After months of job hunting, my husband had finally received a great offer, one that even came with a higher salary and title bump.
The catch is that the role was based in Spartanburg, South Carolina, about seven hours from where we’d lived in Washington, DC, for the past decade.
Relocating together was never on the table. I’ve loved living in the city since I moved there to attend grad school. I couldn’t really see myself — or our nontraditional family with our six rescue pets — living anywhere else.
However, my husband needed work, and he hadn’t found any viable jobs in our area for months. This wasn’t ideal, but we were desperate, and he was excited about the company.
So, we planned for him to move to South Carolina while I stayed in DC. We figured this arrangement would be somewhat temporary anyway.
Although his new position was office-based, we both felt confident that a more hybrid arrangement could be worked out once he had established himself.
I’ve always been very independent and outgoing, and I thought that maybe a little space and more chances to miss each other might strengthen our marriage. I also told myself that maybe living separately for a bit could be fun. I was wrong.
After he moved, our plans quickly fell apart
To prepare for my husband’s move, we had decided to buy a single-story house with a sprawling backyard near his job in South Carolina.
It was an old fixer-upper that needed a lot of work, but the mortgage payment was cheaper than the rentals we were looking at. Plus, since I worked mostly remotely, we figured I could easily bring the dogs with me to stay there and just hire a cat sitter back in DC whenever I came to visit.
Only a few months after his move, though, our plans began to fall apart. For starters, we’d been too optimistic about his work arrangement: His new company was vehemently opposed to any remote work, so we saw each other only on weekends and holidays.
Visiting him also wasn’t as feasible as we’d expected. Because he had taken our shared car to South Carolina, it was too expensive for me to fly and pay to board our three dogs.
Instead, my husband would drive through the night to DC nearly every Friday and head back to Spartanburg every Sunday afternoon.
The 14-hour round trips took a toll on him, so sometimes we would skip our weekend visits to give him a break from the road.
Back in DC, I was also struggling. Without a car, completing normal errands like grocery shopping and vet appointments was much more complicated than I anticipated. It didn’t help that I had a collapsed disc in my back, so walking in my very-walkable city became more and more difficult until it was nearly impossible.
I grew lonely working from home and then spending most evenings on the couch by myself. Our eldest dog was very attached to her dad, and she started acting out the longer he was away, so I couldn’t leave her alone for long stretches, either.
My husband’s higher salary no longer made much of a difference to our lifestyle, either, given all the money I was now spending on food and grocery delivery and rideshares, plus our additional mortgage and a climbing renovation budget.
After 2 challenging years of this, he got a job in DC and moved back
About a year into this arrangement, I reached my breaking point.
A week before my spinal surgery was scheduled, a pipe in our condo burst and we needed all new floors. I scrambled to file an insurance claim, schedule water mitigation, test out flooring samples, and meet the movers to take out all of our belongings before I checked into the hospital.
There was only so much my husband could do from afar, which felt like the last straw: I was physically and emotionally overwhelmed.
Throughout my recovery, my friends took care of me during the week until he could make it home each Friday evening. I made it through, but it would still be another nine months before he finally found a job back in DC and could come home.
After living in different states for nearly two years, I was thrilled to be a normal couple again, but once he moved back, I discovered the last blow: I had forgotten how to live with someone else.
Our home felt like my home, and he felt like just a visitor in it. I had come up with new systems to manage on my own and liked to do things my way; how did he fit into that now?
With time and some hard conversations, we eventually worked out the kinks and fell back into our familiar rhythm. Soon, life started to feel more normal, like it used to.
It’s now been a year since he’s been back in DC with me (and that fixer-upper we’d got in South Carolina is under new ownership, too).
Looking back, we’ve both agreed that living seven hours apart was the worst decision we could have made, and we’ve vowed that no matter what, we will never do it again.
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