Though some GenXpats are single when they set out on their expatriate assignments, as we saw in the last chapter, many are in more or less established relationships without actually being married. This last is very significant. Very few married couples would agree for one of the partners to head off on a long-term business posting abroad while the other stays behind. Yet this is quite a frequent phenomenon among couples that are dating or even living together. Why is it so? I believe that the distinction between marriage and “living together” shows up in instances like these. The commitment of marriage is, among other things, that of valuing the relationship over career considerations, with either the potential transferee refusing the expatriate assignment or the spouse agreeing to move (more on that in the next chapter). It is the unmarried couples that are far more likely to envisage having their careers and their relationships too.
The willingness to embark on a long-distance relationship (LDR) could be due to a combination of factors: that both partners are still at early stages in their careers, feel that they have yet to prove their merit, and are not in a position to present personal considerations in the choice of an assignment. They may also feel that it is too early in the relationship to know whether it is worth giving up a career opportunity for. As a result, they choose an option that seems to reconcile these conflicting needs—they accept a foreign posting and opt to remain together over a distance.
What may not be immediately apparent to these couples is the level of commitment required for the success of a LDR. LDRs require a significant investment of time and money, and very often sacrifices in time spent with friends and on personal pursuits. They actually require far more effort than a regular face-to-face relationship. For this reason, they are unlikely to work if the couple embarks upon it out of uncertainty, especially uncertainty that the relationship is worth giving up a career opportunity for.
Let us look at some of the factors that can contribute to a successful LDR. First of all, both partners must have a clear understanding about the degree and nature of their commitment to each other. Both must go through the exercise of asking themselves some of the following questions: Can I articulate why I love this person? If so, why am I prepared to choose a career move over my relationship? Is this an exceptional circumstance that we are both committed to correcting as soon as possible, or are we really just trying to put off making a choice between our careers and our relationship?
It may seem rather cold and calculating to detail why you love your partner. However, it can be very useful to have this in mind when your relationship comes under attack. And it will: by virtue of the sheer exoticism and attraction of the people you will meet abroad, physical separation from your partner, challenges in distance communication, fewer opportunities for shared experiences, and many more things. Thus it is helpful to be able to articulate the unique nature of your bond. Apart from sheer attraction, you can analyze it in terms of some of the same factors that make strong friendships, thinking of the values, history, and daily activities you share. Knowing what these are and how hard they are to replace will help you keep more insignificant passions at bay.
Secondly, it is vital to have a clear timeline for getting back together. For most people, an LDR can only work as a temporary situation, a brief period where career takes precedence over relationship, rather than as a lifestyle. Take the time to discuss with your partner how long he or she is willing to spend apart, keeping in mind that most expat assignments last about two years. Once the two of you reach an agreement, communicate it to your employer before the assignment begins. This is important, because expat assignments often get prolonged, and the employer usually feels less of a sense of urgency about finding you a job back in your home country than you and your partner do. Being upfront about where you plan to draw the line and reiterating this as time goes on will make it clear how serious you are. That being said, it may well be that your employer never does get around to sending you home. In that case, you may have to honor your commitment to your partner by quitting your job and staging your return independently.
Finally, it makes sense to agree on a trial period with your partner. Even with a clear commitment to each other and a timeline for getting back together, you may find the reality of keeping a relationship alive over a distance too much for either one of you. You might like to set a deadline vis-à-vis each other, say six months, when you plan to review how things are going: Are you both comfortable with the arrangement? Are you both getting all you would like out of the relationship? Are there any changes that need to be made, more frequent meetings, for example? You might even like to let your employer know that you have made this kind of arrangement with your partner. That way, you signal the importance of your relationship upfront, paving the way for potential contract renegotiation.
It really takes all of these—clarity on the immense value of your current relationship, a good reason why you are temporarily ready to give it up in favor of your career, and an open line of communication with both your partner and your employer—for a long-distance relationship to have a fighting chance.
If you are currently living with your partner, then the transition to living apart, in another city, country, or time zone, can impact both of you on many levels. To begin with, there is the loss of physical intimacy. Then there is the loss of your most constant companion, the person who knows the most about you and who is present to share your daily ups and downs. Finally, there is the change in your relationship dynamic. You will no longer have access to all the details of your partner’s existence firsthand. If your relationship previously had three pillars—shared values, history, and day-to-day activities—you will find that suddenly the latter one is being yanked away. Different relationships have a different mix of these three factors; if yours was heavily dependent on the things you do together, this could have a major impact.
