Baggage Check: Commuter Marriage

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Dr. Andrea Bonior dives into the world of psychology.

THE FALTERING ECONOMYhas led to an array of trends, documented (perhaps ad nauseum) in mainstream American media. From the impact it will have on our waistlines, to our educational choices, to our willingness to go without coloring those cursed grey streaks, it appears that there are varied effects of a financial meltdown. But one of the less predictable ones is the increase in commuter marriages.

In hard-charging Washington, D.C., it is not entirely unusual to see families where one parent commutes to another location and remains there four or five days a week.

Certainly, being home (or is it "home"?) to the Senate and House of Representatives familiarizes many area families to that notion; additional industries have jobs that require lots of travel. The more desperate situations, however, involve a parent actually moving to another place to get a specific job, and remaining apart from their family for indefinite amounts of time, calling another place home. This seems to be another type of separation, one more akin to what military families have had to bear.

Technological advances have made these distances much easier to endure, of course. Nowadays, the missing parent can read bedtime stories to their children via teleconferencing, or be updated effortlessly and instantaneously via picture message when Junior scores a goal in soccer (or gets a time-out for that yogurt incident.) But "easy" is a relative term. There's not much research available yet on the emotional implications — for better or for worse — that these specific arrangements have on the family. But it's yet another example of one of the harsh realities that may lie ahead.