Commuter Spouses

What can we learn from looking at married partners who live apart? In Commuter Spouses, Danielle Lindemann explores how couples cope when they live apart to meet the demands of their dual professional careers. Based on the personal stories of almost one-hundred commuter spouses, Lindemann shows how these atypical relationships embody (and sometimes disrupt!) gendered constructions of marriage in the United States. These narratives of couples who physically separate to maintain their professional lives reveal the ways in which traditional dynamics within a marriage are highlighted even as they are turned on their heads. Commuter Spouses follows the journeys of these couples as they adapt to change and shed light on the durability of some cultural ideals, all while working to maintain intimacy in a non-normative relationship. Lindemann suggests that everything we know about marriage, and relationships in general, promotes the idea that couples are focusing more and more on their individual and personal betterment and less on their marriage. Commuter spouses, she argues, might be expected to exemplify in an extreme manner that kind of self-prioritization. Yet, as this book details, commuter spouses actually maintain a strong commitment to their marriage. These partners illustrate the stickiness of traditional marriage ideals while simultaneously subverting expectations.

Long-distance relationships can be difficult. Whether you’re dating, long-married, one of you has been promoted to a different city, or you live a bi-coastal lifestyle, the information and guidelines in this book helps you keep your relationship connected when you’re disconnected.

How does a couple stay connected when living apart is their norm? A super commuter is a person whose job is far enough away from home that they must live apart from their family for days or weeks at a time. During the past several years the number of super commuters in both the United States and abroad has risen exponentially. Through interviews with people from around the world as well as the author's personal experience as the wife of a super commuter and professional knowledge as a licensed therapist specializing in supporting super commuter couples, this book takes the reader behind the scenes of this lifestyle where they will find tips for strengthening relationships, insights on how to decide if super commuting is right for them, practical advice on how best to navigate a super commuter relationship, and six steps to help super commuter families cope with ambiguous loss.

Distilled from nearly two hundred interviews, conducted from the 2003 invasion of Iraq on, Army Spouses marshals an incredible breadth of individual experiences, range of voices, insider access, and theoretical expertise to tell the story of US Army husbands and wives and their families during wartime in this century. Morten Ender offers the first contemporary study of the emotional cycle of deployment and its impact on military families in the post-9/11 world. Military spouses, as he shows, operate both near and far from the front lines, serving on the home front to support combat service in the so-called Global War on Terror that has intimately bound together soldiers, families, the military institution, the state, and society. He paints a vivid picture of army spouses’ range of responses to deployment separations that illuminates the deep sacrifices that soldiers, veterans, and their families have made over the past twenty years.

This singular book describes various aspects of the commuting experience and delineates a process linking causes and consequences of commuting stress. The authors quote extensive survey data from metropolitan areas and examine literature on the known psychological, physiological, attitudinal, and behavioral consequences of commuting. They then provide a model integrating these variables. This comprehensive text features specific coping recommendations at the individual, governmental, and organizational levels.

The Career Mystique shows that most Americans-men and women-continue to embrace the myth that hard work, long hours, and continuous employment pay off, even though it is out of date and out of place in twenty-first-century America. Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling argue that the lock step arrangements around education, work, family, and retirement no longer fit the realities and risks of contemporary living, yet the roles, rules, and regulations spawned by the career mystique remain in place. This books shows that ambiguities and uncertainties about the future abound in boardrooms, in offices, and on factory floors, as Americans face the realities of corporate restructuring, chronic job insecurity, and double demands at work and at home. Moen and Roehling show the career mystique for what it is: a false myth standing in the way of creating new, alternative workplaces and career flexibilities. Based on research funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Institute on Aging.