When You and Your Spouse Want to Live in Different Hometowns
Will and Jen fell hard for each other while attending Tufts dental school in Boston. They both dreamed of moving back home with the other. The problem: “home” was for him in Michigan and for her in Maine.
Married and living in Florida today, they discuss how they handle conflict over where to live, why both sometimes feel like a trailing spouse, and what they have learned from each other about the meaning of home.
Where are you from?
Jen: I am from a small town called Hampden, Maine.
Will: I am from Birmingham, Michigan, which is a suburb of Detroit. It’s not a small town like Hampden, but it is similar in lots of ways. We met at Tufts dental school in Boston.
Why do you both identify strongly with your hometowns?
Jen: “Home” is where my family is, and conveniently that is in a beautiful, beautiful place in Maine. Growing up, I had all of my cousins around and my aunts and uncles. When it was time to go to college, I went to the closest college, which was 20 minutes up the road. When I got into dental school, I chose Tufts — the closest dental school to my hometown. I think my overwhelming sense of home comes from the fact that I have such a large family unit all in one place. It’s just what I’ve always known.
Will: My family is all over the place. None are still in Michigan. But the thing that’s most central to me and that has all of my deepest memories is Michigan. I had a very close immediate family growing up, but we were all very different people. It was sometimes tough to bond with my siblings, because of the difference in personalities as well as in age. There is a five- to eight-year age gap between me and them. So I ended up bonding with friends who were in the Michigan area. For instance, I grew up across the street from my best friend, and I consider his family to also be part of my family. I have a very strong friend group there.
I wanted to leave Michigan for dental school and experience something else, but I always intended to go back. I had the best childhood ever. Michigan has everything. Obviously, Jen, in a great way, threw a wrench in those plans.
How did you adjust to realizing you had different definitions of home?
Jen: It didn’t make sense to me that he wanted to go back to Michigan when he didn’t have family there. I couldn’t understand that his friends were also his family. We both had to accept the fact that everyone has a completely different definition of family and home. It took a while.
Were your attachments to your respective hometowns a source of tension as you started dating?
Jen: It wasn’t an issue when we first started dating. When Will first falls in love, he’s a pushover. We were going to living Hampden, Maine. Life was good.
After a while, however, he started telling me the truth about how he felt. That was when it started to get difficult. I was very resentful. I was like, “I fell in love with you under this idea that we are going to end up having this perfect little family in Maine.”
That took awhile for me to understand, but I do completely understand his perspective. We’re both coming from different places, and we both need to have something where we live. So many of my family and best friends are in Maine, and Will would have nothing there. So that’s when things got tougher.
Will: I thought it was best to be honest with Jen, because I did not want to take it to a more serious level when I knew Maine wasn’t a place where I think I would be happy long-term. Most of my friends are at least five states away. My family is in the West. It would have been very tough to live there, despite it being a great place and despite Jen’s family being the best. There is just not much there for me in terms of what I hold close to my heart.
How did you resolve conflict over where to live before marrying?
Will: Jen was a stronger candidate than I was when we applied for residencies, so she planned to follow me wherever I got in. As it turned out, she ended up doing her residency in North Carolina, and I am doing mine in Florida. This was probably a blessing in disguise. The year apart showed us that we really wanted to be together. Her residency was shorter than mine, so we married and she moved to Florida (where I am still in residency) after she completed it.
Jen: We reached a point where we decided we had to stop bickering about where to ultimately live. We took a day to think about whether we’d rather be with the person we loved most or in the place we loved most. Once we got back together, it wasn’t even a question. We both wanted to be together. That was when our bickering for the most part stopped.
Will: The topic still comes up. But her description of that day is spot on.
Why live in a compromise location where no one gets what s/he wants rather than in one of your hometowns?
Jen: We realized that the other person would resent us forever — and resent the life that we had together forever — if we ended up in the place that one of us wanted and the other one had nothing. We talked about living half the year in Michigan and half the year in Maine. We discussed never having kids, but we decided that we did want a family eventually. Realistically, once we started talking about it, it clearly wasn’t going to happen.
How did you make your relationship work long-distance during residency?
Jen: We knew we wanted to stay together, but I think that there is something like a 90 percent failure rate for long-distance relationships. So we were open to the fact that it might not work out. Some friends pushed me to completely give up on residency and follow Will, because you do not need to do a residency to be a general dentist. But I’m very stubborn. I wanted to do a residency, and Will and my family were very supportive. My residency was only for a year, which made it easier. We knew we had an endgame.
Will: North Carolina was a close flight from Florida, and it was luckily a pretty inexpensive trip. I lived with a roommate in the cheapest spot possible so that I could afford a monthly flight or so. You get into a rhythm where you just numb yourself to emotions. I’d go to school, come back, talk to Jen for 30 minutes, watch Netflix or whatever.
