TOGETHER, APART

To take on a blended family, a person has to be organised, adaptable and happy to compromise. However, not all cope with the extra stress of adding a partner’s children to their load – and choose to avoid it.

A Wellington manager moved in with her partner for 10 months, before moving back to their separate abodes. With five children between them in “a massive house that was always a disorganised shambles’’, she told Your Weekend: “The kids and [my partner] were quite happy and settled, but I found it extremely overwhelming. I was used to having order in my life.

“I felt that, when we lived together, everything fell to me to organise and arrange the running of the home, and all five children needed me, and there was not enough of me to go around. I was just not laidback enough for it all.’’

While the couple continue to be in a relationship and may live together once the kids leave their respective homes, she says the decision to live apart was the right one for them: “If we had not gone back to separate homes, our relationship would not have survived.”