🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Exactly three months after he proposed, and roughly one year before the pandemic began to take hold across the U.S., my husband and I got married. We lived four states and one time-zone apart.
In March 2019, I flew to Michigan, where Matt lived, with a black dress that I'd owned for a dozen years. He donned a gray suit and an office tie. We celebrated at a local restaurant and treated ten guests to wine and coconut shrimp.
Because it was the middle of the semester, I was flying back to Wisconsin less than 48 hours after saying "I do." Matt lived with his parents to save money, and we'd not have the opportunity to consummate our marriage until much later.
I'd been living in Wisconsin for five years after accepting my first faculty position at a regional university in 2014, just six months into our relationship. Matt and I met during my stint in graduate school, just as his career was beginning to flourish. Understandably, he wanted the opportunity to stay put and nurture his professional life.
"We owe it to each other to give our own careers a chance," Matt had said, reaching for my hand. The night I received my job offer we guzzled beer and scoured the internet for a suitable apartment for me in Wisconsin. His blue eyes were intense and hopeful. But they also spoke volumes: building a life in the same zip code would not be an option under the circumstances.
"How are we supposed to make it long distance?" I choked back a French fry. It wasn't that I didn't trust Matt to give us his all. I didn't trust myself to have blind faith. I come from a long line of exclusively failed marriages and love gone completely, devastatingly, horribly wrong—often ending in the kind of personal and financial ruin that would affect generations to come. None of those relationships had the added complication of being long distance, yet Matt and I were supposed to somehow beat the odds?
"There's no way I could be in a long-distance relationship," my mom had said when I told her of our plans to give it a shot. I remember sighing in defeat. Still, on our second 4th of July together, one year after we stood under a firework display on Lake Michigan and first kissed, Matt and I packed my belongings into a U-Haul and set off together to the Upper Midwest.
Watching my parents struggle rendered me career-minded from an early age. My very existence is a reminder of all that my mother had given up for my father, a teen love who'd become her husband when she became pregnant with me at the age of seventeen. I attended their wedding in utero, her flowing gown masking me, their seven-month-old fetus who was simultaneously the elephant in the room. Thirteen rocky years and one more child later, they divorced.
We struggled financially, living hand to mouth. Mom had wanted to be a photographer. Instead, she got single parenthood and a biker boyfriend who helped pay the bills. Dad got the single life he thought he wanted, a basement apartment without a proper bedroom and a second monthly rent.
He had custody on Sundays and would drive my sister and me around one of Brooklyn's fancier neighborhoods. "You can have this life if you stay in school," Dad would say after he parked our jalopy on one of the city's few tree-lined streets. "Or you can be like me and your mother and struggle for the rest of your lives."
Dad had a way of hinting at his private shame and drawing sobering juxtapositions. I craved a world different from the one my parents had chosen for themselves.
So, leaving Matt behind in Michigan to advance my career seemed like a logical step forward, where thoughts of marriage remained on the back burner. In Wisconsin, I raced toward tenure, racking up publications and stellar teaching reviews. My successes had surpassed anything my family had come to expect, and I made my parents proud. Matt and I would see each other every eight to twelve weeks.
Nurturing a long distance relationship is not for the faint of heart. Matt and I suffered through arguments and reconciliations over screens, without the benefit and healing of human touch. Because of our work schedules, we often spent birthdays and other special occasions apart.
But in between semesters, we would spend considerable time together. I'd drive from Wisconsin to Michigan, a nine-hour stretch of highway, to spend time with him, his family, and their dogs. During work, Matt would take long weekends to see me in Wisconsin, his bags stocked with my favorite chocolates. After five years of toughing it out we decided to plan a trip to Rome in December 2018. At the end of an incredible Italian food tour, Matt proposed outside of a local gelateria.
When we were long distance, we were forced to face our weaknesses and limitations. We were also forced to forego control and trust the process. For me, a skeptic and cynic, this was a grueling challenge. But I believe that letting go of popular notions of what relationships are supposed to look like allowed us to ultimately beat the odds. And each time we parted ways, I would bury myself in teaching and writing.
But emptiness lurked in the shadows of my home and taunted the space between our visits like a poltergeist demanding to be acknowledged. Five years after throwing caution to the wind, Independence Day 2019 arrived. It marked the fourth anniversary in a row that we'd spent apart; our first as a married couple.
At almost 40 years old, I laid in bed in my uninsulated and centipede-infested apartment. Summer heat permeated the roof and explosions sounded over my head, the noise keeping up until after 3am. I tried to sleep wearing professional-grade construction earmuffs, but they did little to muffle the celebrations or the realization that was echoing loudly inside me: I could no longer live like this.
Even as an adult, I was nervous to tell my parents about my idea to upend my career in the name of love. The relationship worked long distance, but they had seen how lonely I'd been without Matt and supported my decision. Mom even gifted us a thousand dollars to start our new life together as a married couple.
"How are we supposed to make it through this?" I remember asking Matt last year. We had weathered more than five years together-but-apart, yet the pandemic was a new kind of unknown. Michigan had just shut down. COVID-19 cases were mounting; our local hospitals were already becoming overwhelmed. I'd seen a friend at the grocery store one week before; we were acutely aware of how dangerous it was to hug each other, so we didn't dare.
"The same way we've made it through everything else," he'd said. We sat on the couch that we now shared and hugged. We would embrace only each other for the next year. As with the uncertainty of distance, the pandemic has shaped me, and our marriage, in unanticipated ways. I now trust myself to weather the unknown, and I trust Matt to take the reins when it all gets to be a bit too much to bear.
I've been told that a long distance couple can't possibly get to know each other when they've spent as much time apart as Matt and I have, but I wholeheartedly reject this ignorant assumption. It is precisely because of how we've grown while physically apart, both in a relationship and while married, that we now flourish together.
Sometimes, when I find myself annoyed with the constraints of quarantine and the lack of privacy, or the way the dishes pile up faster than they had when we lived apart, or our umpteenth argument about how warm or cool to keep the house, I also find myself briefly longing for the solitude of my old life.
But then Matt's body flails involuntarily in the middle of the night, jerking and kicking me out of a dead sleep, and I vividly remember how close I came to never giving our marriage a fighting chance. The pandemic forced us to make up for lost time.
Christina Wyman is a teacher and writer. Her work has appeared in Marie Claire, ELLE Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Washington Post, and other outlets. Her first book is under contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and she can be found on Twitter @cheeniewrites.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
