CLOVER STROUD reveals the crushing realities of long-distance marriage

Standing in my kitchen in Oxfordshire, I could hear my husband’s voice — in a different time zone, on the other side of the Atlantic. He’d been working late on the West Coast after a meeting in California, while I was up early, making packed lunches for our children.

I wanted to know if he’d be back in England in time for a parents’ evening at school, but he’d just had a notification that his flight back was delayed. It wasn’t looking likely.

Sometimes, I felt we were living in separate dimensions, not just in separate countries. And as usual, we slid into a conversation about how to join up our marriage, so we could share a life in the same place, at the same time.

This wasn’t the first time Pete and I had had the tricky conversation about where we should live, to try to resolve the problem of creating a life as a family. We’d had almost 15 years together, been married for 12, but for the past eight years had spent punishingly long periods of time apart.

The demands of his work, a business he’d built himself, meant he was often away in Europe or Asia, or increasingly travelling around the U.S., while I stayed at home, fitting my writing career around being a mum to our five children, now aged seven, ten, 11, 20 and 23.

These weren’t just short work trips. Pete was away for weeks at a time, sometimes months. I worked out that we hadn’t spent more than 14 consecutive days together in the previous five years. Even a shared holiday was unusual.

When he was working here, he usually stayed in London from Monday to Friday, since our home in the Oxfordshire countryside wasn’t close enough to enable him to commute to his office.

Friends sometimes laughed in envy at me: ‘I’d love my husband to be away all the time like Pete is,’ they’d say ruefully. But this wasn’t how I felt.

Spending long periods of time apart was the absolute opposite of what either of us had planned. When we met in 2010, I wanted to be as close to him as possible. I’d been married before, in my 20s, and was a single mother to two children, nine-year-old Jimmy, and six-year-old Dolly, when Pete and I met.

I’d been living in Oxford at that time, and Pete was someone I’d known years before, when we were both students there. A mutual friend had suggested we get together when he moved back to Oxford, and when I went to meet him for a quick drink on a snowy evening in January 2010, I knew, almost instantly, that I wanted to be in his presence, to be close to him.

He made me feel seen in a way no one had done before, and he was funny and clever. I wanted to talk to him all the time and felt powerfully attracted to him. I knew, pretty much immediately, that he was the person I needed to be with.

I was right, because Pete is my everything, the person I love more than anyone. And yet, he is the ­person with whom I’ve almost spent the least time in the past decade.

Two years after we met, we had our first child together, Evangeline, followed by her brothers Dash and Lester.

We moved out of Oxford, into rural south Oxfordshire, on the border with Wiltshire and Berkshire, finding a cottage we extended, in a haphazard way, to create a home for our big, ­beautiful, difficult, chaotic family. Providing for this growing family was demanding. Pete’s work meant he started spending longer and longer periods away as his business grew.

His trips started as a few days, but often were extended to ­several weeks at a time. I gave up trying to know exactly where Pete was, and we grew accustomed to a relationship conducted on Whats­App. I resigned myself to fitting my life as a writer around the demands of lone parenthood, ­juggling the babies, toddlers and teenagers with my work.

We’d pretend that living apart wasn’t so bad, pretend that six or eight hours’ time difference wasn’t so great, pretend that another three weeks before we saw each other wasn’t so long, that Whats­Apping at night as I lay in bed was almost like chatting, that FaceTime was a really pleasing way to be together on a Saturday evening. We told each other it was only for a few more weeks, that this was just a phase.

And then six years has passed. Six years!

A long-distance marriage is complicated. Watching Pete’s vanishing form as he left the house, carrying a laptop bag and a carry-on suitcase, often made me feel red with rage, as small, sticky hands pulled at me, and my working life was squashed into the time between dropping kids at school, or crammed into the moments I spent sitting in community ­centres, waiting for them to finish dance lessons or karate club.

Eating leftover pasta, or cereal, for supper after the absolute chaos of trying to get three small children to bed, I’d feel green envy at the thought of him eating sushi in Manhattan. I often wasn’t very sympathetic, and didn’t see what he was experiencing, which was another faceless hotel room, another Saturday afternoon alone, another child’s birthday celebrations missed.

I became enraged by the compromises I was being forced to make and the shape I had to contort my life into. Resentment began to boil up inside me. It made me want to see his screen shatter when I thought of him quietly logging on to a Zoom meeting from a tidy hotel room, where the background was always silent. Homecoming was rarely the romantic experience I fantasised about when he was away, either.