I think if we had not seen each other as much we did that it would not have lasted. Actually seeing the person makes a huge difference in your emotional attachment to them. There was a period where we didn’t see each other for about a two-month stretch. At that point, I almost considered Jen more a pen pal than a fiancée.
Jen: It’s kind of an exhausting when you have to talk on the phone for a really long time. You lose the connection where you can just sit in a room and enjoy each other’s company. When you’re talking on the phone, it takes a lot of energy. With distance, you also push a lot of issues to the back burner, because when you fight you can never get any closure. It was hard.
Jen, how did it feel to “follow” Will even though you were the stronger applicant?
Jen: It was hard. Even though I am a dentist and have a great career, it does feel a bit like I chased a boy down to Florida. I feel like I am the “trailing spouse” that you wrote about. I have always pushed myself to be this empowered woman, but now all of a sudden I am putting my life on the back burner to support Will. I don’t resent doing it, but sometimes I feel resentful.
Growing up, boys were always on the back burner. Go to school. Focus on academics. Focus on your career. And then you reach this moment in your twenties where you are suddenly expected to put a male into the picture. It’s like trying to rewire yourself — to include this other person and to almost compromise who you grew up trying to be. It’s a hard role, because I fought it for so long.
You don’t want parents to not tell their daughters to chase their dreams. At the same time, it would be a little bit easier to be happy with the place you are in if you weren’t raised to believe that you could do absolutely anything and that your world would revolve around you.
Will, do you also feel like a “trailing spouse” in the relationship?
Will: Yes. Society tends to focus on women giving up things. But as we develop less stereotypical gender roles, men who make compromises to support women’s careers are giving up almost as much. It seems like both people are going to start feeling like they are the “trailing spouse,” because both are giving up things they want even though both have accomplished a lot of what they set out to do.
Jen, is it a source of tension that Will is specializing and you are not?
Jen: Orthodontics is one of the most competitive dental specialties, so Will is part of a very prestigious group. I think that when people go into these competitive specialty programs they often assume that they are the stronger applicant. But Will and I knew each other’s class ranks, so we had a different view on it.
Will is very open with everyone about the fact that I would have been the stronger applicant. It sounds like he’s putting himself down, but I think he’s doing it so people know that I could have specialized. Otherwise, I think I would have always felt like I had to prove myself to them. I would have thought that they saw me as inferior.
How have your relationships with friends been impacted since moving to Florida?
Will: I have not maintained one friendship to the level that I wish I had. I think you take a step backward in terms of those relationships when you marry, because time that you devoted to those friends is now devoted to this new family.
You must also respect your partner when socializing. I’d see my friends every single day when we were dating. Once you’re married, you realize it’s this other person’s world, too. It’s their home. It’s their house, their kitchen. You can’t have a frat house mentality where guys come and go as they please. You’ve got to set a date and make sure the other person is okay with it.
Jen: It’s a constant struggle. He doesn’t plan. I like to have really strong plans and have food and entertaining things. He’s like, “People are going to spend the night at some point. I’ll let you know the day of. Surprise.” And I would have cleaned for two hours and gotten ready for them.
I think that distance has shown me who are the friends I will have for my entire life. I don’t keep in touch as much with some of the people who were my best friends. Others who I did not realize were on the same level I now talk to every single day.
How does not living in your hometown impact your identity?
Will: I’ve been in limbo since leaving Michigan for Boston. I still root for the Detroit Red Wings. I still root for the Michigan Wolverines. There are all these Michigan things with which I’ve identified for so long. It’s hard to give them up, and I never expect to.
You realize that you have to develop a new identity. But I don’t know if people are actually very good at it. My relationship with Jen is very real. But if I’m out in Boston or in Florida without her, it feels very, very foreign. I spent four years in Boston, so you’d think it would kind of be home, but it is not.
Jen: I feel the same way. But I am hoping that when we decide on our forever place that we will find a way to get so involved in the community that it starts to become a new home. I think it would be a miserable existence to always be thinking about the place you wish you were.
What lessons should we learn from your story?
Will: You learn that life is probably not going to go the way that you think. I am so set on eventually being back in Michigan that we’ve talked about retiring six months there and six months in Maine. But I’ve already prepared myself for the expectation that it is probably not going to happen. We might have kids and follow them. We might want to live our own lives. We might want to go to Europe. You just never really know what’s coming next.
Jen: That’s the best point from our story. Even with residency, we tried to plan everything. I am a planner. I’m a Type A. And my life is so different from the way I had planned. The best advice we can give is just roll with what life throws at you. It can be way more fun than you ever planned for it to be!
Interview conducted February 26, 2018. Interview has been edited for clarity, privacy and brevity. Interviewees are relations of the Author.
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