How’s this for a 21st century romance: Dr. Laura Minikel met Bent Balle on an airplane in 2000–she returning to the U.S. from practicing medicine in Africa, he escorting his parents on holiday from their native Denmark. Minikel and Balle chatted throughout the 11-hour flight and later met for coffee near her home in San Francisco before Balle returned to Denmark. They fell in love (through e-mail) and married in 2005 (in person), celebrating in four cities with friends and family. Are they happy? Yes. Are they together? Not exactly. Minikel, 37, remains in California to practice obstetrics and gynecology, while Balle, 44, an electronics technician, still lives in his homeland 5,500 miles away. She gets to work herculean hours at a job she loves; he gets to help raise his two teenage kids.
Unconventional? Yes. Unusual? Not exactly. Commuter marriages, in which couples live apart for long stretches, are multiplying. Their number jumped 30%, to 3.6 million, from 2000 to 2005, according to an analysis of census figures by Greg Guldner of the Center for the Study of Long-Distance Relationships, a Web-based clearinghouse for research in this nascent field. While military deployments, migratory jobs and economic need have long forced couples around the world to live apart, in America today, it is more often the woman’s career that drives the separation. Technologies like instant messaging and Skype make the parting easier by facilitating virtual pillow talk that keeps couples in touch.
Living apart upends traditional notions of marriage, but researchers are beginning to suspect that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Studies show divorce in commuter marriages is no more frequent than in those where the couple is under the same roof. A large Rand Corp. study published last spring based on military personnel found that the longer the deployments, the higher the chance the marriage would stay together–in part because soldiers and their spouses cling to idealized memories of each other during their separations.
To couples who can’t bear to spend even a night apart, the advantages of commuter marriages are perhaps unfathomable. But to people like Wendy Wu, 34, they’re crystal clear. Wu, a litigator for New York City-based firm Proskauer Rose, was married in April 2006. As an associate, she works ungodly hours but feels little guilt about leaving her new husband waiting at home alone–because said husband is three time zones away, in Los Angeles, where he works for the police department. Wu has been working out of the L.A. office of her firm, and when she’s back in New York, he keeps busy with triathlons and buddies. “It may not work for every couple, but it works for us,” says Wu.
Not to mention for their employers. The companies that employ these commuting couples often get the best end of the deal: employees are married and thus thought to be more stable but are wedded as well to their jobs–perhaps especially so, given the physical absence of a spouse. Sheila Gleason, 49, met Jay Banerjee, 56, while both worked as banking executives in Singapore. He soon relocated to Germany, then to Belgium. She eventually accepted a big job in London. “During the week we would work ridiculous hours, so it was easy to devote weekends to each other and nothing else,” she says. Their commuting romance lasted 10 years, until they married in 2004 and moved together to New York City.
Men have worked in transient jobs since the beginning of time–as soldiers, truck drivers, traveling Bible salesmen–leaving the wife and kids home to hold down the fort or moving the entire family from town to town. But with today’s preponderance of dual-career couples–80% of the labor force–it is just as often the woman’s job that separates the partners. Stephanie Coontz of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., a historian of marriage, argues that this represents a newly egalitarian attitude toward marital roles. “There’s no longer the assumption that the woman immediately puts her career on hold once she gets married,” says Coontz. “It’s part of an avalanche of evidence that marriage is being reconstructed for the first time in history as a marriage of equals.”
Even the arrival of kids doesn’t necessarily end the arrangement. The census counts 817,000 children under 18 who have married parents living apart for reasons other than marital discord. For these couples, it can mean a hectic and stressed-out lifestyle akin to single parenting for one spouse and an achingly lonely and guilt-ridden one for the other. Every Monday, Jaime Cangas, 40, kisses his wife Karen, 36, goodbye as she leaves their Plano, Texas, home and heads toward the airport. As a consultant for Accenture, she will be gone until late Thursday night, working with clients in faraway cities. Jaime, who sells and markets security software, will drop off their children Caroline, 7, at school and Mitchell, 3, at day care. He shops for groceries during his lunch break, then picks them both up at 6. When they get home, the kids blow kisses at Mommy through the webcam.
Long-distance romances can draw out for years. But Laura Stafford, a professor of interpersonal communication at Ohio State University, says that’s partly because the distance can retard the development of the relationship, extending the honeymoon period and delaying the inevitable friction of integrating lives. “We all do a certain amount of impression management” at the beginning of a romance, says Stafford. “But in a long-distance relationship, you may always have your makeup on. You avoid conflict no matter what.”
Experts say the rockiest phase of the commuter marriage often comes with the longed-for permanent reunion. Tom McConnell, 62, and his wife Joy, 55, lived apart when Tom was laid off from his job as an insurance executive in 1993 and found a similar position in Boston–115 miles away from their home in Simsbury, Conn., a commute too grueling to make daily. When Tom finally moved back 10 years later, Joy had “gotten used to being without him, to having my own life,” she says. How long did it take to readjust? “Six months to a year,” says Joy. “At least.”
It may be some time before Minikel and Balle start that process. They had planned on her moving to Denmark to take advantage of a government program designed to draw much needed doctors. But last July, Minikel was promoted at her U.S. hospital to the coveted post of residency director. So in October, Balle will visit for five weeks–the longest stretch they’ve ever spent together. She hopes he’ll eventually move to the Bay Area. For now, they’re keeping their passports handy.
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