A couple between countries: living across several homes

Monday, half past five in the morning. A suitcase by the door, coffee drunk standing up. “See you Thursday?” “Maybe Friday. Depends on the flight.” A kiss at the door, then silence in a flat that is suddenly too big. She stays in Ljubljana, he goes to Munich. Or it is the other way round: he stays, she flies to Zurich, and at the weekend they meet in the house on the coast, the only place both of them would call “ours”.

There are more couples like this than we think. People with international careers, entrepreneurs with business in several countries, partners from two different countries who never really decided where they would live. The outside world sees plane tickets, beautiful flats and an interesting life. Rarely does anyone ask what it is like on a Sunday evening, getting ready for yet another goodbye.

In this post I want to write about a long-distance relationship in an adult, settled partnership — not student love across a border, but a couple who share a life, perhaps children and assets, yet still live between several homes. What does distance do to such a relationship, what does it protect and what does it slowly wear away?

When home is spread across the map

Couples who live between countries rarely choose this life all at once. Usually it happens gradually: a job offer that can’t be turned down, a company that expands, a parent in another country who needs help. Each decision made sense on its own. Together, though, they have created a life that nobody really planned.

And that is exactly why a real conversation about it often never happened. The logistics are agreed to the minute — who flies when, who picks up the children, where Christmas will be. The feelings stay unagreed. What do we feel when we say goodbye? Who misses whom more? Is the one who stays at home lonely or relieved? Nobody talks about it, because it seems the conversation would open the question of whether the whole arrangement is right at all.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we see a couple as a system that creates its own unwritten rules. Couples living between countries have many of them: “we don’t argue when one of us arrives”, “what happens during the week stays there”, “we don’t ask what the other was doing”. Some rules protect the couple. Others slowly drive them apart, because they keep the partners from really getting to know each other in the part of life they did not share.

What we know about long-distance relationships

Research on long-distance relationships is surprisingly optimistic, but with one important trap.

First, the good news: on average, long-distance relationships are no worse in quality than those in which partners live together. Crystal Jiang and Jeffrey Hancock found that long-distance partners disclose more about themselves to each other and idealise each other more — and that their sense of intimacy is comparable to, or even greater than, that of couples who live together. Similarly, Kelmer and colleagues reported that long-distance couples were as satisfied as, or more satisfied than, geographically close couples on several measures of relationship quality.

But here is the trap. Laura Stafford and her colleagues followed long-distance couples who then moved to the same place. About a third of these couples broke up within three months of finally living close to each other. Distance did not break them. The reunion did — the moment when the idealised picture of the other met an everyday life in which nobody is on a weekend visit any more.

These studies mostly covered younger couples and relationships before marriage, so they can’t be transferred directly to spouses with a shared life and children. Even so, they point to something I also notice in older couples: the problem is often not the distance, but the transition between distance and closeness.

Idealisation and the return to everyday life

A partner you only see at weekends has one quality that an everyday partner lacks: they are always a little bit visiting. When you come home on a Friday, the fridge is full, the children are excited, time is measured and therefore precious. Arguments feel like a waste. And so the couple start avoiding them.

That sounds like a good thing, but it has a price. What isn’t said on Friday isn’t said on Sunday either, because the goodbye is too close. And what goes unsaid for weeks builds up into a quiet resentment that later flares over something entirely trivial — over who forgot to buy milk. I have written about what really lies beneath such arguments in From blame to needs: how a couple learns a new language.

The other side of idealisation is the everyday life of the one who stays at home. If she looks after the children, the house and her own job while the other is “abroad”, she may feel that her partner comes on holiday into a life she carries alone. The partner who travels, meanwhile, may feel that what awaits him at home is a to-do list rather than an embrace. Both are right. And both feel unseen.

Attachment at a distance

Distance is a kind of test of attachment for a relationship. When the partner is absent, it shows how each of us tolerates uncertainty.

Someone with a more anxious attachment will experience separation as a constant threat. An unanswered message in the evening is not just an unanswered message but a sign that something is wrong. You can read more about this reaction in Anxious attachment: why a partner’s silence sets off the alarm.

Someone with a more avoidant attachment may — entirely unconsciously — experience distance as a relief. They have space for themselves, closeness comes in measured doses, nobody expects too much. For them, difficulties often begin only at the reunion, when there is suddenly more closeness than they are used to.

When these two styles meet in a long-distance couple, distance amplifies the cycle they would have anyway: one calls and asks, the other withdraws and answers briefly. I describe how to recognise this cycle and step out of it in The anxious and the avoidant partner: why these two find each other.

Belonging: where is our home?

Couples who live between countries often don’t argue about distance but about where home is. One says “come home”, and the other feels that “home” means something else to them. For one, home is Ljubljana with parents and friends; for the other, the city where they built a career; for the children, perhaps a school in a third country.

A sense of belonging is one of the most basic human needs. When we divide it between several places we don’t necessarily lose it, but it becomes more fragile. Many people who live between countries describe not being truly at home anywhere — a stranger in one place, a guest in the other. This quiet loss often resembles what I describe in Losing a homeland: moving abroad and quiet grief.

