Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin parted ways in 2014, but there has been no rush by the rose quartz vagina egg-flogging star to move another man into her Hollywood home full time. Despite marrying TV producer Brad Falchuk last September, Gwyneth says he lives there sporadically. He comes and he goes, as it were.

They’re both incredibly content, she insists, mentioning their respective teenage children’s feelings as a reason to stay independent. But it’s Gwyneth’s aside on the importance of “maintaining polarity” in a relationship that I find much more delicious. Well, I would, because I think it’s true, having merrily waved off my other half four days ago, back to his own property to maintain his own polar existence. Or, more accurately, his North Polar existence, because his idea of cosy living involves windows ajar, radiators off and icicles forming on nostrils.

It’s been this way for a couple of years. I don’t want to change it. On days apart, we speak constantly via WhatsApp. If I need him, he’ll appear – say, if a big spider is loose in the house, or if very bad news has happened. He is cherished entirely, but I can cherish him 13 miles away. On our days apart, I emotionally recalibrate. (Sorry, went a bit Gwynnie there.) I leave self-tan silhouettes on the bed sheets and a trail of forgotten cups of Earl Grey in every room. I eat oatcakes, harissa and hummus with pickled onions for dinner if I’m not really hungry, play tinny 90s R&B through my iPhone, stack the dishwasher illogically so the glasses look gritty, and indulge many other unique personality bolt-ons that my ex-husband feasibly still talks about in a PTSD support group.

Some of us – perhaps all of us – are not really meant to cohabit full time. Four days a week together is perfect. All human life is there: the chat, the chores, the waking ups, the teeth brushings and the joint socialising. But then for three days there is silence. And I love silence. Days and days of silence, aside from the sound of a Kenneth Williams audiobook and the cat scrunch-washing its behind. Yes, I love to love, and to be in love, but I really love to be physically alone.

Of course, poor old Gwynnie infuriated the world again by raising her sage concerns about modern love. Everyone has only just got over her “conscious uncoupling”, whereby the actress foolishly suggested divorce could perhaps be gentle. Divorce need not, she seemed to feel, always involve you and your soulmate descending into full mental collapse, communicating via lawyers or splitting a Sofa Workshop three-piece suite with a chainsaw to make a petty point about “equal halves”. You could love your way through divorce. And now, here she is, saying you can live separate lives during love.

There were those who complained. “You sit on a throne of lies!” they said, but these were perhaps the grumpy cohabiters who’ve not had a good night’s sleep since 1995 because their partner makes a sound like a Black & Decker belt sander for six hours every night. Or people who’d love to find their bathroom unstained and sweet-smelling on every visit. Perhaps they were people who begin sentences like, “Chernobyl? Yes, I’d love to watch that, but my other half doesn’t like disaster shows…”, before trailing off into an introspective abyss, accepting that somewhere along the way they have discarded the fundamentals of who they are and what they enjoy, in order to cheapen household bills, gain better living conditions and, of course, greater intimacy, which weirdly, with time, has become less intimacy with a thick underbelly of resentment.

I accept that “living apart together” could be the ultimate in having your cake and eating it. The conventional wisdom has always been that if you want commitment and security from your partner, then you must pay the price of never sleeping apart, ever, and maintaining a laser-eyed scrutiny of each other’s schedules. “A man is only as faithful as his opportunities,” I was told many times growing up. But if cohabiting actually stopped anyone cheating, then surely Premier Inn would go into liquidation tomorrow. And while most infidelity is about a short-lived urge for strangeness, the irony is, when you live part-time apart, you both carry on being the other one’s sexy, mysterious thing for much longer.

Not that Gwyneth Paltrow has to worry about this kind of thing – look at her, for God’s sake. Her skin seems to radiate gold. Personally, I benefit from three days per week out of service, to focus on the arduous “painting of the Forth Bridge”-style maintenance that keeps me, in my 40s, on just the right side of shaggable. My dream is to one day buy a castle where the two of us could eventually cohabit: separate wings, several bathrooms, and potentially a cottage several acres away for when one of us becomes too annoying.

But for now, I stand with Gwyneth and the great philosopher Sting. It is utterly unorthodox, yes, but if you love someone, set them free.