Bringing it all back home

Over afternoon coffee in a Dublin pub - some of us don't need cafe bar licences to act all European - a friend suggested that Oprah Winfrey had the right idea. "She has been going out with Steadman Graham for nearly 20 years and for a long time they didn't live together," she said. "There must be something in it."

The couple don't have children together, of course. It probably wouldn't work if they did. But my friend was suggesting that living apart could be the key to the longevity of this still unmarried couple's relationship.

It's a controversial one, this. Separate bank accounts is one thing, separate houses quite another. While America's real first couple seem to be shacked up now, some people are genuinely concerned about Oprah's well-being, believing that marriage is the ultimate ambition for every right-thinking woman.

Caxton Opere, author of The 36 Well Kept Secrets of Successful Marriages and Divorce, believes Oprah needs to get married - and quick. "There is no way on earth that Oprah Winfrey comes close to having her needs met as a woman outside of a marriage to the right man. God has blessed Oprah with so much and she needs a good husband but she must have her fears."

Perhaps she does have marriage fears, but I like to think that clever Oprah had found the perfect way to remain herself without getting subsumed into the life of another person. Perhaps she realised that she got more done when life with Steadman was all midweek dates and weekend sleepovers.

Perhaps it felt good retaining some semblance of a private life, having quality time to herself whenever she needed it, or reading a book into the early hours without having to worry about disturbing her partner. She was Steadman's girlfriend when they were together, but she was herself, alone, when she closed her front door. Maybe they both needed that.

There is a lot of pressure on couples to become clones of each other. To think the same things. Like the same foods. Listen to the same music. Want the same holidays. I've always been too independent to go down that road, and have always been in relationships with people decidedly different from me, but I, too, am less passionately myself when I'm in a relationship.

I know I was more productive when I lived on my own. I remember being more motivated to do stuff, whether it was putting photographs into an album, hanging pictures on the walls or being creative, back when I had sole charge of my home. With more photographs in frames and more pieces of me on display on shelves, my life was much more firmly stamped on my surroundings back then. We've done loads with the house, but it's still a blank canvas, still a place you wouldn't necessarily recognise as the place where I live.

A magazine recently asked to do an at-home-with piece with me. When I'd stopped laughing at the surreality of the request, I realised there was hardly anything in the house that makes it uniquely mine or says much about my life. When I go to other couples' houses I am jealous of their ability to put themselves and their lives so very clearly on display. I've got a Polaroid of myself hidden behind some boxes of tea. What I want but can't seem to get enough energy to create is a photographic montage of my life displayed prominently on the wall.

It's no reflection on my boyfriend, who has no problem being himself despite living with someone as unpredictable and demanding as me. If anything he has become more himself since we have been together. I just have to accept that I am the kind of person who gets lazy about her life when she is sharing it with somebody else. I did it with my ex-husband, and in ways I think it led to our break-up. It worries me that I haven't learned anything from that. It worries me that I'm still neglecting to resolve this now.

I could have it all wrong, of course. Oprah and Steadman just might just not have loved each other enough to share a home back then, but I still think what they were doing with their separate mansions was respecting their individual needs with a view to being closer as a couple. Then again, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow lived on opposite sides of Central Park for years, and look what happened to them.

Separate houses probably isn't the answer. Maybe what we can do is take more time to remind ourselves who we were before we became one half of something else. And, in remembering, move closer to ourselves again.