Decide before he goes, not from a hotel car park at eleven at night. Distance doesn’t break this — improvising does.

I read every letter myself, usually over tea before the house is up—thank you for sending this one. If you’d like to ask something, the Contact page is open, and your privacy is a given.

What do I do when he travels for work?

Michael had a stretch last year of three or four nights away most weeks, and we handled it badly for the first month. Not dramatically — we just stopped. Whatever we’d been doing paused when he left and restarted when he got back, and both ends of that felt awkward. The restart was worse than the pause.

What fixed it wasn’t a clever system. It was deciding in advance, on the Sunday, what the week looked like — so neither of us was making a judgement call at a distance while tired. Insight: The difficulty with travel isn’t the distance, it’s that decisions get made badly when you’re apart and out of rhythm. Move the deciding to before he leaves and most of the problem goes.

Here’s what works for us now.

1. Settle It Before He Packs

“So — what are we doing this week?” Five minutes on the Sunday. Decide whether it continues, pauses, or changes shape, and then don’t revisit it on Wednesday.

2. Give the Week a Shape

If it continues, say what that means: “Until Friday, then we’ll see.” An open-ended arrangement across a trip turns into a question he’ll keep asking, which is worse for both of you.

3. Keep One Small Contact Point

Not a performance — a line. “Thinking about Friday.” It maintains the thread without either of you having to be clever over text at the end of a long day.

4. Let Him Ask Once

Agree he can raise it once if something changes — a bad night, a change of plan. “If you need to, say so, and I won’t mind.” One sanctioned ask prevents a week of him wondering whether to.

5. Plan the Homecoming, Not the Airport

The mistake we made was treating his arrival as the moment. He’d been travelling nine hours and I’d had the kids all week. “Tomorrow, properly” is a much better sentence than an exhausted evening neither of you enjoys.

That travel stretch ended up being good for us in the end, mostly because it forced us to be deliberate about something we’d been doing on instinct. If your weeks apart have gone quiet in the same way, restarting is its own small skill. How do you handle the away weeks? Share below. For a head start, grab my free Top 10 Trust-Building Tips for Couples—it’s yours the moment you subscribe.