Marital Tales of Two Cities

By John Leo.

The ways and means of long-distance marriages

Kaity Tong, 32, and Bob Long, 37, a couple for eight years and a married couple for four, have never lived together in the same town or house. She is a newscaster at WABC-TV in New York City. He is an independent TV producer-director in Los Angeles. As a rookie at Eyewitness News, Kaity is on call seven days a week, so Bob flies in to spend two weeks with her every month. The rest of the marriage is conducted by telephone. They talk six or seven times a day, and last month their phone bill was $800. "I tuck her in at night and wake her up in the morning," says Bob, who stays accessible to Kaity at all times through various paging and answering services. "There is nothing good about separation, but we refuse to let it be an obstacle," he says. "She thinks I'm cute and I'm in love with her. The rest is mechanics."

Such indomitability helps. There are at least 700,000 commuter couples according to some estimates. In the Age of Divorce, where others fail in the comfort of one home in one city, the commuters are determined to bring off marriage on the wing. The requirements are simple enough: jobs in two different cities, each too good to turn down, a full-time sense of humor, the ability to memorize airline schedules, plus a tolerance for the earaches that come from hours on the telephone. Leisure time is no problem. "The little time off you have you spend commuting," says Helene von Damm, 43, a two-city presidential aide. "By the time you get together, half the weekend is over, and "you have to think about getting back."

According to researchers, about half of the conjugal commuters are in the academic world, where work schedules are flexible and jobs too scarce to turn down. But the numbers are increasing in business, politics, show biz and journalism. The education level is high--about 90% have done some graduate work. Family income tends to average $30,000 to $40,000 a year. Often the commuting comes about because the wife has reached a level at which further advancement means moving, and the husband solidly supports the move.

Doris Etelson, 51, the first woman vice president of Howard Johnson Co., the restaurant chain, has been married for 32 years and commuting for five. When she was offered the job in Boston, her husband Robert, 54, who owns an air-freight trucking company in Newark, responded with enthusiasm. "She supported me for years," he says, "and now she is entitled to whatever success she can get." One person who opposed the commuting was her boss, Howard B. Johnson. Says Doris: "He was concerned that it would either jeopardize my marriage or disrupt my business efficiency. He was wrong on both counts."

Mary Downs, 38, is now a Denver stockbroker who commutes to Washington, D.C., where Husband Fred, 37, is a Veterans Administration official. Three years ago, when she lived in Washington, she says, "D.C. was dragging me down. I was a superbitch because I was unhappy about where I was living." Now she is happily self-sufficient, with "good friends in both cities." Reunions with Fred, she says, are "like honeymoons." His male friends question the arrangement, as friends and in-laws often do about commuting couples, managing to imply that the marriage is in trouble. Not so, says Mary. "We have always had good communication--both cerebral and sexual--which encourages us that we are doing the right thing. We are still a couple."

But another commuter, a Chicago businesswoman who eventually gave up commuting--and marriage--said she could not cope with the dislocations. "There was a glamorous facade," she said. "In fact I was stuck on planes next to drunks and children." She felt her life was cut in half and "lonely at both ends."

Many new commuters report on the shock, sometimes comic, of working out new support systems--from how to balance the family checkbook, to finding a new doctor or dentist, to simply lugging the family silver back and forth to have it on hand for dinner parties in both cities. Says Harriet Engel Gross of Governors State University, one of the sociologists who study commuter marriages: "The decision to live apart produces a life-style that is difficult at best, endured in the service of career or other goals, but not one endorsed enthusiastically." The typical commuter, researchers say, is very serious about marriage, feels guilty about separations and lives under fairly heavy stress. Those who fare best have been married seven years or more and have either no children or grown children. Sociologist Naomi Gerstel of the University of Massachusetts found that commuters who live apart a month or more at a stretch "were much more likely to find the situation extraordinarily stressful. They began to develop 'separate worlds,' or their marriages began to resemble non-marriages."

