Marriage at-a-Distance

Introduction

The success of our nine-year marriage at-a-distance is not easily explained to people whose conception of marriage requires a couple to share the same house, bedroom, and bed. We live 502 miles away from each other in separate countries. Though

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certainly not without its trials and tribulations, and while we eagerly look forward to living together in the near future, our marriage at-a-distance has sustained us for almost a decade. We are both psychoanalysts who met in a psychoanalytic online discussion group. Below we separately describe and analyze our experience. 

Part I: Jean Hantman

The movie You’ve Got Mail tells the story of two people who, like my husband and me, met on the Internet and fell in love before ever seeing each other. I’ve seen it about eleven times and every time I view it I notice something new and true about love and relationships, and computers.

The last time I saw it I realized it depicts something that was occurring sociologically in the mid-to-late 1990’s, when half of us had made the leap “online” and the other half hadn’t. In fact, the stodgy resisted knowing about it. You could be living with your wife and children, or parents, brothers and sisters, or girlfriend or boyfriend, and disappear into a whole new private world they knew nothing about and didn’t want to know.

In You’ve Got Mail, Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) was living with her boyfriend and Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) with his girlfriend. Their partners had no idea what kind of social revolution was taking place, what private lives were unfolding right in front of their eyes at the dining room table on the computer.

Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed the movie, seems to posit that, by the late 90’s, the resistance to getting online had become a character flaw that undermined, in fact ended, many already-bad relationships. Kathleen’s boyfriend, Frank (Greg Kinnear), was obsessed with typewriters, and romantically, pompously opposed to computers, while Kathleen secretly slipped away into her e-mail and instant messaging relationship with Joe. (Instant messaging involves Internet exchanges between parties simultaneously connected electronically.) One gets the feeling that, along with all the other incompatibilities in each of the two relationships, resisting computers might have been perhaps the worst: the relationship-breaker.

Frank: Name me one thing, one that we’ve gained from technology

Kathleen: Electricity.

Frank: [points to computer] You think this machine is your friend but it’s not.

For a short time between 1993 (the year You’ve Got Mail came out) and 2000, there was a split in our society: those whose open-minded, voracious curiosity led them into a spectacular new way of connecting with like-minded people from all over the world, impossible to imagine ten years earlier; and those who started looking more and more provincial, prehistoric, stubbornly clinging to Remington typewriters, power lunches in person, and the P.T.A. “In person” became obsolete temporarily, as personal and business relationships moved online and our collective, highly-charged libidinal energy shifted from in person to e-mail.

Half of us were online having discussions with psychoanalysts in Turkey and Montreal; anonymously posting to message boards for help with relationships and addictions; finding the recipe for anything in three seconds flat from a chef in Brazil; and (according to Nora Ephron and the online rest of us) the other group was dangerously out of the loop.

So in 1994, divorced with three young children and working on my PhD, I bought a computer. Instantly, I signed up for America Online and, like Lucy, slipped through the wardrobe into the Internet. (“Lucy’s siblings insist that Lucy was only gone for seconds and not for hours as she claims.” See The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). Any fan of the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Internet can relate to the feeling of stepping into an extraordinary new world without ever leaving the house. (This phenomenon happens with many inventions. Until they become simply tools, or manifest their downside, there is a heavenly glow around the new: sewing machines, birth control pills, www.com, etc.)

In 1996 I joined an online psychoanalytic discussion group that worked liked this: a member would write his or her thoughts, questions and opinions about psychoanalytic topics and when he or she clicked “send,” all 700 members of the fo-

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rum would receive this “posting” in their e-mail inbox. This was how my husband and I met. I posted a thought about psychoanalysis to 700 anonymous members of this online forum and he posted back. Lively discussions ensued. There were others posting opinions about psychoanalysis but it became clear soon enough that Dr. Carveth and I were beginning to form a personal bond, in separate countries, that the rest of the (mostly anonymous) members watched.

I didn’t know what he looked like or how old he was. I may have known by then that he lived in Toronto and had a six-year-old son. All I could tell was that he was brilliant and accessible—friendly, undefended. He had no “art,” no armor. He was who he was and I admired this because, at the time, I was only art and armor, more sweet than friendly, and cautious, having recently experienced the meltdown of my first marriage.

After a month of group discussion, he privately e-mailed me with an offer to help with my dissertation, saying that, as a professor, he had coached many grad students on their road to doctorates. That started stage two of our relationship. Still never having seen each other, without knowing the slightest thing about each other’s appearance, or age, or location or any of the things that normal dating reveals at the outset, we moved to the second stage of our long-distance relationship: private e-mail. This brings to mind an exchange from You’ve Got Mail.

Joe:                  You’re crazy about him.…

Kathleen:          Yes. I am.

Joe:                  Then why don’t you run off with him?
What are you waiting for?

Kathleen:          I don’t actually know him.

Joe:                  Really? –

Kathleen:          We only know each other – oh,
God, you’re not going to believe this…

Joe:                  Let me guess. From the Internet.

Kathleen:          Yes.

Joe:                  You’ve got mail.

Kathleen:          Yes.

