For most of the modern era, adulthood came with a blueprint. You left home, built a career, found a partner, and eventually established a home of your own. The principle of a settled life had a concrete centre. One skyline. One set of routines. Family, friendships, and romantic life tended to gather around the same front door.
While that model still works beautifully for many people, another way of living has become increasingly attractive: a life distributed across several places, each serving different purposes and accommodating different parts of a person’s identity.
This is the world of the Betweeners
Elite Traveler has used the term to describe people who maintain lives across multiple homes and places: weekdays in London and weekends in the country, part of the year in Europe and part in the US, a family home alongside a city apartment, or regular returns to a place where long standing friends and family remain. The significance is larger than travel. These are people building continuity across places, rather than choosing a single location to function as home.
Several developments have made this possible. Work is one. For generations, where you worked placed a powerful limit on where you could live. Remote and hybrid working have loosened that relationship. Digital infrastructure allows professional life to continue across considerable distances, giving some people greater freedom to decide where they spend their time.
Technology has also changed the social cost of distance. A person can live for months in another country while remaining present in professional networks, family dynamics, friendships, and social circles. Physical distance remains significant, but it no longer automatically means disconnection.
Wealth expands the possibilities even further. For those with the resources to do so, residence, education, investment, taxation, climate, family ties, and quality of life can all be considered across borders. Henley & Partners projected 142,000 international millionaire relocations in 2025, illustrating the scale of global mobility among the affluent.
Property has consequently acquired a different role. A second home can be much more than a retreat. It can become a working base, a place for children to spend part of the year, a gathering point for family and friends, or simply another setting in which a person’s life unfolds. This phenomenon is often described as multilocal living: maintaining meaningful lives across two or more residences for reasons including work, family, relationships, leisure, and quality of life. And it’s important to remember that having several bases doesn’t necessarily mean having fewer roots. A person can be deeply attached to each of the places that make up their life.
What does this mean for modern dating?
Romantic relationships have traditionally been closely connected to domestic life. Dating progresses towards sharing a home, and the shared home becomes one of the clearest physical expressions of commitment. For people whose lives have several geographical centres, that sequence doesn’t always describe the relationship they want.
There’s already a recognised model for this: Living Apart Together, or LAT relationships, in which committed couples maintain separate homes. Research into LAT relationships has found that autonomy, established careers, children, previous relationships, and personal preference can all play a role in couples choosing to live apart.
For a Betweener, and for the person drawn to dating one, the implications are particularly interesting. Instead of two people giving up their separate worlds to create one, they can build something that belongs to both of them: a relationship with its own rhythms, rituals, and sense of belonging. Neither person has to give up the places, relationships, or routines that make them who they are.
Modern love and the freedom to live differently
For internationally mobile singles, successful professionals, parents, and people with established homes and communities in different places, compatibility can involve geography as much as personality.
At Ivy Relations, we understand that a meaningful relationship doesn’t have to follow one prescribed model. For some people, that means building a home together. For others, it might mean maintaining a few, creating a relationship that moves naturally between several time zones.
Sometimes, what two people create together is neither yours nor mine, but something in between. Because modern love doesn’t always ask us to choose between independence and intimacy. The right match allows both to flourish.
Words by Katy Pannocchia