MARRIED BUT LIVING FAR APART
Couples today find ways to bridge the distance even more
Ian Derrer and Daniel James were married in August 2019 in the garden room of a restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with each of their 19 guests reading aloud lyrics to the couple’s favorite Stephen Sondheim love songs. After staying in Santa Fe for a weeklong honeymoon, the couple drove to Dallas, where Derrer, 45, lives. The next day, James, 33, left for Houston, where he lives. Through four years of dating and seven months of marriage, the couple have never lived together. Most Fridays, one of them makes the 244-mile drive between the Texas cities. They live separately for their careers — both work in opera administration — and would be reluctant to ask the other to give up a job he loves.
Long-distance marriages are not uncommon. But for some, the coronavirus has thrown a wrench into their lives. Many are no longer willing to get on a plane, which for one couple means they are not sure when they will see each other again. For another pair, visits now involve a 13-hour car trip. Derrer and James are actually living in the same place for the first time, thanks to their jobs going remote during the crisis.
Some couples had always planned for their separation to be short-lived, so they are waiting out the time by increasing their hours on FaceTime. Others are finding that the crisis has cast a shadow over an arrangement they have maintained for a decade or more.
Danielle J. Lindemann, a sociologist and the author of “Commuter Spouses: New Families in a Changing World,” said that most of the 97 couples she interviewed for her 2019 book thought the arrangement was necessary to keep the momentum going in their careers. Those who study these couples, who are part of a group known as LATs (living apart together), agree that their numbers are on the rise, though figures are hard to come by, according to Lindemann.
Most of the couples Lindemann spoke with were highly educated. But their specialized training, she said, “shrank their universe of available job choices, as they saw it, rather than expanding it, as we might expect.”
When Jimson Mullakary, 31, and Dr. Roshini Mullakary,
29, were dating, they used to joke that they were in a longdistance relationship because he was in Manhattan, where he works as an accountant, and she was a medical resident on Long Island. They now live 1,137 miles apart. When Roshini Mullakary was applying for fellowships, she found only a handful of programs in the New York City area in her specialty, allergy and immunology. Jimson Mullakary encouraged her to apply anywhere that she thought would give her the best experience.
“He’d say, ‘Whatever happens, we’ll figure it out together,’ ” she said. He proposed in summer 2018 on a balcony overlooking the ocean on the Greek island of Santorini, and a few weeks later she moved to Rochester, Minnesota, to be a fellow at the Mayo Clinic. They were married last September.
To bridge the distance between them, they send each other handwritten letters once a week and connect via FaceTime from their respective apartments while catching up on work, leaving it on for hours and talking intermittently. Every few weeks one flies in for a weekend visit.
Many couples see living apart as a short-term solution to accommodate their careers, but sometimes it becomes a long-term arrangement. Patrick Donnelly, 50, and Alexandra Mascolo-David, 58, lived together in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, when they married in 2000, but he moved away a year later for graduate school and she stayed. In the 19 years since, Donnelly’s career in arts administration has taken him from