The longest time you have spent apart from your other half? How was it?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Longest apart in our nearly 28 years living together (23 married) was around 2 months. She was doing an internship with Seagate in MN, and I was working, taking care of the pets, and being sorry for myself.

Most things weren’t bad, and that was before we had co-dependent Cat which would have been inconsolable, but I was quite unhappy and had a hard time sleeping and getting up. My give a damn about just about everything else was near all-time lows. And we did an online chat every 2-3 days, and played WoW together with friends online once a week.

So I’ll give a +1 for tech. We’d been going out for several years before we both graduated from college and were living in separate states before moving in together. I burned a LOT of prepaid calling cards in those days.

22

In 2013 or so my husband and I were living in Florida while he finished his post-doc internship to wrap up his PhD. I got pregnant (on purpose) but I miscarried the fetus. I hadn’t yet made any friends who could support me through it. He was on neuropsych rotation so he wasn’t getting home until maybe 11pm and I was completely falling apart psychologically. Our relationship followed suit.

Since we were planning to move to Chicago afterward, I got the idea for us to geographically separate. I’d go live with my Aunt and try to find a job and an apartment while he would wrap up his post-doc.

This was probably the darkest time in our 24 year relationship, but the reasons for separating weren’t that we didn’t want to live together. I think some people thought we were getting a divorce or something. It was not like that. It was, “We can’t spend time together anyway so you might as well go stay with your biggest support person while you get your mental health back on track.”

So we were separated six months, and ended up not living in Chicago and moving back to Michigan. We started to pick up the pieces of our shattered relationship.
It took me a long time to forgive myself for what happened that year.

One thing we did, because communication had broken down so much, is we started a shared playlist and we would take turns sending each other songs, kind of like a conversation, and the upshot is we have an entire playlist that instantly reminds me of that time. We had made plenty of playlists about how much we loved each other at various stages of our lives, but that was the first one we made that was like, painful. But still full of love.

23

I was with my ex-wife for fifteen years. I went on many business trips that were two to six weeks long. In the beginning she’d cry and cry when I left and when I called her because she missed me so much. At the end it would be like, “when are you going away again? It’s been a while”. To be a little fair, we were new in town when I first was traveling and didn’t have a friend group yet. The longest that she was away from my was maybe ten days when she went to visit her family. I typically went with her but occasionally couldn’t.

I never lived alone until after the divorce. It was family, dorms, housemates, housemates with girlfriend, fiance/wife and then just me. I have had a couple live in girlfriends in the interim but I really like living alone.

24

I think the longest time apart was about three weeks when all the “women folk” gathered to support my cousin who was dying of liver cancer. We took turns staying with my cousin in shifts (along with an on-call hospice nurse.) It was a rough time (missing my husband and the actual dying thing), but also a time I got to know my cousins better because I had always lived so much farther away from them. My husband stayed behind to care for my father who lived with us, as well as our dogs. And he couldn’t take time off of work.

Other times have only been for a couple of weekend nights. Oh - I was in the hospital for 10 days once, but of course he would come visit. We’ve been married 21 years.

25

Been together 56 years, married 55 of them. Longest time apart was one week, when I traveled to a trade convention, 30 years ago. A few shorter separations when she was out of state for business trips 30-40 years ago. Our times apart were mildly unpleasant but not a big deal.

26

Congratulations, that’s quite an achievement!

27

I know that the context of this was about hospice care, but it reminded me of one of the most important reasons for my wife and her sister to be in Brazil: they have a large family, and they were desperately in need of time together with their cousins, where the middle-aged women could just hang out and talk about “Remember when we were kids, when so and so did this and that”

That’s part of the reason why I didn’t go (that and the inability to take a month off of work). I wanted them to be completely unfettered in getting an extended “girls’ night out”; it has been too many years for them.

Five days and counting!

28

The other long period of time we had was two months during our first anniversary (age 24.) I went to Mexico by myself to do some volunteer work. People thought I was insane to be going anywhere without my husband especially on our anniversary.

I bought him an anniversary present that we still have. It’s a large somewhat abstract painting of two people passionately embracing in the ocean. What I remember the most is that I had to pay more for the shipping than the actual price of the painting.

29

You have to admit that was a bold move!
Cool that you still have the painting decades later.

30

In 2012 we had been living in the UK for 12 years, and had reached the decision to move back to New Zealand. We put the house on the market. As one of the kids was getting married in December, we decided to travel for that, and my wife would stay while I returned to keep working and sell the house. We expected this to only be a few months.

The market went flat, and we had no action on the house sale until May/June 2013. Then the stupid UK house sale system dragged on without an exchange date. I was able to keep extending my contract for work, but my security clearance would expire and my employer wasn’t going to renew it.

Everything finally got sorted out for the house sale, and I got the movers in September. I had one single bed, a washing machine, and a few cooking things. No fridge, and I had to borrow eating utensils. Then my contract finally ended. I was hounding the Real Estate agent for an exchange date. After a few weeks, I booked a ticket home, and set the deadline for exchange.

On the Monday of the final week I rang the lawyers office only to find out that they had retired the previous Friday. I had a short conversation with the office manager, and the locum set the exchange for Friday. I flew out on Sunday. The lawyer confirmed the money Friday afternoon and I dropped off the keys.

Ten months in all. We talked daily until the internet was shut off. I visited her family, and did some trips for myself (Bletchley Park and the Computing Museum). I used to take my guitar out to a local park, sit under a tree and practice songs for a couple of hours to get out the house. I went to the movies - Les Miserables was a bad idea. I cried so much the lady next to me asked if I was OK.

We had lots of friends, and our daughter was studying in London, so I didn’t feel lonely, but I felt very disconnected. The stress of handling the house sale alone was a challenge, especially when the lawyer wanted my wife to sign something. We had set up a Power of Attorney so I could handle everything, but she still had to sign and send a certified copy. Really annoying. When the house was empty and I finished work was the worst. I had a laptop and a bed and that was it. It was pretty boring.

We coped, and I don’t regret what we did. It was the best approach in the circumstances, and it all worked out.

31

When Mrs Magill and I got married, she was working for Accenture. She would take off at three o’clock in the morning to go to the airport, and she would get home Thursday night (sometimes Friday morning if the flights didn’t connect). About that time the song “Save Tonight” was getting heavy airplay. That was one of the few times in my life where a song perfectly fit how I felt.

When we were moving to Nashville eleven years ago, she started her job out here when the boys were still in school, so she moved out here and house-hunted, while I tried to sell the old house while taking care of a five year-old, a seven year-old, and a surly eleven year old. That was about three months, but we would see each other every other weekend. I was so busy with the boys, I hardly had time to feel lonely.

Now, she has to go to Rhode Island for one week each quarter.

32

Thank you very much!