"The secret is to roll with the punches," says Secretary of Transportation Drew Lewis. "When the schedule changes, you've got to be totally flexible, whatever comes. Just don't worry about it." Lewis and his wife Marilyn, both 50, seem to spend half their time in automobiles, driving the triangle from their farm outside Philadelphia to Washington and Harrisburg, where Marilyn is a second-term delegate in the state legislature. "I love all the driving," she says, "because it lets me collect my thoughts, and when I'm driving with Drew, it's a private time when the telephone doesn't ring." Drew grouses about the inconveniences--the right clothes are always in the wrong city, and leisure activities are pared to the bone. Says he: "There isn't as much time for the fun things, but with Marilyn in the legislature, our conversation is much broader. We don't have to discuss the garden, the dog and the children."

Combining long-distance marriage with child rearing is the hardest part of commuting. One two-year-old child of a commuter marriage, who lives with his father in Yarmouth Port, Mass., has been to the airport so often that he calls all airplanes "Mommy." Some toddlers, like the 18-month-old daughter of Susan Davis, vice president of a Chicago bank, manage to veto commuting entirely. "She was really very angry that her father had disappeared," says Susan. "He would kiss her and she would turn her head away." So Susan's husband gave up a high-level job in Milwaukee and is now back in Chicago. Says she: "From the start it was not clear how to make a two-career family work."

Betty Loafmann, 38, a management consultant for Aubrey Daniels & Associates, has been commuting to various cities for four years. She manages to get home to Chicago almost every weekend, and her two-year-old son seems free of anxiety and stress. But Husband Glenn, 37, a psychotherapist, admits that he envies the glamour of Betty's travel. The tension of departure often produces a marital spat on the way to the airport on Sunday nights. Their life, he says, is "weird, but it can work."

Some couples are so starved for small talk that reunions begin with a rush of compulsive jabbering. Others find themselves acting self-conscious during reunions. "Psychologically, it is tiring," says University of Delaware Sociologist Marvin Sussman. "You just cannot pick up where you left off."

One way of coping is to turn the reunion into a new courtship. Says Sarah Conn, a clinical psychologist who runs workshops for two-career couples in Newton, Mass.: "This person who shows up on Friday night is not the old familiar person whose dirty old socks have been hanging around for a week. There's a newness, comparable to going out on a first date."

Couples who fantasize all week, or all month, about wild sexual bouts are often startled to find they much prefer sitting by a fire or just holding hands. Says Mary Crawford, a professor at a Pennsylvania college who used to commute to Iowa: "Roger and I had a feast-or-famine sex life--once a month I flew home to Iowa for three days. If we climbed into bed weary, wanting just to sleep together spoon fashion, we felt faintly guilty."

Like many commuters, Robin and Marvin Whaley, a young couple juggling a St. Louis-Atlanta marriage, report that separation reduces the trivial day-to-day fussing of marriage. Robin, 26, works in ad sales at a CBS-TV-owned station in St. Louis, and Marvin, 29, has a similar job at an Atlanta radio station. When they are together, says Marvin, "it's all prime time." Air fare has risen during their two-year commute, and they have cut down on telephone calls as an economy measure. Recently he sent her a singing telegram that cost $45, instead of one week's calls. Almost as an act of will, the Whaleys have ruled sexual jealousy out of their lives. They think such doubts are too much to cope with in a busy two-city marriage.

Though husbands and wives living far apart seem to be a recipe for extramarital sex, researchers insist that commuters do not have any more affairs than stay-at-home couples. The reason seems to be that so much concentration is poured into work and marriage that little time, or energy, is left over. The commuters, say researchers, single-mindedly await the day when they can become ordinary one-city folk again."They are functioning on 'deferred gratification,' " says Sociologist Sussman. They are, in other words, the new troops of the Protestant ethic, enduring hardship now for the sake of better days ahead. -- By John Leo. Reported by Maureen Dowd/ Washington and Nancy Pierce Williamson/New York, with other bureaus

With reporting by Maureen Dowd/Washington, Nancy Pierce Williamson/New York

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