Whether due to the current job market, more rigorous requirements for getting into and paying for college, or a combination of these factors, more married couples are living separately without any marital problem being the cause. In fact, according to the US Census Bureau, an estimated 3.2 million American couples are currently living separately—a whopping 26 percent increase since 1999. While I cannot vouch for the reasons of the other 3,199,999 couples, I can give a glimpse into the life of one no-longer-cohabitating married couple—my husband, Cody, and I. Before regaling invisible readers with details of the weekend-to-weekend lives we lead, however, an introductory entry is necessary.
Cody and I moved in together our junior year of our undergraduate studies at Purdue University after becoming engaged. We lived with another Purdue student—which I don’t recommend to beginning cohabitators as this venture did not work well at all—and grew into a couple conscious of one another’s habits and pet peeves. Cody became easily agitated with me because I had been coddled as a young adult still living at home and had only a rudimentary knowledge of cooking, cleaning, and laundry through living in the dorms for two years. I became irked with his persistence that laundry (my designated chore) be done every other day; I didn’t realize that he had so few items of clothing for work and that he had to do laundry that often.
Over the course of what remained of our time at Purdue, we grew into a functioning couple who were able to branch out into our own apartment, to begin working as a unit to split up chores, and to perform tasks as well any well-oiled married machine. Our plan was to move wherever Cody got into graduate school for psychology and have me start teaching nearby. After that year of cohabitating bliss, we were going to be married on June 25, 2011 and have an already-established home in which to return after the honeymoon. Unfortunately, fate had other ideas for us.
Cody was accepted into Valparaiso University’s Clinical Mental Health Counseling program. I was offered a job by one school thanks to the state of the job market in English education (and, quite honestly, teaching in general) at a rural school located a whopping two and a half hours away from Cody. We had an enormous decision to make: did I give up a job in my field in order to live with my fiancé, or did we live apart for a year in the hope that I would find a job near Valparaiso the following school year? Given the first paragraph of this entry, we obviously chose the former.
The first year living apart was difficult. I moved back in with my parents. They live forty-five minutes away from my school, which is located in such a rural area that finding an apartment complex within a half hour is an impossibility. Adjusting to life under my parents’ roof was as difficult for me as living completely alone was for Cody. He took custody of our only child, an American chinchilla rabbit named Thorin, in order to give him some company. We saw each other on weekends, and at first we were so stressed and frustrated at being apart that we fought constantly. After a couple of months we were finally able to unwind and adjust enough to realize that those few hours we spend in each other’s physical presence a week are too precious to waste by complaining and arguing.
We are now in our second year of being LATers (a married couple who Lives Apart Together). Due to the retirement of my department head, I was offered classes that I couldn’t give up in order to look for a job that may or may not be as rewarding. Aside from that fact, Cody only has another year in his Master’s before he moves on (Lord knows where) to finish his Ph.D. We are in limbo at the moment and are waiting to figure out where we are supposed to be for the next chapter in our lives. In the meantime, we are still living separately and hoping to one day have lives that coincide with one another’s career goals.
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