I doubt I'm that different than many who've posted here, but I'm surprised to see so many people here with limited views about relationships and separations.

Maybe this couple married before they were ready and won't make it. Maybe she wants out or is ambivalent.

But lots and lots of people live in marriages and have negotiated living apart for careers and other reasons. In academia where jobs are scarce and long term travel is common, this stuff goes on all the time. I know a couple who are both professors and who are currently living 18 months in different countries as one of them is doing field work and the other just landed a tenure track job. They talk every few days on the phone and factored in the cost of visiting each other every other month to their living expenses. They aren’t that unusual. I know another couple where she’s an academic living on the west coast eight months a year teaching and on the east coast with her husband four months a year. They expect to do this until she’s tenured. People who work with NGOs long-term often travel for months at a time.

I know three couples (two pairs of gay men and one lesbian couple) who cannot get a spousal visa into the US because they cannot marry. One of these friends just moved to Europe as he gave up on getting his partner here, but their relationship (stronger than many marriages I see around me) lasted seven years across long distance (and they’ve lived together in Europe three years before that). Another couple worked it out so they spend six months a year together in Asia as the Philippina partner can’t come and work here and the other has a stellar job that she can manage to do long distance for months at a time.

This may or may not work out for this couple; but if both partners are agreeable, relationships survive separations all of the time.

I think she got married way, way too young and probably for the wrong reasons. She needs to leave him. She can always find someone else, maybe someone like her who is committed to overseas work. It is true that marriage hinders your chance to do lots of things that if you don't do them while young, you'll have to wait until you're old to do them and will have many regrets until then. Esp. if you have kids. These opportunities don't come again. I gave up a chance to attend a semester of college in Italy because of my abusive alcoholic ex husband -- according to the religion I was in, divorce wasn't an option and I was completely intimidated by this. My dad had offered to pay my way to Italy, however. I've regretted this ever since and at 50 have not had the money to go overseas again (wound up with 2 kids and divorced from the same guy, without any religion), and poor all these years, needless to say. Overseas organizations, NGOs, &c, won't take you if you have kids. Someone wanting an overseas career has to seriously rethink marriage, esp. to someone who isn't in it with her but wants to stay settled in the states.

I'd tell her to leave him and go for it. Her whole life is ahead of her. She'll NEVER get a chance like this again unti she's ready for retirement, after a lifetime of regret and depression at her lost chances.

To share a somewhat similar experience from the wife's perspective. I got married young (a month after 23) and stayed "happily" married for a year before realizing that I was simply too damn young to be in such a serious commitment. I got itchy feet and I left. And I, too, made a half hearted attempt to get my then-husband to come with. I said, "If you truly cared about me you'd come". And that was, simply, bullshit. He knew it and I knew it. I was just my feeble attempt at assuaging guilt. He was a lovely man and he didn't deserve to be hurt. I was a selfish girl and didn't want his hurt on my conscience. But ultimately it was because you can only duck the truth so long.

It sounds to me like the wife, who could possibly love her husband to bits, just isn't all that into being married. She doesn't want to make the choice to be with somebody forever. She's got a shitload of running and exploring to do. And she knows she functions just fine without him at her side, hence the months-long "unpaid internship" that she must be just loving and that has reawakened her peace corps ambitions.

So she's checked out already. At least for now. And that sucks, but there it is.

The last thing the LW should do is go with her. He'll go and find that a: he's not that keen on the whole deal; b: she's never around because she's loving the whole deal; c: he's consequently lonely as hell and massively bitter about the great job he loved (tell me those come around more than once in a lifetime if you're lucky) that he "had" to give up. Divorce now or divorce while you're out there or divorce when you get back. Or annul and see if it will work/can work once she's back. If she comes back.

For now, though, she's gone to stretch her wings. And she really doesn't much want you along for the ride.

A few years ago, I was in a very similar position to yours. I was in a long-term relationship, and I had two work opportunities in front of me. In both cases, the work itself was quite interesting. But one would take me to Africa for a year. The other would keep me where I was. I really wanted to go to Africa. My girlfriend did not, and gave me the ultimatum that Cary suggested: I could go if I wanted to, but that would be the end of our relationship.

I was angry for about two hours. But then I put myself in her shoes and realized that I would have made the same ultimatum in her place. She wasn't telling me to go or not to go; she was simply telling me what the consequences of my choice would be. My choice then became stark: Do I go abroad and lose her, or stay and lose the opportunity to work abroad on economic issues I care about?

But we make these decisions all the time. You can drive yourself nuts imagining the many shapes your life could have taken if you'd gone to college, gone to a different college, moved to the Midwest, starting playing the flute, become an accountant, moved to Iceland and taken up fishing.

What I'm saying is that if your husband gives you an ultimatum, then all that he has done is made his decision for himself. Now, you must make yours, and it's yours alone. If you decide to leave him, or to stay, you can't blame him if you're unhappy with the decision later. Your life is yours to shape; the question is whether you want your husband to shape it with you, or do it for yourself. The choice is yours.