Leaving my husband
thoughts on distance and desire
It’s November 2023, less than one month after I got married and three weeks since I moved in with my husband for the first time, yet I’m not in our little studio flat. I am, instead, on the top deck of a boat, sailing around the remote islands of Fiji.
I’m not sharing the luxurious room with the brand-new husband either. No, that spot is reserved for my friend and we are having the time of our bloody lives.
Many people were surprised I was travelling without my husband so soon after marriage (including the perplexed Fijian airport officer who, after I said I’d recently gotten married, congratulated my friend Julia and me). Rochelle, a Canadian and one of the dozen guests on the cruise, is not one of them.
Walking through the dusty streets of Lautoka, conversation turns to relationships, and I ask how she kept her decades-long marriage strong. She gestures to the wild forest around us. “This, at least once a year,” she said, explaining how they both embrace travelling (be it days or weeks, with friends or solo) without the other. “You need time apart to remind yourself of who you are as an individual,” she added.
Skip ahead six months. My husband and I are in our sun-soaked garden with his great aunt, Daphne. Small, grey-haired and sharp as a whip, she has done a fair share of living and has the wisdom to prove it.
“So, what’s the secret to marriage?” we grin. Like many wise people of a certain age, she doesn’t share a pithy tip or sexy strategy; instead, she tells us a story. Every week, her husband Allan would drive her to choir practice. No matter what happened that week, their challenges or arguments, he’d make sure she always got there. “The point,” she says, “is we always pursued our own passions, and encouraged the other to do the same.” They didn’t just begrudgingly accept the others’ interests or pastimes but actively enabled them to happen.
While it was choir practice instead of a Fiji cruise, Daphne shared Rochelle’s fundamental idea;
Intentionally creating distance and filling it with something self-expansive helps relationships flourish, long-term.
My career as a travel editor enables this in a somewhat dramatic way. Several times a year, I’ll hop on a plane and find myself in a different timezone and continent for a few days or weeks, exploring somewhere new. I never accept a trip without consulting Jono, yet his response is always the same: enthusiastic support for something I’m excited about.
Of course, one doesn’t need to go to Japan or the Galápagos to achieve some space. Like Daphne, the separation can be as brief as a choir practice or a book club, a sports team or hiking. It can be with other friends, strangers, or all on your own.
It cannot, I’ve found, be domestic labour or any other kind of ‘work’. Rather, it must be something I mentioned earlier: self-expansion.
I first encountered the idea of self-expansion during an interview with Amy Muise, the Associate Professor and Director of the Sexual Health and Relationships Lab at York University. While studying how long-term couples could re-ignite sexual desire, Muise discovered couples experienced higher desire when they pursued novel, exciting and moderately challenging experiences that broaden or shift their ‘sense of self’ by creating new skills or perspectives. AKA: self-expanding activities.
For many people, the pursuit of personal passions comes naturally, yet it’s easy to fall out of the rhythm. Especially when entering a new relationship stage, whether it’s dating or marriage, moving in together or children.
As Daphne clarified, it’s also one thing to pursue a passion, quite another to have your partner actively encourage and enable it rather than merely accept it.
I’ve found Daphne and Rochelle’s advice to be true for two reasons.
First, allowing the right amount of space is key to desire, an idea Esther Perel became famous for in her 2006 book Mating in Captivity.
In it, the Belgian-American psychotherapist argues: “Erotic desire thrives on distance, not closeness.”
We’re often told the ideal relationship is constantly connected and totally transparent. Yet, as Perel explains, this erases separateness, mystery and autonomy; elements that fuel desire (ooh la la).
In other words, you must see your partner as ‘other’ — a separate person with their own independence and mastery — in order to desire them.
Obviously, there’s nuance here. A relationship needs closeness, transparency and connection to thrive, so it’s about dancing between the poles rather than setting up camp in the extremes. “Fire needs air. Too much air and it extinguishes. Not enough and it suffocates,” Perel adds. It’s not about distance for distance’s sake, but creating a dynamic tension between connection and autonomy.
