Married but ‘single’: As Jamie Oliver says he only sees his children at weekends, meet other couples who are devoted to each other – but locked into separate lives
- These three couples share how they end up spending most of their week apart
- Nicole Siddal looks after her children all week while her husband Craig works
- Similarly, Gail Riley spends all week at home while husband Scott works away
- Jennifer and Gary Judge, both 32, reveal they are like ships passing in the night
To all intents and purposes, on a practical level Nicola Siddall is a single woman raising her two school-age children alone.
From Monday to Friday, she gets up each morning and makes breakfast and packed lunches for Joe, 12, and Kai, nine, sees them to school and then goes to work herself.
In the evening, she cooks dinner for herself and the boys, sees them to bed, before retiring to her own empty bed.
Nicole Siddal looks after her children all week while her husband Craig works 42 miles away from home – Nicole usually ends up working on Sundays too
Yet Nicola, 43, has been with husband Craig, 52, for 17 years and married for seven. They own a three-bedroom home in Poynton, Cheshire, and have built a life together.
Yet for 80 per cent of the time they live separate lives. ‘Craig works as an aircraft engineer at an airbase 42 miles away in Chester,’ says Nicola. ‘He leaves us at 5.30am on Monday and returns at 5pm on Friday.
‘It is curious that he has an entirely separate life from that of his family for five days out of every seven.
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‘Even when he’s at home, we don’t spend much time together. He likes to meet up with his friends at the pub on Friday evenings, but after a hectic week I prefer to relax at home.
‘On Saturdays there’s an endless round of sports clubs for the boys. Craig often likes to unwind by going pheasant shooting, so I’ll go to the gym or for a swim instead.
‘Sunday evenings used to be for us, but often I end up working then — I run my own cleaning business — to make extra money.’
Welcome to the world of the ‘married singleton’, where committed couples spend only a fraction of their time under the same roof, and barely pause to say hello when they do. Often frantically busy, the married singleton’s life is split very clearly in two: single parent Monday to Friday, and conventionally married at the weekend.
For some couples, it’s a matter of financial necessity that one half should leave the family home and live where their work is.
Scott Riley spends five nights a week away from his home because of his work, leaving his wife Gail alone (pictured)
Others find the only way to fulfil their ambitions is to sacrifice family time entirely during the week and devote themselves to their job.
However it happens, it’s thought that one in ten of all couples in the UK essentially live apart, and a third of those have children. Just last week, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver said he was happy to be a weekend dad, seeing his family only a couple of nights a week.
But can seeing your other half so rarely truly make for a happy, successful marriage? Or are the men — for largely it is the men who live a single, child-free life during the week and re-appear to play super-dad at weekends — simply having their cake and eating it?
Arabella Russell, a counsellor with relationship guidance service Relate, agrees it’s a precarious lifestyle choice, no matter how much a couple may trust one another.
‘There’s a real danger that the partner at home starts to feel resentful,’ she says. ‘When you’re knee-deep in washing and kids and he’s gone out for a drink with work colleagues hundreds of miles away, that’s when you might start to feel … “hang on — he’s having all the fun and I’m the permanent babysitter”.
‘How well this works does depend very much on how good you are as a couple at communicating feelings rather than burying them.’
Craig has worked at the airbase in Chester for seven-and-a-half years, says Nicola. ‘We agreed that rather than commuting and spending a small fortune on petrol, he should rent a room during the week.’
Why not move the family to Chester? ‘I didn’t want to uproot the children,’ Nicola says. And besides, she has her own job to consider.
However, communication isn’t their strong point, she concedes. She also admits that sometimes she feels Craig underestimates how hard she works.
‘Sometimes Craig jokes that I’ll be late for my own funeral because I’m constantly playing catch-up. I don’t want to husband-bash, but if he had to juggle our family needs on his own, he’d struggle,’ she says.
A fashion buyer for a major retail company, Jennifer Judge is the one who spends most of the time on the road although her husband Gary has to go away often too (pictured)
Of course, trust is all important in this arrangement. While Nicola says she trusts Craig implicitly — and vice versa — remaining confident your spouse won’t stray is not easy.
‘You only think about trust when it’s being tested,’ says Arabella Russell. ‘We all need reassuring sometimes, and actually being a bit jealous is just another way of admitting vulnerability and saying that you really love that other person and want them to stay with you.’
