I found myself toying with my cell phone the other day. If I just switch
this bad boy to vibrate instead of ringer I think I can successfully
conduct my entire marriage by cell phone.Woo boy.

Marriage by cell phone isn't so unusual in the military community these
days. If it isn't a long deployment or a trip to a war zone, then we're
tackling trainings, schools and work ups. We've got geographic bachelors
stationed in Washington, DC or on precommissioning ships. We've got
recruiters who travel three weeks a month and work long hours when they are
home. 

Although this kind of separation may be necessary, it seems like kind of
a bad idea to me.  Let's promise to love, cherish and hardly ever see each
other?  I don't think so.

Yet Ladies Home Journal thinks that this kind of distance is a marvelous
thing for a relationship. In their February issue, they feature a study by
Purdue University researchers that  found that long distance couples argue
less over trivial matters than couples who live together. They don't take
each other for granted as much. They have independent lives which makes them
interesting partners.

I bet that story was enough to make civilian folks wonder what a one
bedroom apartment might cost. It made me wonder. Right up until I read the
part where the researchers concluded that long-distance relationships tended
to be more stable and satisfying than those of couples who live under the
same roof.  

Stable and satisfying, huh?  Beg to differ.  I don't care what their study
says, but stable and satisfying are not the words I'd use to describe a long-distance marriage. 

No one would.  In my own informal survey,  couples who are living apart
described the long distance parts of their marriages as "irritating,"
"tiring,"  "harder," "expensive" and "crap."  I left out the other four letter
words.  Most of them made up by me.

The female respondents agreed that they do appreciate their husbands more
and that their husbands do make more of a focused effort. One woman even
claimed to shave her legs every time her husband came home.   But "stable"
and "satisfying?"  Not so much.

What these researchers are describing is not an ideal relationship that we
can all learn from. They are describing the coping mechanisms that couples
maintaining their marriages by long-distance relationships require. Good
relationships are made up of good conversation and shared responsibilities
and time spent together‹not months spent apart. 

Marriages can and do go through periods of enforced separation for any
number of reasons. But long-distance couples do this as an investment for
the future.  It's a temporary, inconvenient, stressful, difficult
arrangement. We don't need to see it positioned as some of idealized
alternative lifestyle featured on the pages of a glossy magazine. Instead
we need to know more about the costs of living apart and exactly how long
even the best of relationships can last  by cell phone.