Most people assume that happily ever after means living together, but that's not always the case. A growing number of couples are trying "commuter marriages," where they live in different places at least part of the time for work. Real estate trainer David Knox, who has lived hundreds of miles away from his wife for five years, shared his story on HuffPost Live.
Knox and his wife bought a second home in California as an escape from the Minnesota winters. On one flight home, his wife was offered a job working in California. "I said, 'well, for the winter months, it'll be great -- we'll be together. But in the summer months, we're gonna have to figure that out,'" he explained to host Caitlyn Becker. "And she took my motorcycle, a car and a trailer on 207, left to California and never came back. Finally she said, 'you know what? You don't have to save that stuff in the bathroom -- I'm not coming home.' We all of a sudden realized we were, in fact, living apart."
Despite the distance, Knox and his wife try to see each other every few weeks. He flies to her in the winter, in the summer, she flies to him. "Our time together is special, we look forward to it. We love each other. The downside of it is, I get lonely. I miss her, she misses me."
While Knox would not endorse commuter marriages for every couple, he did acknowledge that his wife's job became essential during the financial crisis. "When the economy crashed, her extra income helped quite a bit, so we decided that, you know, I didn't want to go out of business, so she was a big help. I kept my business on track."
But after five years of living apart, Knox and his wife will be reunited shortly -- she quit her job and will be moving back to Minnesota for a few months. "We did reach a point where we said, 'you know, I'm kind of tired of this, I'd like to get back together."