Friends and colleagues who have had successful LDRs report that it is necessary for the partners to see each other once or twice a month. Longer intervals can be allowed to occur occasionally, but it would be unrealistic to expect a relationship to work if you can only see each other a handful of times a year for a few days at a time. At that point, it is likely that the benefits of meeting someone new at your destination would soon outweigh the benefit of the connection you have with the partner you have left behind.
Fairly frequent meetings are not only key to maintaining intimacy; they are necessary to defray the weight of expectations that these meetings can engender. Many times couples postpone various issues until they can see each other face-to-face. The expectations of those meetings then become tremendous: on the one hand, the couple wants to recapture the romance of the relationship, on the other, there are lots of logistics, decisions, and issues that need to be dealt with in the span of a weekend. The short time you have together is further hampered by the accumulated tiredness of an intense workweek combined with the exhaustion of travel. It can therefore be hard to get on the same wavelength and satisfy each other’s expectations, and very easy to fall into petty squabbles instead. The more frequent and ordinary you can make the reunions, the better, as there will be fewer things to catch up on and less pressure to make them perfect.
For the sake of providing a complete picture, I will mention that some people actually enjoy the long-distance setup. They find the rare meetings a good way of keeping the excitement of a first date, and like the fact that they do not have to share the mundane elements of daily life. This is less likely if the couple has been living together for a period of time before the onset of the LDR; more often, the couple will have met during a trip, semester, or internship abroad and the LDR consists of joint holidays. Such an arrangement allows the couple to combine occasional romance with the benefits and space of conducting a bachelor lifestyle at home. The main challenge of these “holiday” LDRs usually occurs when the couple attempts to live together full time and make things work every day. Some make the transition beautifully, while in other cases both parties realize that they really liked having independent lives and they break up.
As we saw in the chapter on keeping in touch with friends and family, differences in communication styles or the inability to verbalize emotions can pose a problem over distance. If you consider that romantic relationships have an even greater nonverbal component and involve more intimate emotions than friendships, you can see how the problem can get compounded. For an LDR to succeed, both sides must feel comfortable expressing their feelings for each other verbally and explicitly. Another challenge of communication is what I will call emotional a-synchronicity. Let us imagine, as an example, that one partner—the man—has decided to go out with friends, while at the same time the woman is sitting in her foreign home, alone after an atrocious day at work, wanting to share some concerns. When she calls him, she hears the sounds of merrymaking in the background and, even though she knows that her partner is not in a position to anticipate her state of mind at a distance, she feels resentful that he is not available with his support. Differences in time zones can have a similar or worse impact: if one partner wants to make a late-evening phone call and a have a personal conversation while the other is in the midst of a morning crisis at work, chances are that they will not connect in a meaningful way. Being attuned to each other’s emotional needs at a distance can be tricky. One strategy is to set aside regular times and channels for “serious” discussions, which ensure you are both in a private setting and available to talk and share. Another is to practice the art of listening: by staying quiet and receptive long enough, you will eventually create the opportunity for your partner to share what is on his or her mind. Many personal concerns take some working up to, and pauses are a natural part of that, though they can often feel uncomfortable on the phone. Learning to use the phone in an effective way is an essential skill of LDRs.
Another aspect of LDRs is that you may find yourself “straddling” two locations, without really settling down in either one. It begins when you spend most of your nonwork-related time traveling home to see your partner. This means that you never have the time to properly settle into your new apartment and purchase all the knickknacks it takes to make a home, nor do you have the time to settle into your new city, meet people, and visit its attractions. Your weekday evenings end up consumed by the chores required to maintain households in two different cities, while you dedicate your weekends to couple time at the expense of other friendships. This last is something to be very careful about.
If you consider that most LDRs have the odds stacked against them, it is particularly important to maintain your other friendships in case things do not work out with your partner. Consider what would happen if you have spent the better part of your first year on assignment jetting back and forth between home and abroad and your relationship ends. Suddenly you realize that you are alone in a new city, but you are no longer a newcomer. The acquaintances you have in your host country have gotten used to the fact that you are never around, and no longer make the social openings they did when you had just arrived. Simultaneously, you have lost touch with your friends back home, because you never made time for them. You can find yourself in a very lonely place. To prevent this, be very disciplined about keeping work within reasonable limits and making the effort to build a social life at destination, no matter how tired you are after your workday. It is also useful to ensure that your partner comes to visit you as often as you return home. This lets you discover the host country and make new friends together.
