How to be Happy: Alannah Hill reveals why she ‘never’ lives with her boyfriend

Alannah Hill has been with her boyfriend for 10 years but there is one relationship habit she rejects — and she wants other women to follow suit.

When it comes to being happy, fashion designer Alannah Hill has one habit she believes is indispensable to contentment — and she would like to see other women adopt it as well.

“I don’t believe in living with boyfriends, husbands,” she told news.com.au podcast How to be Happy.

Ms Hill believes that couples should “live apart together”, which is why her boyfriend of 10 years stays over several nights a week but still has his own home.

“I think we all need a room of our own. So he has his own place which is seven doors up from me,” she said.

“Never, ever, ever should you move in or share your money with a man or a woman.”

RELATED: Why man left six figure job to be a PT

How to Be Happy is a news.com.au podcast.

The advice is just one of several unconventional pearls of wisdom Ms Hill, famous for her eponymous fashion label, which she left in 2013, dishes out in her in her new book, The Handbag of Happiness: And other misunderstandings, misdemeanours and misadventures.

In the latest episode of How to be Happy, Ms Hill tells host, journalist and former news.com.au editor-in-chief Kate de Brito why she decided to write an “anti-self help book”.

“All the self-help books, the platitudes and the you can do it, look at yourself in the morning every day and say that you’re beautiful — that doesn’t really work,” Ms Hill said.

Instead Ms Hill believes true happiness is scarce to come by and not something you can buy your way into.

RELATED: Turia Pitt’s one-word happiness trick

Alannah Hill believes most of us mistakenly believe we can buy our way into happiness.

“I thought I was a posh woman, I was running a successful business, I had a Mercedes, I was as posh as anything,” Ms Hill said.

The designer remembers falling in love with an expensive handbag while on a work trip in New York and how she “slammed” down her credit card to buy it, convincing herself it would be the item that makes her happy.

“After about 10 minutes I was back to being just me, because you take yourself wherever you go,” Ms Hill said.

“Happiness, we only get 10 minutes of it at a time, but I think the minutes and the seconds circling those ten minutes, they’re what we’re striving for.”

But in reality Ms Hill says we often don’t remember when we’re truly happy, because we are too busy enjoying ourselves. Picture: Serge Thomann

Given so many of us think material items are what will make us content, we forget that the pursuit of genuine happiness is a “thankless, long arduous task”, Hill said.

“I think we all have been conditioned to think we’ve got to be happy, we’ve got to be happy we’ve got to be happy, I don’t feel happy, I will be happy if I buy the handbag,” she said.

”You can’t be happy all the time, a lot of the time we’re just content or maybe a five out of 10.

“When we’re really happy we don’t even really remember it because we’re so busy being happy we forget about it.

“It’s only a few days later when we’re really, really depressed that we think, ‘I was happy three days ago and I didn’t even enjoy it, because I was too busy being happy’.”

Listen to the full interview with Alannah Hill on the third episode of the How To Be Happy podcast, available to stream now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify