Day 143: Just Because I Love You Doesn't Mean I'm Going to LIve With You

I have not lived with my husband in a year and I’m not planning to live with him anytime soon. This fact seems to elicit shock from most people I tell. It’s not as if I prefer not to live with him, well, most of the time anyway. I love living with Jeff. He’s interesting, cuddly and can always be counted on to clean the bathrooms. Our current living arrangements are courtesy of the Army and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. In a month he will be home and for a month he will be here with me, but then he will go back to Ft. Bragg and I will stay in Charlotte. After a year of being separated by half the globe, a two and half hour drive is as close as the next room.

Thing is, with the Army there is no end in sight. He could retire in three years and then we could stay in Charlotte or move to DC or back to our beloved NYC, but he won’t retire, not my man. Nope, he’s been in the Army since he was 17 and he’ll likely be in for another 20 years, so how do we make it work when I am unwilling to live in places like Leavenworth, KS and Fayetteville, NC? My answer is to just not go. We are both independent people capable of sustaining a long distance marriage. He has moved around his entire life, even as a kid his parents never settled anywhere for very long and that makes him distinctly gifted at making friends and adapting to new people and locations. Whereas my particular skill is in learning to be alone. I’m good at it and I don’t mind so much.

I don’t know where the future is going to take us geographically, but I do know that my home may not be in the same location as my husband’s and that is something with which we are both willing to deal. Happiness comes in many different forms, and the one thing I have learned with 100% certainty is that if I am living somewhere I hate, I won’t be happy. Jeff knows it too and as I’ve told him for years, if I’m not happy he won’t be happy, because I will make him miserable.

So we are left with separate homes, but that doesn’t have to mean separate lives. Many of us have friends or family that live in another city and we somehow stay connected, this isn’t much different except it takes a little more effort, time and money to make a commute work. Without kids and a job I really don’t have a reason to stay here, but I’m hoping that will change soon – well the job part that is. At 36 I’m getting a little tired of trying to reinvent my career every two years, so I think I’m going to put down some roots, and I don’t think that is going to hurt my marriage one damn bit. Love doesn’t just exist in the same house and it’s not going to go anywhere if we’re not in the same state.