‘Really good flatmate’: what happens when the love is gone but it costs too much to move out?

Financial pressures can make separation for a cohabiting couple financially impossible. Illustration: Victoria HartView image in fullscreenFinancial pressures can make separation for a cohabiting couple financially impossible. Illustration: Victoria Hart‘Really good flatmate’: what happens when the love is gone but it costs too much to move out?

The cost of living is putting pressure on relationships – and preventing some couples from properly splitting up Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads The separate sleeping arrangement started seven years before the marriage finished. When Mary-Ann’s* hot flushes turned the bed into a furnace, her husband, Bill, moved into another bedroom. For the next two years there was some travel between the bedrooms for the purposes of intimacy.

Then that stopped too.The distance grew after each argument; they took separate holidays and, when Bill inherited money, he separated it from their pooled finances. Mary-Ann says it was clear Bill’s mind was no longer in the marriage – he was what is termed “quiet quitting”.

But she acknowledges she was drifting away too, focused on a demanding new job.“I’ve been really supportive with cooking and cleaning since you got this job,” Bill told her one day.“Yeah, you’ve been a really good flatmate,” his wife replied.

My husband and I are separating – but he doesn’t want anyone to knowRead moreBy late 2025, the couple’s blended family was still living under one roof but the relationship was over. Mary-Ann suggested she move out of the family home while it was being prepared for sale but that if she was paying rent somewhere, he should cover the mortgage. “Nope, no, no, no, I’m not going to do that,” she recalls him saying.

“You have to pay half the mortgage until it’s all done.”For Mary-Ann that was financially impossible. For the next five months, the couple stayed under the same roof.

“I was annoyed but I just wanted to take the path of least resistance,” she says.Mary-Ann and Bill are among a growing number of couples forced to stay under the same roof even after deciding to separate because neither can afford to establish a second household, a phenomenon called “separation under the same roof” (SUSR).While data on SUSR is limited – and virtually nonexistent for de facto couples – the proportion of divorcing couples who report remaining under the same roof after separation has risen steadily, from 15% in 2020–2021 to 19% in 2024–2025, according to the federal circuit and family court of Australia divorce application data.

Elisabeth Shaw, a clinical psychologist and CEO of Relationships Australia New South Wales, says while there are a range of reasons couples take time to physically separate, the cost of living is “front and centre”. “But there are two parts to it – one is affordability, the other is the lack of housing stock.”Those two factors create a vortex of misery for couples struggling in their relationships.

Nearly a third of Australians report that the cost of living is putting pressure on their relationship, according to Relationships Australia research. It is the number one relationship pressure, the research says. But the catch-22: financial pressures can also make separation financially impossible.

‘Stressed but stuck’While Australia’s divorce rate is the lowest in decades, research presented last year found that rapid house price growth might be locking people into marriages. “Put simply, divorce is a decision that brings with it significant costs,” University of Sydney economists Professor Stephen Whelan and Dr Luke Hartigan observed.“The value of housing has an impact on a number of family decisions including on whether people have children or not and on whether they stay together or separate,” Hartigan explains.

“When you have higher house prices it’s more costly to run two households so you’re more likely to stay in one household.”Shaw outlines the story of “Robert” and “Jane”, who sought counselling after eight months living under the same roof while they tried to agree about a property settlement and parenting arrangements. Robert had moved into his teenage son’s bedroom but the situation was untenable: the couple fought and Jane spent much of the time crying.

“They didn’t have enough money to buy two homes and even two rental properties was a stretch,” Shaw says. “Both were increasingly stressed but were stuck.”Another separated couple had spent a year in a state of conflict under one roof.

The children were drawn into the combat and distressed; both parents tried to get them on side. Neither would agree to find somewhere else to live and move out. “Their financial picture looked pretty bleak and some of their stuckness was driven by fear of poverty,” Shaw says.

In some cases, she adds, couples decide it’s better to stay in the same house for the sake of the children or until the house is put on the market. “What we find is that it tends to be short-lived, because very few couples, in the scheme of things, ar