Till Jobs Do Us Part

The marriage of President and Mrs. Bill Clinton may not be typical. But when Hillary Rodham Clinton moves to New York in the next few weeks to pursue her own political career, their marriage will take on a new form shared by more than a million other U.S. couples--the commuter marriage.

First labeled a decade ago, commuter or “dual location” marriages have paralleled the rise of dual-career couples, mergers and downsizing, sociologists say. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 2.4 million people who are married, not romantically separated, but living in different households--whether those households are across town, in other states or even other countries.

Two-career couples “want to make sure the family corporation prospers,” explains Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “They don’t know which career to bet on. It always used to be the man’s. Now they say, ‘We’ll bet on us both.’ ”

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Sociologists say most commuter marriages involve a professional woman who doesn’t want to follow her husband to a new job opportunity or, more typically, whose husband doesn’t want to follow her to one. In some cases, couples choose to live in different places temporarily while assessing whether a new job will work out. In others, the arrangement lasts 20 years or more.

“I’d much rather live happily apart than unhappily together,” explains John Gillis, a history professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Eleven years ago, after their children were grown, his wife, Tina, moved to Berkeley to take a dream job--administrator of UC Berkeley’s humanities center. For the Gillises, both 60 and married since 1960, marriage has evolved into a matter of flying cross-country nearly every month and nightly phone calls (10 p.m. his time, 7 p.m. hers) in order to stay connected.

One reason the arrangement works, they say, is that they’ve built a traditional and committed relationship that transcends geographic distance. Another is that they established two equally comfortable homes, with another vacation house in Maine, so neither feels deprived. He lives in a four-bedroom home with all the family memorabilia on a shady street in Princeton, N.J., while she has a four-bedroom, modern, glass hillside home with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

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There have been some drawbacks: The neighbors didn’t socialize with Tina until after John came for a lengthy visit; Tina and John worry that one of them might become seriously ill, and last year they paid $17,000 in property taxes.

Married couples living apart are not a new phenomenon. Historically, however, they tended to be impoverished immigrants, slaves or military couples whose choices were limited. Wealthier couples have not voluntarily sought to exercise domestic independence since the Middle Ages, when marriages were alliances between landowners and authority figures who frequently lived apart to govern or to visit their separate realms, according to Stephanie Coontz, a family historian at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

“What’s interesting is that what was a totally exceptional situation that created quite a bit of freedom for the women is now much more widespread,” she says.

Today’s commuter marriages often are found among academics or couples in the entertainment industry who rarely find jobs in the same place but have enough money and flexibility to avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls.

Edgar Burcksen, a freelance film editor in Los Angeles, and his wife, Jana Nezdobova, an optician in San Rafael, like their temporary arrangement so well, they’ve decided to keep it until their children, 10 and 12, go off to college.

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Burcksen moved to North Hollywood seven years ago, after a Lucas Films project he was working on ended and he couldn’t find similar employment in Northern California. Now he usually works 10 days in Los Angeles, then flies 400 miles to spend four days at home in Marin County.

When Burcksen, 53, worked at Lucas Films, his 48-year-old wife says she was often cranky and resentful because he spent so much time at work, often returning to the editing room after dinner.

Now, she says, they spend hours chatting on the phone, and he helps the children with their homework through the fax machine. When he’s home, he’s more involved with the children and doesn’t get interrupted by calls from work. Plus, she says, “he does all the work around the house.”

Living alone in Los Angeles, Burcksen says, “I don’t have to call up my wife and say, ‘Honey, I’m going to be late.’ I can work 12 hours a day, and nobody cares!”

Recently, Nezdobova flew down for an evening to join him at a premiere, returning the next day to be home when the children returned from school. After 25 years of marriage, it was as much fun as a date, she says.

Neighbors in their traditional suburban block wonder how she trusts her husband living alone in Hollywood.

“If you don’t trust somebody, then it doesn’t matter if he’s in some other city or at home,” she says. “The relationship has to be very stable. Otherwise, you cannot do this.”

Wives in a commuter marriage say women friends often envy them. Jamie White, a Los Angeles radio talk show co-host, says people are often shocked to hear that her husband, an orthopedic surgeon, lives in Denver with his two children from a previous marriage.

“Then they say, ‘That sounds like the perfect marriage!’ Every woman says, ‘I would love not to be with my husband during the weekday. I could get so much more done!’ ”

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However, White, 31, admits their relationship has suffered since she couldn’t refuse an offer to work in L.A. two years ago, only a few months after their wedding.

When they get together on weekends, she doesn’t know where to find utensils in his house. He can’t remember what foods she likes. She rents a fixer-upper in Pasadena. He and the kids live in a suburban mansion near Denver.

“We just don’t have anything in common anymore,” she says.

“When I moved here, I was so devastated, I cried every night. I was alone in scary L.A. by myself. Then I just picked myself up, and now it’s very odd. It’s like I’m not married,” she says. She admits she has a male friend with whom she spends three or four weekday evenings. Although she has remained faithful to her jealous husband, she says, “it’s really hard.”

White calls her situation a Catch-22. Her husband doesn’t want to uproot the children to move to Los Angeles and, at this point, she’s unwilling to move back to Colorado.

“Now, it’s so far gone, that even if I would move back, I don’t know what would happen,” she says. “Do I want to give up my career and maybe [still] have my marriage ruined?”

Sharon Watson, 56, of the Los Angeles County Children’s Planning Council, discovered that geographic separation eventually turned what she thought was a solid, 20-year marriage of soul mates into a divorce.

At first, her husband, Eric, a chemist, took a studio apartment in Thousand Oaks because he couldn’t bear the 1 1/2-hour commute from their Mount Washington home to his lab. Seven years later, his company transferred him to Boulder, Colo. At first, he flew home every other weekend, then once a month to spend four days.

Sharon began to resent the unequal division of household labor and felt guilty for asking him to do chores when he came home. The last straw was having to fight two-hour traffic to pick him up at LAX. “It was silly, but it became a symbol of one more thing.

“It gets cumulative over the years,” she says.

After one visit, she called him in Denver. He said, “I wrote you a letter asking for a divorce.” She said, “You wrote me a letter?” He said, “I couldn’t face you.”

She says, “That was it.”

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A year later, he was laid off and now is traveling the world.

“We’ll probably always love each other,” she says. But if they ever get back together or if she has another relationship, Watson says she’ll insist on living together under one roof.

Lynn Smith can be reached at lynn.smith@latimes.com.