When one partner returns after long periods of time, the moment they step back through the door is loaded with massively unrealistic expectation and grinding resentment. More often, his return would precipitate a blazing row which would then simmer away for a couple of days before we could push on through to that next place, where we found one another as a couple again.

Often, Pete would be leaving again just as we’d got there. ­

Children thrash a marriage, but so do long periods of separation.

Cramming a marriage into a weekend that lasts from the time he returns from Heathrow on Saturday afternoon to leaving at dawn on Monday morning is impossible. Trying to find connection with one another in the space of a single weekend will put any relationship under pressure.

And long periods apart also mean trust is an issue. I’ve sometimes felt twitchy with jealousy at the thought of him walking into another hotel, another conference, another meeting, with me having no real sense of who he was with.

Trust isn’t just about sexual fidelity. Since we were spending so much time apart, both of us had to trust that the other was making the right decisions about our life. I had to trust Pete when he said that his business needed him to be away for weeks at a time.

He had to trust me that I was making the right decisions for the children, supporting them through their little lives — since in all the time he was away, they were growing up.

I hated going to parents’ evening alone, watching other couples ­discussing their child’s progress, and I’ve forgotten the number of birthdays and anniversaries we’ve spent apart.

And alongside this pressure, I was lonely, the kind of loneliness that meant sometimes I heard a voice, chattering away in my head, that was me, and yet distant from me, taunting me that I was alone again.

When other friends talked about working their way through a new Netflix series together, or processing the day as they cooked supper, I felt envious. I forgot what a shared domestic life, for long ­periods of time, felt like.

When the children were very small, I obsessed about moving house, and finding a place which would mean that Pete and I could be together.

I developed an advanced Rightmove habit, fantasising about a house in London which might mean the short time we had together, when Pete was actually in England, would feel more joined up. Sometimes I looked at houses in London, but apart from the insane expense of even attempting to move to the city, I also felt deeply bound to rural life.

I’d reacted to long periods of time apart by creating a house we loved, filling it with the children’s friends and building a strong ­community around me where I felt secure. My relationship with the landscape and community of the area we call home was strong, compensating for the absence of my husband.

Still, I tormented local estate agents by putting the house on and off the market; it almost makes me laugh, now, remembering my obsession with finding some kind of portal to a place where Pete and I would be together and I wouldn’t be alone again on a Friday night, ­surrounded by piles of Lego and cold pesto pasta.

I loved the first lockdown, as it meant Pete was at home for a completely uninterrupted period of time, although he was off as soon as the world started turning again.

In the last few years, as the pandemic calmed, the conversation between us about where to live and how to be together gained momentum. It was clear that America was where the focus of his work was going to be, and Pete started looking at houses, and engaging me in a conversation about where we might live, where the kids might go to school, what our life there might look like.

I often tried to ignore it, deleting the emails he sent me with links to houses I might look at on Zillow, the U.S. equivalent of Rightmove, and throwing away a prospectus that arrived in the post of a potential school. But however hard the prospect of leaving a home I loved was, the conversation between us about relocation wasn’t going away.

I knew that Pete and I needed to be together, and that the ­children needed him too. We needed to be together as a couple, as much as a family.

Slowly, the jigsaw pieces of a potential new life in America ­slotted together. The elder two children would stay in England at university. Rather than selling up, we could rent our house. Our younger children got places at good American state schools, and that red brick house that Pete sent me the details for, could be ours to rent.

Last summer, I spent several frenzied, emotional weeks dismantling our home, finding foster homes for two of our dogs, sending bags and bags of clothes and books to charity shops, carefully packing our life into cases to keep in storage, while sending our essentials, including the kitchen table, on to America.

Honestly, I didn’t want to leave the home I loved, but I wanted to be with the man I love.

Settling into life in America has been strange and beautiful, hard in ways I could not have foreseen, and often ridiculous, as well as very demanding. I profoundly miss our home, the community where I felt at ease. But I also love being with Pete. I love meeting him after work with the children on a Friday night, even meeting for sushi as we walk back from his office near the White House.

I love seeing the kids walking to school with Pete. Those moments that others take for granted — such as watching their husband reading to their kids, or helping them with their homework — is extra precious in relief against all that time we spent apart.

I’m also proud of what we’ve been through together. I think that learning to live separate lives made us resilient and creative in the way we approach our ­marriage, which is a good thing.

I love the time together, even if it meant giving up the home I love to have it.

The Giant On The Skyline by Clover Stroud (£18.99, Doubleday) is out now and available at https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-giant-on-the-skyline/clover-stroud/2928377236977