So far, we have looked at the mechanics of LDRs—commitment, communication, and handling life in two locations. Beyond that, there are certain mental or psychological requirements for an LDR to work. Probably the most significant one is the question of trust. If you do not trust your partner, then you can drive yourself crazy worrying about the temptations he or she will encounter. If you trust blindly, then you may have unpleasant surprises in store for you. What, then, are the components of a proper trusting relationship?
To begin with, you need to have confidence in yourself and your own value. If you are not entirely sure of your own merits, you may be susceptible to the constant, nagging thought that your partner may at any time find someone better, more attractive, intelligent, or wealthy than you are. The second element is confidence in your partner’s ability to see and appreciate your value. If you have a subconscious suspicion that your partner is only attracted to you for superficial reasons, that could easily be superseded by someone else, or if you are concerned that your partner is not really sure of what he or she wants, and therefore why you are important to him or her, then you will likely be haunted by doubts. Only if you are fundamentally convinced of your own value and your partner’s ability to recognize it, will you really feel that you are in a position to be trusting.
Of course, you cannot eliminate the possibility of your partner meeting someone else. This holds true even if you are not apart. However, if you feel confident that you both represent a consciously acknowledged value for each other, then you can trust that your partner will not be swayed by a spur-of-the-moment reaction but only by a serious feeling, and that he or she will likely discuss things with you in a forthright manner should something like this occur.
Another challenge is striking the right balance between acting as individuals and yet not growing apart. As with the question of trust, this is essential to any relationship, but distance simply puts more emphasis on the matter. Acting as individuals means keeping up or developing your own interests and circle of friends apart from the relationship. Having this kind of outlet is very important, because it allows you to grow as a person and helps ensure that you fuel your relationship with novelty and interest. It also provides a safety net to fall back on when going through difficult times with your partner. Growing apart means that, in the process of pursuing your own interests, you develop in some meaningful way that does not include your partner. Suddenly you find that you no longer share some major values, spend little time together, and really do not share very much anymore.
In a long-distance scenario, there is clearly potential for growing apart. The person who leaves is suddenly exposed to new horizons: new values, new ways of doing things, and new opportunities, and may simply cease to find understanding with the one left behind. There is no foolproof way to prevent this; the changes may be too great to bridge. Your best chance to avoid this is to have very open communication. Invite the partner who has stayed behind to visit as soon as possible, so that he or she gets a firsthand sense of what you are going through and feels part of it. Try to be frank about what you are experiencing. Let us imagine, for example, that back home you come from a middle-class environment and at your destination you are suddenly projected into high society with all the trappings: five-star restaurants, parties, limousines, beautifully dressed and powerful people. It can be tempting to get caught up in that whirlwind without sharing it with your partner back home, partly because you are scared it could make your partner feel jealous or threatened, and partly because it is too fresh even in your mind to know what to make of it. Try to talk about it and share things as they happen. The more you bottle up, the more your partner will feel excluded, the bigger the rift of understanding will be, and the tougher it will be to bridge it.
As the one who gets left behind, if you sense that your partner is sharing less about his or her life than you would like and you sense that he or she is slipping away, do resist the temptation to cling with constant phone calls and questions. Your partner is going through a big change in lifestyle and may need time to process it before sharing. Your best bet is in fact to pursue your own interests and keep developing as an individual, so that you keep pace, in your own way, with the dynamic growth your partner is going through.
Another possibility is that all your new experiences overwhelm you, and you cling to your partner at home for support. All the while, your partner at home has his or her own life and finds it difficult to deal with the sudden increase in your reliance on the relationship. You must be prepared to invest the time and effort to develop your own circle of friends and your hobbies abroad, for your own sake as well as that of the relationship.
Despite all your efforts, things may not work out. Out of respect for your partner, communicate any doubts you may have as early as you can. Talking about things gives you a chance to address the issue or to decide that you want to call it quits. Either way you are ahead: either you solve the issue, or you are both free to pursue the next relationship that will ultimately make you happy.