Knowledge@Wharton

How can professionals maintain a home life when they’re forever on the Road? Meet five couples who are making it work

After four years of managing a relationship and an intense professional travel schedule, strategy consultant Kelly Jirovec had grown accustomed to birthdays and Valentine’s days spent on the road, often sans gifts and candlelight.

But this year, she got a surprise. During a business trip in Phoenix, Kelly received a dozen red roses from her husband, Todd, delivered to her hotel. She couldn’t stand the thought of leaving them behind for her flight home to Dallas, so she carried her bouquet, vase and all, onto the airplane. “I noticed that people seem to be especially nice to you when you’re carrying flowers,” she says, laughing.

Jokes aside, Kelly, who is married to Todd Jirovec, WG’93, says it’s just this kind of spontaneous gesture that helps ease the strain of a growing phenomenon: married couples who also juggle extensive professional travel schedules. Of the almost 44 million business travelers, nearly seven in ten are married, and half of those are raising at least one child at home, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. And more people than ever are traveling professionally: business travel has increased 14 percent since 1994, with frequent business travelers away from home an average 3.1 days per trip.

The Jirovecs, married for a year and a half of their four years together, both travel professionally, though Todd’s work as a senior manager for Deloitte Consulting keeps him on a plane and away from home three to four days a week. The first nine months of their marriage, in fact, the couple lived apart, with Kelly, 26, in Boston and Todd, 34, in Houston, though they are now both based in Dallas.

“The fact that we’ve always done it, I think, makes it easier,” says Kelly, a consultant with Boston Consulting Group. But like most couples dealing with regular and prolonged absences, the Jirovec’s have had their share of misunderstandings, especially early on.

Expectations for time spent together is a major issue cited by most of the couples interviewed for this story. One partner might prefer silently crashing in front of the television, while the other wants to talk about world events over a sit-down dinner. In the Jirovec’s case, Todd, the quieter of the two, wanted an hour or so to himself to catch up on the week’s mail and generally settle into being at home again. Kelly, who is very social, would “be all over him,” wanting to talk and reconnect.

“It caused some arguments,” says Kelly. “I would feel like I didn’t see him for a week and he just wanted to read the mail. But he was wishing I would just give him a minute to himself. I find that when I do give him that time, he comes back and wants to talk. But you only learn those things by going through them.”

Through trial and error, the Jirovecs have found other ways to ease the disconnected feeling that comes with spending more time apart than together. A daily telephone call is a key. “We have a rule that we talk every day, no matter where we are and what time it is,” Kelly says. “And sometimes, you have to work real hard to make those conversations meaningful. That’s not to say every conversation has to be stimulating and intense and that we can’t just talk about what happened during our day, but we do try to do more than that when we can.”

It’s also critical not to let feelings of insecurity creep into the relationship, Kelly says. “It’s important to assume that your partner really does want to be with you – that it’s circumstances that are behind his absence. You have to believe and trust that the other person is just as frustrated as you are by not being together.” Having realistic expectations is also important. It’s normal to feel a little uncomfortable with one another after being apart all week, Todd says. Couples need to understand this and not expect instant chemistry when they find themselves suddenly together again. “We have said that it takes until Saturday afternoon to really feel comfortable together again,” Todd says. “If you accept this early on, it takes the pressure off.”