Joe:                  Three very powerful words.

Kathleen:          Yes.

I knew about instant messaging (IM) because I was on AOL, but Don hadn’t yet discovered it. I didn’t tell him about it because I loved the pace and rhythm of our e-mail correspondence at the beginning. Epistolary was more my style for relationships with far away friends than the phone. Having something to do with my hermetic personality, combined with what I had learned about the nature of desire, I preferred the space and time between e-mails to the immediacy of an IM or a phone call. But we shifted from e-mail to both telephone and instant messaging after about two months. We still hadn’t met in person.

We Meet in New York City, Break up Fourteen Times, and Get Married: One afternoon we were talking on the phone and I said, “It’s too bad we’ll never meet, but let’s be long-distance friends forever.” Don replied, “I’m coming to New York in December for a conference. Why don’t you meet me there?”

This set off warning bells because I had by now had too much experience with dating “blind,” meeting men online, thinking they sounded interesting and then the letdown at the actual meeting because there was no chemistry. In fact, I didn’t believe in chemistry until I started Internet dating and discovered how much of the physical is in-

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volved at the beginning of a relationship. Don was convinced that we would be as compatible in person as we had grown to be long-distance. But I’m a pessimist and I wasn’t as sure. Don assured me that there would be chemistry because, he said, “all women love me.” I was incapable of opposing his mixture of bravado and optimism and so we did meet, on December 18, 1996, at the winter meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association at the Waldorf. At that point, our real long-distance relationship started.

“I Wanted It to be You”: The movie, from which the quote in the heading was taken, ends at this point, when the two characters meet, but our story continued on. When I tell women about my long-distance marriage almost all of them say, “Wow, you have the best of both worlds. You have a great marriage and your own space.” When I tell men about my long-distance marriage they express a wide range of negative emotions, from skepticism to dismay. I ask women what they make of this difference in response. In general, they tell me that men need women around more, they need to live with a woman. Occasionally the word “needy” is used. I don’t think men are needier; I think they are more companionable than women. They need less time to regroup after clashes; they are faster to forgive, to love again.

We went from visiting each other about four or five times a year at the beginning to now seeing each other twice a month: I usually fly to Toronto. I much prefer visiting Don in Toronto than having him come to Philadelphia. I have always been a “runaway” and traveling suits me. Don is a “homeboy” with many close ties to Toronto institutions and organizations, and being visited at home by a runaway suits him.

I should say, though, that the reason we didn’t pick one city to live in together is not a reflection of either one of our styles, gender or personality. We haven’t lived together yet because I have been finishing raising my three children in Philadelphia and Don has an even younger son in Toronto. Next fall my youngest starts college, and so I have started the immigration process.

Through overcoming the struggles involved in nurturing our marriage in two different countries, over and over again, I have actually changed more significantly than through twenty years of psychoanalysis. I won’t go into the literally long list of shifts in my way of thinking about love, fidelity, commitment, and desire. Through the struggle I have learned faith most of all, that is, the ability to hold onto something that is out of sight knowing that it is right there all the time.

Part II: Don Carveth

I too have changed more significantly through my relationship with Jeanie than through my three analyses combined. But it was all that analytic work that gave me the capacity to respond to the gift the Internet had given me—my encountering her in an online psychoanalytic discussion group—and then to follow through rather than retreat from the challenge of love.

Jeanie has described our meeting. At first I didn’t even realize I was dialoguing with a woman. I teach in a bilingual (French/English) liberal arts college where it is not unusual for me to have male colleagues named “Jean.” I’m not entirely certain why I assumed “she” was a “he”—perhaps it was the somewhat “phallic” way she had of writing, at least in those days. (Has there been something of a softening? I think so.) There was Marcio in Baltimore, and Bernard just outside New York. For some reason I imagined this “fellow” Jean resided in Belgium—something about the name “Hantman” I suppose. In any case, I slowly began to notice that this “Jean’s” postings on the list in response to mine seemed unusually warm, even affectionate. I began to imagine that “he” might be gay. That was okay, I thought. Now in my fifties, I felt I’d overcome my youthful homophobia and I could allow myself to enjoy this young man’s apparent admiring response to me. When “he” spoke of his difficulties with his psychoanalytically oriented doctoral dissertation I even found myself offering to help mentor him.

It was at this point that some of the other members of the list, who had been online with Jean for some months prior to my joining and who knew of her gender—and who had no doubt been amused by my misunderstanding—posted comments that caused the scales to fall from my eyes. That occasioned my sending her my first, off-list, private e-mail, in which I asked if it was really true

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that she belonged to my favourite gender. She replied in a private e-mail with the subject-line: “XX not XY.” I was overjoyed. With intensified private e-mail contact and the addition of telephone communication, I soon realized I was in love, even before the exchange of photographs. The fateful meeting that Christmas in New York merely clinched the deal. We left New York in separate cabs, hers heading to Penn Station, mine to La Guardia. For a few blocks we travelled side by side, until hers turned off. I felt as if my heart was breaking and I couldn’t refrain from muttering to the cabbie: “There goes the love of my life.”

Encountering one’s “soul-mate” can be terrifying. It forces one to revise one’s view of one’s whole past life and relationships. It presents a frightening challenge: is one willing and able to radically renovate one’s life structure in light of the revelation, or will one use “sophisticated” arguments to rationalize a retreat and justify adherence to established patterns?

Our relationship was highly impractical. We lived many miles apart, in different countries. We each had young children to raise. She was unable to move here; I was unable to move there. It seemed the sensible thing to do was say goodbye. We tried, many times, but found it impossible to part. So there seemed no alternative but to embrace a long-distance relationship, which soon became a marriage at-a-distance.

One of the things that made the relationship appear doomed from the outset, at least to Jeanie, was her Freudianism. Accepting the view that the sexual drive is rooted in a bodily source and therefore essentially biological and ineradicable, she was pessimistic regarding my capacity to remain faithful while living apart. Drive tension would build up and, in her absence, I would need and find an outlet. (Oddly enough, she seemed not to apply this theory to herself, but only to me, as if drive theory only really obtains in the case of the male!)

Respecting the power of the unconscious compulsion to repeat and aware of how difficult it is for “a leopard to change his spots,” she was doubtful that a man who had been married twice before and for whom Eros is important could be emotionally and sexually “contained” in a relationship based on weekend meetings every three or four weeks, supplemented by holiday get-togethers, and otherwise dependent upon e-mail, instant messaging (sometimes enhanced by video-cam) and telephone contacts. She was convinced my loneliness and libidinal tensions, plus the availability of other women in both my academic and psychoanalytic communities, would inevitably lead me astray. I worked hard to counter her fears, arguing against Freud’s (and the popular) view of sexuality as “bubbling up” from the body, as it were, in favour of an existential and self-psychological view of human sexuality.

According to Jean Paul Sartre, the human self has an “eccentric” (ec-centric or off-center) relation with the body. As children, we not only have to learn to identify our selves with our bodies, but under various circumstances we can disidentify from our bodies and what may be happening to them. We can put ourselves into a wide range of different “projects” (e.g., into political goals for which we may be prepared even to sacrifice our bodily life altogether) and into various “disembodied” forms of “intercourse” (e.g., into our words, enjoying conversation) or into our intellects (enjoying intellectual intercourse). Or we can decide to “incarnate” ourselves—put our “selves” into our bodies (specifically our sexual organs)—and enjoy sexual intercourse, after which, still embodied, we might shift from a genital to an oral project and enjoy a smoke or a meal together. Freud, of course, privileged the sexual channel of our multi-channel human universe, viewing it as somehow primary and all others—friendship, altruistic love, sports, music, whatever—as somehow derivative, “sublimations” or transformations of the “real thing.”

I have always found it difficult to convincingly argue this Sartrean view to colleagues steeped in the Freudian privileging of sexuality. They are quick to assume the argument is motivated by some defensive flight from our animality and our sexuality. Matters only get worse when such colleagues learn of my Christianity. They are quick to assume some sexually repressed choirboy is at work in this critique of drive theory. (Suffice it to say that in light of her familiarity with my history and personality, Jeanie appreciates the irony in this analysis.) But to refuse to reduce

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Eros, the drive to connect, to integrate, to unite, to the one channel of sexual intercourse, and to see all other forms of connection as merely derivative, is in no way to de-value the sexual channel. I confess it’s my favourite channel, but it remains only one of the ways in which Eros may be gratified.

Freud himself had moved “beyond the pleasure principle” but had done so only partially, never entirely transcending the tension-reduction, drive-discharge model which, for both the Scottish psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbairn and for Heinz Kohut and his followers in self psychology, describes pathology, not health. For these psychoanalysts, our primary drive is for satisfying, holistic personal relationships and in the absence of these we fall back upon pleasure-seeking. The idea of human “driven-ness” as a “breakdown product” due to frustration of the need for positive personal relations is an important supplement to mainstream psychoanalysis.

Part III: Conclusion

Don Carveth

Early on I assured Jeanie that since, for the first time in my life I had found someone with whom I enjoyed mature personal relations (seeing, valuing and respecting one another’s separateness and differences, as well as similarities) and from whom I received a level of validation, empathy and responsiveness that made me feel reliably “seen,” “held” and loved, I felt released from my narcissistic “driven-ness” enough to be able to return her love, to give as well as receive these gifts—that is, to idealize (not idolize) her, in a stable, realistic, enduring and “faith-full” way.

Who can blame her for being sceptical? It sounded good. But time has proven me (and Fairbairn and Kohut) right. The narrow sexual frustration inevitably entailed in marriage at-a-distance is not really a problem as long as one’s need for a loving, responsive and empathic partner is reliably and frequently gratified. On average we have conversed, screen to screen as it were, for at least two uninterrupted hours every single night, online or on the phone or both, for the past nine years. This is more direct communication than that enjoyed by many married couples who live together. Ironically, the residual anxiety that, for Jeanie, accompanies her love causes her to keep an eye on me in ways that both gratify my need for her attention and reinforce my devotion and desire. It works.

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