Focus on couples with latitude

Retired couples - or those nearing retirement - who keep their own homes and separate finances and opt instead for sleepovers, shared holidays and other joint leisure time are becoming so commonplace that the Office of National Statistics is wondering how to deal with them and academics have begun studying them.

Living Apart Togethers - Lats- are obviously nothing new. But the phenomenon is now becoming more widespread, appealing to people who have their own families, do not want to complicate their inheritance arrangements, have the money to live separately and prefer a relationship that centres on enjoyable pursuits rather than domestic routine.

For many, this is not just a personal preference - teachers' widows and widowers, for instance, lose their spouse's pension if they remarry or cohabit.

It seems an old-fashioned rule and one which appears to take its starting point from Mr Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch, by punishing people who find love again. The state pension system is notoriously complex and quirky, but widows and widowers who remarry before they reach state pension age tend to lose the state pensions they inherited from their spouse - whereas if they wait until retirement they will retain them for good, regardless of their marital status.

Private schemes are kinder to the bereaved who remarry, says Andrew Powell, pension specialist at solicitor Hammonds: 'Modern occupational schemes don't tend to choke off the pension if the widow or widower remarries.' (You would still have to check the details of the individual scheme, of course).

Family lawyer Lisa Fabian Lustigman of solicitor Withers sees other implications for Lats who are divorced and either paying or receiving maintenance. 'A Lats arrangement is a lot more attractive to a woman who does not want to lose her maintenance,' she says. Divorcees of either sex can get maintenance from their ex-spouses in some circumstances - usually if they do not earn and have done little paid work in the past. This maintenance would disappear if they remarried - and a judge might be persuaded to end it if they cohabited permanently with someone who gave them financial support.

But the idea of Lats is so new that the family law judges who decide on maintenance orders are unlikely to end maintenance if such a relationship exists. However, that could change - especially since the payers of maintenance to people in Lats relationships might feel hard done by. 'It depends how mores go in this country,' says Fabian Lustigman. 'There probably was a time when cohabitation was not viewed as anything serious. But I can see that, if Lats takes off, a judge might say: "There is this relationship. What does it provide? Does it provide holidays? Daily living? Mortgage or rent?".'