Reshmi Shil, a 34-year-old Calcutta-based schoolteacher, still remembers her first quarrel with her husband, Shyamal. “Married for only two months, we could only have light-hearted telephonic chats as he was posted in Delhi. So when he called up, telling me that he had broken his spectacles while trying to wear his T-shirt, I laughed heartily at his clumsiness. I was stunned when he banged down the receiver. I immediately called him back — only to have a full-blown fight!” In retrospect, however, Shil admits she was in the wrong. “Living apart, I didn’t realise that without his spectacles he had to grope his way around the whole day.” Ten years later, the fact that the couple had clearly removed most communication bottlenecks was evident on their anniversary, when “we got countless compliments about how ‘in-love’ we still look!”

Sheetal Kedia (name changed), a 22-year-old Calcutta University student, has mixed feelings about her long distance marriage to a New Jersey-based engineer. “Sometimes, it’s romantic to chat online with one’s own husband. But a relationship across two different time zones seems unreal and I’m dying to get my visa to join my husband.” However, for Udayan Mitra, 36, a Calcutta-based mid-level manager who recently had an “online love marriage” with a Gurgaon-based HR executive, a long distance marriage is a blessing. “It seems tailor-made for this age, when work-related commitments loom large 24x7. A long distance marriage lets two busy professionals work without distractions so that when they meet up they can genuinely relax in each others’ company,” Mitra claims, adding, “The icing on the cake is that the romance never gets stale!”

Professional commitments, financial compulsions, visa constraints or even children’s education — increasingly, middle class couples are living apart for numerous reasons. Unlike military marriages, where separations are de rigueur, most of these long distance marriages are a conscious lifestyle choice, seen as a necessary sacrifice for a higher goal. Many long distance middle class couples argue that unlike the underprivileged migrant population, they can afford the pleasures of instantaneous connectivity through technologies like the Internet or text messaging, making physical separation less forbidding. Says Ipsita Banerjee, a civil lawyer at the Calcutta High Court who also deals with a number of divorce cases, “In the short term, technology is a boon for couples in a long distance marriage. But ultimately it is the temperament and mutual commitment of both individuals that decide the success of a marriage.”

In popular fiction and the media, extra-marital affairs are a natural corollary of long distance marriages. “When I was about to marry a marine engineer, I encountered many snide remarks about sailors having wives at every port,” remembers Suparna Chatterji, Mumbai-based entrepreneur and a mother of two. “Two decades later, I know whether you are separated from your spouse by thousands of miles or an arm’s length, it is one’s individual chemistry with one’s spouse that matters.” Concurs Dr Debashis Ray, practising psychiatrist at the Apollo Gleneagles Clinic and Hospital and AMRI, “What about emotional distance despite physical spousal proximity? For a successful marriage, two people must be compatible physically, intellectually, sexually, emotionally and spiritually. So a long distance marriage may be successful if the couple remains as one emotional unit.”

In long distance marriages, the husband and wife must operate as individuals instead of as a unit. And for very young wives living in orthodox families, the physical absence of a husband can effectively curtail their own mobility. But for yuppie professionals like the Mitras, a long distance marriage can mean the opposite. Says Mitra, “After a 15-hour work day, while my colleagues head home I go out and party. When I call up my wife, I find she’s doing the same! But a basic level of trust is a must.”

Asserts Kumkum Bhattacharya, professor, department of social work, Visva-Bharati University, “There are two sides to every coin. A long distance marriage can enable couples to avoid daily friction. But either one or both the individuals may feel deprived, as sexual and emotional needs can remain unmet.” Apart from the inevitable degree of loneliness, various pre and post-marital determinants also play an important role, adds Dr Ray. “Pre-marital determinants include psychiatric morbidity like depression or substance abuse, whether an individual comes from a broken home or has lost or been separated from parents at an early age. Post-marital determinants include the quality of the relationship before geographical separation, and whether the separation was a mutual decision or enforced by one individual.”

Bhattacharya points out that long distance marriages have sociological implications. “While a man may enjoy a spurious kind of bachelorhood, treating marriage as a brief vacation, a woman may come to enjoy a greater degree of autonomy and self-reliance, transcending normal codes of marital patriarchy.”

With older couples, children occupy centrestage. “We encourage our nine-year-old daughter Navina to e-mail her daddy every day, fearing he’ll just remain a shadowy presence in her life,” admits Shil. But simmering tensions can erupt in the long term. Observes Bhattacharya, “As children normally stay with the mother, she becomes the figure of authority. In the long run, the father may resent that, resulting in an unhealthy power tussle for the ‘love’ of the child.”

When couples decide to start living together again, they sometimes have unrealistic expectations of having a complete and perfect family. “I know one couple that stayed married for 17 years but divorced within a year of their staying together,” says Shil.

Adds Dr Ray, “When a couple in a long distance marriage decides to stay together, one of the two individuals usually makes the transition from being a rare house guest to a full-fledged family member. Personal and physical needs, likes and dislikes, personal space — these are all largely unknown quantities and give rise to friction. ”

Living alone, both husbands and wives develop self-sufficient living patterns and learning to depend on each other may not initially be easy. “One has to consciously practise being a couple with mutual give and take, otherwise acrimonious ego clashes will follow,” cautions Bhattacharya. Banerjee feels that long distance couples need more patience than the average couple. “I’ve seen that impatience between couples causes more divorces than any other factor,” he adds.

Whether by choice or compulsion, staying married while living apart is no longer considered an aberration. But for long distance marriages, the beginning of the end can be the easy replacement of “we” with “me”. Absence can make the heart fonder for a short while, but for the long haul what matters is whether you can bridge the absences wisely.