Forget Time Zones, Let's Switch Circadian Rhythms!

Having enough time to see and converse with my husband is difficult enough to manage being a timezone apart.  After all, I teach during the day and he goes to class in the evening.  I work Monday through Friday, and he normally works weekend hours.  By the time he gets out of class during the week at 9:30 Central Time, all good Eastern Standard Time teachers should be on their way to bed if not already asleep.  We had managed to find a schedule that worked well for us--we called each other when I drove to work in the morning (at 5:30 Cody's time), spoke when I left from work around 4pm my time, talked briefly before he went into class at six his time (which normally coincided with my dinner), and then finally when he got out of class.  Of course, this last phone call was more of a groggy Iloveyougoodnight on my part than an actual conversation.  On weekends, we spent as much time together in the town in which Cody lives as possible.  When he had to work, I enjoyed some rare me-time or prepared for teaching for the next week.

Recently, a new monkey-wrench was introduced into our already complicated, clock-watching marriage.  Cody was, thankfully, offered a full-time position at the facility in which he has worked for a few months as an  as-needed tech.  The one downside is that the position is strictly night shift.  Now our week-day phone conversations have been altered.  Cody takes his break when he knows I'll be on the road in the morning; we speak briefly before he has class and before I go to sleep.  Our conversations are shorter and more hurried.  We sometimes have to recap days of our lives rather than mere hours.

Weekends have also taken a turn.  Cody has every other weekend off, but on those weekends in which he does work, I spend most of the day alone.  He wakes up sometime between three and six in the afternoon.  To compensate for this, I wake up and we go out for breakfast when he gets off work in the morning.  Afterward, he goes to sleep.  It gives us some time to connect before those hours of quiet solitude.  I lie down with him until he goes to sleep, just like he does with me at night when he doesn't have to work.  Sundays provide a slightly different agenda since I have to leave by 3pm Central Time.  Cody does his best to stay up until one or later so we have that last bit of time together.  We both become upset when our time together draws to a close, and we find ourselves doing something that I hate--counting down the days until the weekend, which makes me feel as if I'm wishing away my life.

Dealing with a change from having a diurnal husband to a nocturnal one has been interesting.  As difficult as the transition has been, however, I appreciate that we are able to take that struggle in stride and adapt to a new situation.  Being able to handle circumstances like these give me confidence in the stability of our budding marriage (four months today!) and make me look forward even more to that time in which we will be able to live together once again.

How We Became LATers

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.