"I'm in a Long Distance Marriage and I Love It"

Christine* is a 23-year-old living in Houston, Texas. Her husband of seven months, though, lives three hours away in San Marcos. She spoke with Cosmopolitan.com about what it's like to live apart from your new husband during the first year of marriage.​

I married my high school sweetheart right after graduating from college. We started dating when I was a senior in high school and he was a freshman in college. We're from the same hometown near Houston and were friends before he left for college, and went on a few dates too, but didn't start officially dating until after he left. 

There was definitely concern about starting a relationship apart — not concerns about cheating, just concerns about how often we would see each other. That first semester of our relationship, we probably saw each other every two or three weeks and we'd spend the whole weekend together. He usually came to visit me. I wasn't really allowed to visit him since I was still in high school. Neither of us ever thought it wouldn't work, but he has told me (since then) that I was really insecure in those first few months. Every time we'd talk or hang out, I'd need him to reassure me, and tell me how he felt about me. He was in college! I was like oh he's so much cooler than me.

Things got a lot easier after I graduated and moved to a city about half an hour from where he was living for college. It was still distance, technically, but it wasn't bad at all. We saw each other almost every weekend, and we alternated who visited who each time. It was honestly just easier to study and focus without him there every day. And then every weekend when we'd visit, we would have this great sex. 

We got engaged on New Year's Eve my junior year of college, at the very beginning of 2014. And then a few months later, in August of that year, we got an apartment together before I started my last year of school. So it was the first time we were living together, and also the first time we were even living in the same city. We'd always kept our separate apartments in the summer, so we didn't really live in the same place while school was out. Since we'd been dating for four years, and were engaged and planning our wedding, we weren't really worried about moving in together.

Before we moved in, I definitely thought we would cook a lot and exercise together and do all these things together, but the exercise thing never happened. We spent a lot of time together, but it wasn't really cooking, it was like, "let's order pizza!" My expectation was sort of that we'd have a dining room table and sit and talk every night, but I forgot that work and school happens, so when we got home neither of us wanted to sit down and talk or cook. We also both like to be alone a lot. We'd spend a lot of time in the same room but not talking, or he'd be watching something on TV that I didn't want to watch and would go in the other room. Like, we'd be together but not hanging out. I remember one day we were sitting on the couch together, and hadn't said a word to each other in hours, and I was like, "Is it really lame that we're sitting here not talking?" And he was like, "No, we just like being alone but don't have a lot of space to do it!"

We got married a few days after my graduation, and then went on our honeymoon right after. We came back to our apartment for a couple of months and lived there together for the rest of the summer, before our lease was up. I don't know how to explain it, but everything was suddenly better. Like it wasn't bad before the wedding at all, but things just got so much better and less stressful with the wedding over. It was a really happy time, I loved it. People talk about the honeymoon phase, and it's real, but I used to think of it as this thing where you're super happy and then all of a sudden you're not. There's not really a drop off, though. We're still really happy, and we've been married for almost a year now. 

That summer living together after our wedding, we were sort of preparing for the possibility of living apart again. We both knew we had certain plans — I was applying to graduate schools around Texas, and he knew he had to stay in San Marcos to finish up a couple more of his own classes, and he had a job and a band there that he couldn't leave. He's a musician, and his bandmates all live there and their music and work is really important to him. And he knew that there was a possibility I would get into a program in a different city.

As it turned out, I got into a school in Houston. So when I got in, it was bittersweet. He was happy for me but we were sad to go back to living apart. I never could've made him move to Houston with me — it would've felt like I was breaking his soul. We were back where we were when we first started dating, especially since I'd be moving back with my parents to save money during grad school. When it came time for us to drop off the keys and leave the first apartment we shared for the last time, I cried for like an hour. It was like, "Oh I'm going to be visiting him at his house, but I don't really have a home. 

It's really not so bad, though. I see him three or four days a week, even though we live about three hours apart, and when we see each other it's almost like being on vacation, because we can forget about all of our other stresses. It's still super exciting to see him and be married to him. It does kind of feeling like we're dating again. Like we're married, but we don't have all those technical married people things like joint checking or life insurance plans or whatever. It's like we're married, but on hold. We're still really happy and I love seeing him. But that traditional marriage of like, move in together, set up your house and bank accounts — we haven't done those things. And we got all these gifts for our wedding, but I don't feel right using them without him so they're in storage for now. We'll take those out when we do move in together later this year, in August. That's our plan. 

I do feel like living apart for this first year takes some of the stress away, though. I have so much going on with grad school, and he's really busy with classes and work and his band, it's nice to be able to focus on our own lives and still get to see each other and be married. I'm glad we got married when we did — I wouldn't have put it off just so we could be married when we were able to live together again. Also, when I go visit him, we have this really great married people sex. I don't know how to explain it, but the sex got so much better after we were married. It was like I sort of loosened up a bit or something.

We definitely have to work at it, but our relationship is really strong. We're perfect for each other. We're best friends, but also we're married. I don't know if I'd recommend a long-distance marriage to everyone. I could see how this would squash someone else's relationship. But we'd been doing distance for so long. We're very much individual people, and are very comfortable being on our own. I'm not half of a person when I'm not with him, and he isn't either. We're just two really great people together.​

​*Name has been changed.

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