For a paper that's supposed to be on the cutting edge of everything, this is some pretty low-class stuff:
It was July 2021 — 17 months into the pandemic — and Ms. Ordway, an extrovert, wanted to live closer to the city of Columbia, Mo. Lockdown on their rural farm in Ashland, Mo., "was a lot harder on her than it was on me," Mr. Ordway, 58, said.
They needed "to figure out how to give her what it is she needs in order to be happy," he added. They have two children, ages 17 and 14, and felt that one of them would benefit from going to school in a less rural area.
So, in March 2022, Ms. Ordway, 62, found an apartment in Columbia, a 20-minute drive from Mr. Ordway; she also got a job as a shuttle driver at the University of Missouri, which allowed her to be more social. They visit the other's home a couple of times a week, and speak on the phone every morning and every night.
The Times is really trying to upsell this unhappy here:
The decision has stuck. Though pandemic restrictions have eased and their child has left school to work, the distance is working for them. "It feels like we're dating again," Ms. Ordway said.
Mood right now:
This kind of arrangement is wrong and dangerous and destructive on a great many levels. Let's go through them:
- For starters, it's not how marriage is supposed to be structured. This has been understood for many thousands of years; the writers of the very first book of the Bible, Genesis, bluntly state that upon getting married a man "leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh." The marriage union is close, intimate, inseparable; it is not meant to be lived at 20 minutes' worth of distance. That's called a friendship, not marriage; these are two distinct concepts and should not be conflated as they are here.
- This kind of separation will, for the vast majority of people, weaken a marriage, not strengthen it. Men and women live in the same house together in marriage because building a life under the same roof bluntly reinforces the basic facts about the marital union: That you are together, you are one unit, one team, indivisible, working together. Moving 20 minutes from your spouse will only serve to degrade those values, leading inexorably toward legal separation and eventually divorce.
- It will also inevitably make the husband and wife more selfish, further degrading the marriage bonds. Few things de-center a person's ego like marriage; in a good, healthy marriage, you must always be considering your spouse, usually before yourself. That won't be the case if you live apart. Where before you were constantly thinking of your spouse — his needs, her desires, his wants, her hopes, his joy, her suffering — now you are mostly thinking about yourself, about how to tailor your life precisely to your own inclinations.
The Times in this report is giving a false illusion of happiness and security. Few things are more emblematic of disorder and collapse than a husband and wife suddenly not living together anymore. It should not be this way.
Even the appeal of "dating [your spouse] again" is a misleading siren song. "Dating," in this context, is meant for the beginning of a relationship, when things are new, uncertain, unstable; it is not meant for a seasoned marriage, where the highs and lows of early love should be replaced by the solid rock of spousal fidelity and devotion.
