Celeb couples who lived apart: Kourtney Kardashian & Travis Barker, Victoria & David Beckham, more

Gwyneth Paltrow explained: "We’ve just done it slowly," when the Wall Street Journal asked about her living situation with Brad Falchuk. The couple met on Glee in 2010 and dated for eight years before getting married, but it took them another year before they decided to move in together.

She explained to The Sunday Time Style Magazine that Brad spent three nights a week at his own house and four nights at her Los Angeles home. Not only was the arrangement approved by her intimacy teacher, but she also said her friend's liked the idea. "Oh, all my married friends say that the way we live sounds ideal and we shouldn’t change a thing," she revealed.

Kaley Cuoco revealed she had an "unconventional marriage" with her ex-husband Karl Cook, whom she divorced in 2022. One year after their wedding, she told E! News: "We have a very unconventional marriage, you know, we have different locations that we are at a lot. "We are not together every single day, and I think personally, it's important. It works well for us."

Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith surprised fans when they announced they had secretly split in 2016.  Although she insisted they had no plans to divorce, the Red Table Talk host said on the Today Show they had been living separately. "[We were] still trying to figure out between the two of us how to be in partnership, right, and in regards to how do we present that to people," she said.

Kourtney Kardashian's love story with Travis Barker began when they were neighbours, and their close proximity means they have been in no real rush to live together. After tying the knot in three separate ceremonies in 2022, the Kardashians star and the Blink-182 drummer continued to stay in separate houses but said they were looking at uniting their blended family under one roof.

"We want our kids to also feel really comfortable and they have both lived in their homes their whole lives for the most part, and they each have their rooms and we are a block away," mother-of-four Kourtney said on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast. "When the kids are at their dad's house, I stay at [Travis'] house and there's still nights when we'll stay at each other's houses in between." Kourtney shares Mason, Penelope and Reign with her ex Scott Disick, while she has recently welcomed a baby boy called Rocky with Travis. He is also a father to Landon and Alabama.

Former couple Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton lived in adjoining houses in London during their 13-year relationship, which ended in 2014. "I did not have room to house children, put it that way," the actress – who is mother to son Billy and daughter Nell – told The Times.

"I lived in a cottage. And I did always think, ‘God, wouldn’t it be ideal if Mister Right lived next door because then I’d have room to put the bedrooms in?’ So what was Tim’s house is basically the family house and I kept my bedroom and my kitchen."

While most couples had already been living apart at the beginning of their relationship, Claire Danes had the opposite with her husband Hugh Dancy. In the formative stages of our courtship, our relationship, our schedules were amazingly compatible. Lately we've not been so lucky, she told Piers Morgan, referring to the fact she was in a long-distance relationship she filmed Homeland in North Carolina and he worked on the play Venus In Fur in New York. 

She added: "We talk a lot, we text a lot, we send each other photos of our toes - dumb stuff. I think it's dangerous when you go into reporting mode, when you just kind of list the things you've done that day. Sometimes you just kind of have to act as if you were with each other and not say anything terribly significant."

Work was also the reason Robin Roberts and her wife Amber Laign live apart. While Amber lives in Connecticut full time, Robin spends five days a week at her apartment in Manhattan in order to be close to the GMA studios. In a chat with Ellen DeGeneres about her book, Everybody's Got Something, she wrote: "Amber and I have been a loving couple for almost ten years now, but we choose not to live together. Maybe that's why we've lasted almost a decade!"

Victoria and David Beckham now own three gorgeous homes together: their main London residence, a country bolthole in the Cotswolds and an apartment in Miami, but there was a short period of time when they weren't living in the same country. Addressing David's sudden move to Spain after joining Real Madrid, Victoria said on the Beckham Netflix docuseries it was "less than ideal" when he had around 12 hours notice. "I was like what do you mean we don't have anywhere to live, we don't have schools for the children, what do you mean? But the reality is that we moved to Spain."

The family were reunited after a short period of time, but they both admitted they struggled in the early stages of the move. "I had two children, Brooklyn and Romeo, and this is what nobody seemed to take into consideration, when I was getting criticised for not being in Spain from the beginning. "A kid has to go to school, I knew I couldn't move until I had a school for Brooklyn. I was doing Monday to Friday in London and then jumping on a plane to Spain," the fashion designer said.