Pursuing a passion, separate from our partner, is one healthy way to enable this distance.
This September, Jono and I did our longest stint apart (three weeks) while I was in the UK. And boy did our relationship feel like that of two giddy teenagers during that time (spending hours on the phone and sending ‘thinking of you’ texts, wanting but not having) and for weeks after we were reunited.
Again, three weeks is extreme, but the concept scales up and down.
Secondly, your willingness to encourage, not just accept a partner’s pursuits, is a superb litmus test for how well you’re pursuing yours.
For me, it’s easy to carve out a large chunk of time (days, weeks, etc) for travel. What’s challenging is making time for hobbies in the day-to-day, something my husband excels at, whether it’s reading his book in bed before work or wingfoiling after.
If you’re delighting in hobbies, you want to help your partner do the same — if only to ensure they’re joyfully busy, rather than waiting for you to return.
On the flip side, if my husband’s pursuits elicit a bitter, stubborn resentment, or if I merely accept rather than encourage, I’ve come to realise this can say more about me than him.
Sure, our ideas of how to spend time, money and energy may be misaligned, but more often it’s because he’s living proof that the story I tell myself (”One shouldn’t prioritise time and money on playful pursuits”) is a lie. ‘If I can’t play,’ so my voice of insecurity pouts, ‘neither can he’.
Case in point is my wonderful husband’s religious devotion to Saturday morning golf. This man is so dedicated to the game that my 18-month-old niece began greeting me with “nono golfing” any time she saw me without Jono. Yes girl, you’ve caught on years earlier than I did.
For a long season, I resented him spending half a precious Saturday whacking balls around a field. Sometimes, embarrassingly, I poured gasoline on my anger by performing domestic labour needlessly solo, delightfully furious about how ‘good’ I am by being productive1.
One has two levers to pull when a partner’s pursuits elicit uncomfortable emotions2: decrease theirs or increase yours. The former was a favourite of mine. Then, I encountered the wisdom of Daphne and Rochelle.
Why, I wondered, when given the opportunity and freedom to do something with my time, did I decide it was better to guilt-trip and complain rather join in and pursue my own things?
Spoiler: I didn’t have an answer. So, today, when I encounter that familiar resentment, I treat it as a reminder to take inventory of my time;
Have I spent any of my resources on hobbies or delight this week?
Am I waiting for permission to stop life admin and go play? (If yes, I remind myself that only I can give that permission.)
What needs to be ‘sorted’, so we can both enjoy our time?3
If you struggle to make time for frivolous (non-money-making, upskilling, optimising) activities during the day-to-day, two tactics have been massively helpful:
Create external motivations. Book a class that charges no-shows, attend a ticketed event, enrol in a paid lesson or commit to something you love with a friend (one who won’t let you flake).
Get out of the house. Environments matter. I can read or write in bed on a Saturday morning, but 9 times out of 10, I’ll end up doing laundry, cleaning bathrooms, the list goes on. So, like a university student who could study at home but goes to the library, I take myself to a café or friend’s house where I can fully commit to my hobby.
These days, when people give Jono pitying looks when I leave on assignment, or assume I’ll join the bitching about his golf, I think of Rochelle gesturing to that wild Fijian forest and Daphne’s weekly drives to choir.
I think of these wise women who knew that long-lasting love isn’t about romantic getaways or being someone’s other half, but motivating the other to become fizzy and full all on their own.
Of course, there is a legitimate domestic labour issue, and if your partner consistently prioritises leisure above house/relational work, it needs to be discussed. This is different from passive-aggressively doing their chores before they have a chance to do them, so you can be righteously mad, which I have never done…
Given the activity, time and money are reasonable.
The latter will always look like housework to me, which can swallow passions whole, leaving no time for play. So, it’s been essential to Clearly Communicate what ‘enabling my passion’ requires. To Daphne, it was a ride to choir but to me it’s often getting the house in a kind of order.