‘I love being on my own’: At 81, Helen Mirren says space is key to her marriage – this is how much is healthy

Dame Helen Mirren has been married for an impressive 29 years. Her secret? ‘Spending a lot of time apart,’ she once said. Joking, of course. And yet… Not entirely.

‘I love having him by my side when he is by my side,’ she elaborated. But also: ‘I love being on my own when I’m on my own. And he allows that. And likewise, I allow him,’ she added.

She’s not talking about romantic licence, if you were wondering. ‘If I wasn’t by his side and someone else was, I’d be rather pissed off about that,’ she clarified.

The science supporting ‘me time’

She’s not alone. In 2019, a study found that 40% of those surveyed who worked away from home were extremely happy in their relationships, compared with just 30% of couples who were always together.

There was an important proviso, though. Five days a month appeared to be the optimum length of absence. Any shorter, or longer, and contentment levels seemed to fall.

Relationship researcher Eli J. Finkel drew a direct line between high divorce rates and a relationship dynamic in which couples looked to their spouses to fulfil almost all their psychological needs (be it best friend, lover, co-parent, career adviser, therapist).

‘In the past, you married someone who helped you meet your basic needs… Now people are looking to their spouses to help them discover who they are, and to achieve the best version of themselves,’ he explained. It’s a lot of pressure. In fact, he described it as The Suffocation Model of Marriage.

As the Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel says: ‘We tend to think that relational disconnects happen as a result of a lack of closeness, but perhaps the way we construct closeness reduces the freedom and autonomy needed for desire. When intimacy collapses into fusion, it is not a lack of closeness but too much closeness that impedes desire. No wonder they call it “drifting apart” –we all need a little space.’

Cultivating a life outside of your partner creates a healthy sense of mystery. It allows you to see your partner as a complete, independent individual, which is a powerful driver of long-term romantic and physical attraction.

How it works in practice

Helen and her husband, film director and producer Taylor Hackford, both have jobs that take them away, on location, regularly. So much so, in fact, she’s said that during the pandemic: ‘We realised that, yes, we’d been together for 30 years, but to count the years we’d actually been in the same house together was probably a quarter of that time.’

What happens when you retire, though? Or if you don’t have a job that requires travel? Well, don’t panic. A 2020 paper analysed three separate studies and suggested that being able to manage relationship challenges constructively is linked to having a careful balance of connection to and autonomy from your partner. You need to feel close, but also be your own person, in other words. You don’t have to spend time on different continents or even counties to re-inject that sense of autonomy within a marriage.

Pursuing separate passions can spark desire when you come back together, suggests Esther, even if it’s only a weekly round of golf: ‘When we see our partner in their flow state, it’s as if this person who is so known to us, is momentarily once again somewhat elusive. And in this space between “me” and “the other” lies the erotic élan – that movement toward the other. Because sometimes, as Marcel Proust said, “mystery is not about travelling to new places but about looking with new eyes.”’