Megan Bearce LMFT - Super Commuter Couples: Staying Together When A Job Keeps You Apart

To my village

One day, in retrospect, the years of strugglewill strike you as the most beautiful.

Sigmund Freud

In addition to being a licensed therapist, I am the wife of a super commuter. If you had told me a few years ago what our life would look like todaywith my husband Ian leaving for a dream job in New York early on Monday morning each week and returning home to Minneapolis Friday evening, I would have laughed and said, No way! Having barely escaped our personal financial meltdown that started in May 2009 when we were living in Los Angelestriggered by the perfect storm of the real estate crash, the stock market crash, and the birth of our second childI thought we were all settled in to re-build our lives in Minneapolis. Little did I know that once again our world was about to be turned upside down.

During the decision-making process of whether or not to launch into a super commuting relationship, we had to make tough decisions and we had to rationalize. Unlike other business disciplines, my husbands work on the production side of advertising does not offer an advanced degree. In this business there is only one way to prove oneself and that is by demonstrating unique skills and resources. That being the cold reality, we had to weigh the amount of exposure and experience he would gain by working at one of the premier special effects companies in the world against the difficulty of separation. We told ourselves and we told other people that by going to New York to live and work, Ian would be paid to receive the equivalent of an MBA degree in his industry. Other considerations important to him were the quality and integrity of the employees, the work environment and corporate culture, and the fact that many employees at the company highly value family life.

Add into the mix the instability of his current job in Minneapolis, plus the security of a big job with a big company, and a super commuting arrangement began to sound more and more appealing. And finally, even if manna rained from the heavens and we magically found a way to move east, what if Ian didnt like the jobor worse, what if he got laid off? It was 2010 and the economy and housing market were still limping along with no prospects of a meaningful turnaround.

After carefully considering the pros and cons, the pros won out and we decided to take a giant leap of faith into the unknown and we are now well past our two-year anniversary. And the fact is, we are hardly alone. Today there are literally millions of people who are doing the same thing we are doing in one form or another.

For this book I interviewed two-dozen people from Costa Rica, South Africa, and across the United States who were involved in a super commuter relationship (names and other identifying information have been changed to protect privacy). The lessons they have to impart are as diverse as they are helpful to those contemplating a plunge into such a relationship.

These lessons are enough to fill a book. Many of them are included in this one. May you find insights and encouragement from what my husband and I continue to experience and from what I have gleaned from others in the United States and beyond who share this ever more popular lifestyle.

If so, then this book has fulfilled its purpose.

What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier?Each moment seems split in two: melancholy for whatwas left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.

Ernesto Guevara

My motivation for writing this book has as much to do with our children as it does with my husband and me. Our daughter Katherine was three and a half years old and our son Austin almost two when Ian started his job in New York. Given where they were developmentally, they each handled it differently. Our son seemed less impacted initially, but as he has grown older, he has become more vocal about missing his father and asking when he will be home. Katherine has always been close to her father and as an emotionally intense child; her reaction to him leaving her every week was often traumatic. Sunday evenings and Monday mornings were usually and sometimes still are especially difficult since over the weekend we had crammed in as much quality dad time as possibleand yet, at the same time, doing as many household projects as we could along with the myriad of other tasks, paperwork, and scheduling that Ian and I rarely have time to discuss in detail during the week. It was heart-wrenching for me (and for Ian and me, on Sunday evenings) to watch Katherine lying in her bed sobbing, missing her daddy even before he left and pleading with him to stop going to New York. I could only commiserate with her and explain that we all missed him. I would also remind her of the fun things we had done that weekend or would be doing again in just a few short days.

Sometimes that calmed her. Usually it didnt. And I would have to confess to her that I truly didnt know when he would be able to stop making these long weekly trips a half a continent away. I was walking that fine line that parents walk when they dont want to burden their child with their own emotions while at the same encouraging the child to express her feelings honestly. If she felt sad, which she often did, it was best for her to express that sadness.

Such is one tiny facet of the daily life of a super commuting family.

So what exactly is a super commuter? However one defines the term, essentially it refers to a new category of employee who lives in one city and commutes a great distance to his or her job in another city, via any mode of transportation. Due to the sometimes vast distances involved, it is often more economical and work-efficient to not return home on a daily basis, but rather on weekends only. This phenomenon is by no means limited to the United States. The Financial Times of London ran an article in December of 2011 in which it highlighted the growing trend of super commuting in Europe, profiling employees who do weekly commutes between London and such Continental cities as Amsterdam and Prague.