Contemporary family life and intimate relationships are characterised by an increasing diversity. A common feature for several of the new family forms is not just a more open and flexible concept of the family, but also a significant spatial flexibility: a household no longer necessarily embraces what people with mutual commitments define as their family. By seizing on the multi-household nature of new family forms, research into the differentiation of family life can achieve a more unified analysis. But the aim of the article is also to demonstrate how new combinations of families and households can be analysed in terms of a response to changes in gender relations that have occurred in recent decades. The point of departure is two new family forms, typical of two different age cohorts, namely the LAT-relationships (Living Apart Together) of the young-elderly consisting of long term intimate relationships in which partners retain their own households, and divorced parents, often in early middle age, who experiment with forms of custody which mean that their children spend approximately the same amount of time in each household. In both cases it is possible to maintain that challenges to socially accepted perceptions of gender involve the transgression of socially accepted configurations of the family and household.