Jennifer Conlin

New York

It’s a typical weekday in the Ghosh household. Two-year-old Emilio, strapped in a highchair, is dallying over breakfast while his father pleads with him to finish. “Try some blueberries,” Gautam Ghosh suggests, then slips his hand into a Baby Einstein puppet and begins his daily ritual of entertaining Emilio while his wife gets ready for work.

Such scenes are hardly unusual for two-career couples with children, but this one is remarkable for the fact that Ghosh, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is nearly 9,000 miles away and a daunting 16 hours behind his family’s time zone. When his wife, Cecilia, and Emilio begin their day in New Zealand, it is the previous afternoon in Ghosh’s Philadelphia office, where he conducts his morning video chats with Emilio via Skype — software that enables users to transmit their voices and images through the internet. “We talk in the morning and around dinner, when my wife needs my help the most,” said Ghosh, whose wife recently accepted a post as an assistant professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. “This was a career decision we simply had to make for financial stability,” he said.

The Ghoshes are hardly alone in choosing to live in different places because of work. In 2006, the Census Bureau reported that 3.6 million married Americans (not including separated couples) were living apart from their spouses. In March, Worldwide ERC, the association for work-force mobility, released a report revealing that three-fourths of the 174 relocation agents surveyed had dealt with at least one commuter marriage in 2007, a 53 per cent increase since 2003. “Families today are undergoing all sorts of strains that didn’t exist before and are simply having to adjust to make things work,” said.

David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, who says the challenging economy may force more couples into commuter marriages for the sake of a paycheck.

Reginald C. Richardson, a lecturer in psychology, agrees. “I think we are going to see more and more commuter marriages in the future, given the global economy and the fact that our technology now makes this more doable,” Richardson said.

Emma Child, a partner in the investment banking group of Rose Partnership in London, a financial services and corporate search firm, said that in recent months she had noted a marked increase in the willingness of couples to live in different locations. “Eighteen months ago anyone searching for a new job would ask to be placed in their current location,” Child said. “Now they come in and say ‘I am prepared to move,’ even, if necessary, without the family.” She added: “We send a lot of people to emerging markets right now. But honestly, who wants to move the family to Lagos? And if the spouse is working, who wants to give up the second income?”

Until last year, teacher Miles Harvey and his wife, Rengin Altay, were getting by in Chicago on two freelance incomes. But when his wife, an actress, lost her Screen Actors Guild insurance because her voice-over work had all but dried up, they began worrying about their financial future, particularly with two young children to support.

“I wonder if we would be doing this if the economy was better,” said Harvey, who accepted an assistant professorship at the University of New Orleans and who now commutes weekly to Chicago. Though the plan is for the family to move to Louisiana, he says, “It is not a great time to buy a house in New Orleans, nor is it a good time to sell one in Chicago.”

—New York Times