Pauline Boss introduced the term ambiguous loss for losses that are not final: someone is physically absent but psychologically present — or the other way round. A long-distance partner is, in a sense, both. They are not at the table, but they are in every message. They are at home, but their mind is at a meeting in another country. Ambiguous losses are harder to grieve than final ones, because there is no clear moment when you allow yourself to feel that you miss something.

Who carries more

Life between countries rarely weighs equally on both. Often one is the person who moved for the other, or the one who stays at home while the other travels. At first this inequality may be a conscious decision — “now it’s your career’s turn” — but over time it becomes taken for granted. The one who gave way feels their sacrifice is no longer seen. The one who gained the space may feel guilty or, on the contrary, entitled.

Back in the 1980s, the sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Harriet Gross described marriages in which partners live in different places because of their work. They studied how such an arrangement affects work, family and who in the couple carries daily life.

In affluent couples this inequality often hides behind comfort. The outside world sees that they “lack nothing”, and nobody asks the partner who gave up their job how they feel in a new city where they know nobody. Loneliness in a beautiful flat is loneliness all the same — sometimes even more shameful, because it seems you have no right to complain.

Over time the partners may come to live more and more separate lives and no longer recognise each other when they meet. Whether this is growth the relationship can take in, or a drifting apart, I explored in When your partner grows in another direction: differentiation in a long relationship.

This is how a conversation might sound when the inequality finally comes to the surface (composed, not a real person):

He: “Every time I come home, I feel I’m in your way. As if everything runs without me.”
She: “It does run without you. Five days a week. What am I supposed to do — stop it all and wait for you?”
He: “No. I’d just like to know that you miss me.”
She (more quietly): “I miss you on Wednesday evening, when the children are ill and I don’t know who to call. By Friday I’m so tired I can’t miss you any more.”

In this short exchange both finally say what has long gone unsaid. He is not asking for attention, but for a place in a life that carries on without him. She is not rejecting him, but saying that the missing came at a time when there was nobody to hear it.

Exercise: an agreement about transitions

Because tension builds up most often around goodbyes and reunions, it makes sense for a couple to arrange these two moments consciously. Every transition is a small change, and changes need time.

1. Each of you writes down how you feel the day before a goodbye and on the first day after a reunion. No editing: tired, angry, anxious, relieved, empty.
2. Swap your notes and read them without comment. Only one question is allowed: “Have I understood you correctly?”
3. Agree on an “arrival hour”. For the first hour after a reunion nobody raises difficult subjects, checks bills or hands out chores. You simply arrive.
4. Set one moment during the week that is just for the two of you. Not for logistics, but for the question “how are you really?” — even if it is only ten minutes.
5. Once a month, review the arrangement. Does this rhythm still suit both of you? What would either of you change? An arrangement nobody talks about becomes fate. An arrangement you check regularly remains a decision.

The exercise won’t remove the distance. But it will give back the sense that distance is something you manage together, rather than something that happens to you.

When distance is not the problem — and when the answer lies elsewhere

I want to be honest here: not every long-distance couple is in trouble, and not every distance is something to be overcome.

Distance suits some couples. Partners who both value independence and have a clear agreement can live between two countries for years and be content. The research I mentioned shows exactly that: distance alone does not break a relationship. If things are going well for you, there is no need to look for a problem that isn’t there.

Sometimes distance protects something. It happens that a couple — quite unconsciously — keep the distance because they fear what would happen if they were together all the time. In that case moving to the same place won’t solve the problem; it will reveal it. A conversation about why you chose distance then matters more than one about how to reduce it. The feeling that often comes up here — wanting and not wanting at the same time — has a name: ambivalence.

Practical decisions are not a matter for therapy. Where to pay tax, how to arrange ownership of property in several countries, or what it means to move a child into a different school system are questions for tax advisers, lawyers and educators. Therapy can help you talk about these decisions as a couple, but not make them for you.

When distance comes with control, such as constant location checking, demands to be reachable at all times or threats, it is no longer a question of distance but of safety. In Slovenia, help is available on the SOS helpline for women and children victims of violence, 080 11 55 (in Slovenia), and in an emergency call 113 (in Slovenia).

In the end, most couples living between countries are not asking whether the distance works, but whether the two of them still work. The answer rarely lies in the flight schedule. It lies in whether they can tell each other how they are really doing.

Therapy for a couple who rarely sit at the same table

For couples who live between countries, even arranging a joint session is part of the work. My sessions take place in person, in Ljubljana — and with a couple who are often apart, this alone shows how they negotiate, who adjusts their schedule and who finds it harder. I also work with English-speaking clients.

Because shared time is scarce, such couples often benefit from a longer session, with enough room for the conversation to really get going. I write about what longer sessions are and who they are for in Longer sessions for couples. One of them is A Look into the Past, where we draw a genogram together — and with couples living between countries we often discover that moves, departures and distances are nothing new, but a pattern that has repeated in the family for generations.

What to remember

• On average, long-distance relationships are no worse in quality than those in which partners live together.
• Tension builds up most often at the transitions — goodbyes and reunions — so these moments are worth arranging consciously.
• Distance amplifies the attachment pattern a couple already has; the one who calls and the one who withdraws become even more visible.
• The burden of life between countries is rarely carried equally — that inequality is worth putting into words.
• If distance is protecting something, talking about why you chose it matters more than moving.