately, saying the situation works perfectly for them.
Turetsky and Bach spend several nights of the week together at each other’s places before returning to their respective residences to relish their own space.
“Most people we tell about our unusual living situation move pretty quickly from surprise to curiosity to, in some cases, a little envy,” the author stated.
The author says she has the 38-minute commute to her hubby’s home down to a fine art and the arrangement has meant they don’t take one another’s company for granted.
“We’ve been together for almost six years now and yet a mundane weekday evening still feels like a date,” Turtesky declared.
While Bach is now looking for a residence slightly closer to his wife’s Brooklyn abode to whittle down the travel time, the pair have no plans to live together permanently as their second wedding anniversary approaches.
“I think this living arrangement is the secret to our happiness,” Turetsky enthused. “It’s become a cliche that the secret to a happy marriage is separate bathrooms. We’ve settled on separate boroughs.
“This is not what I expected marriage to look like,” she added. “It’s so much better.”