For some couples, however, being apart actually reinforces their marriage. Gail Riley, 36, effectively lives the life of a single parent Monday to Friday while her husband Scott, 39, travels the country as a training manager.
She and their children Jack and Joshua, aged six and two, stay at home in Lingdale, East Cleveland, where she works as an office manager for the same tow bar company.
Gail has her hands so full, she’s up at 5am every day to get a headstart on the chores — but still doesn’t mind the arrangement. In fact, quite the reverse.
‘I don’t worry about him being away from home,’ she says. ‘We’ve been together for 18 years, married for nine, and I absolutely trust him.
‘I think the secret to a successful relationship is having time apart. We’re not under each other’s feet all the time, so we don’t get bored of each other’s company.
‘The week flies by — and when Scott comes back on a Friday evening, we do lots of lovely family things together.’ The person who does feel lonely, though, is Scott. He admits he gets fed up with being away from his family all week.
‘But I quite like it,’ says Gail. ‘It’s bliss not having to pick up his dirty washing five days of the week.’
Another pressure these part-time arrangements place on families is the feeling that they must make the most of every minute they have together.
If those two days are all about striving for the best possible quality time with the kids, the most romantic dinner and the best sex, expectations are just as likely to be disappointed as fulfilled. Petty squabbles can become disastrous if they taint an entire weekend.
Figures suggest that one in ten UK couples essentially live apart mostly because of work (file photo)
‘It can be quite a volatile way to live,’ says life and career coach Neena Madhok, whose own partner, a management consultant, is often away for a week at a time.
‘Either you have this lovely weekend together and then they go away again and you’re left feeling bereft, or you’re disappointed because your careful plans didn’t work out and it wasn’t as great as you’d imagined.
‘It’s really important that the person who stays behind has their own life outside the relationship, so they’re not dependent on the other person for all their happiness.’
Besides, says Arabella Russell, real marriages aren’t all about highs and lows. Rather, a solid partnership is built on the tiny victories and trivial problems of everyday life that you share — the blocked sink, the better-than-expected school parents’ evening, the dog’s trip to the vet.
‘If you’re not seeing each other all the time, you need to find a way to keep those connections alive,’ says Arabella.
‘It’s when they start to disappear that you find people begin to feel they don’t belong any more.’
Indeed, some married singletons say they feel like ‘visitors’ to their own families. ‘If the single life starts to feel more appealing to one or the other, then you both need to discuss whether working away is actually an excuse to get away from family life,’ she says
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Jennifer Judge and husband Gary, both 32, sometimes feel like strangers to each other. For the past three years, they have ‘been like passing ships in the night’.
Largely it is the men who live a single, child-free life during the week and re-appear to play super-dad at weekends (file photo)
A fashion buyer for a major retail company, Jennifer is the one who spends most of the time on the road, though Gary’s sports business also takes him on frequent trips away from their home in Crosby, Merseyside.
Last year, Jennifer took an exhausting 55 flights to the Far East, the U.S. and Europe.
‘It might sound excessive, but that’s the job,’ she says.
‘As a general rule, the longest I’m away for is 12 nights, and Gary has also agreed that he won’t ever be on the road for more than a week at a time.’
Somehow, into this punishing schedule, they manage to slot their four-year-old daughter and all her playdates, parties, pick-ups and drop-offs.
At nursery five days a week, the little girl has grown up with part-time parents. ‘We’re lucky that her grandparents can step in to collect her if Gary and I can’t — although they all still work full-time, too,’ Jennifer says.
Even the family dog has a time-share slot. ‘I have to be incredibly well-organised, even down to ensuring that my father-in-law is free to walk our dog four days a week,’ Jennifer adds.
‘We do guard our Saturday nights pretty closely — when I’m at home. We make sure we have a romantic evening, starting off with wine, a nice dinner and ending in the bedroom.’
Jennifer and Gary say it was never a conscious plan to live like this — and for many couples the prolonged absences would be a deal-breaker.
‘We never sat down and discussed how our lives would be, it’s just how things have evolved,’ she admits. ‘But we’re both working like this for our future. Already it’s allowed us to buy a family house in the neighbourhood where I grew up, with wonderful schools and parks close by.
‘These are the things I remind myself every time I board a flight knowing I won’t see my daughter or my husband for a week.’
However, Jennifer says she does sometimes question their lifestyle. ‘If Gary’s away, our daughter is in bed and I’m on my own, that’s a trigger point,’ she says. ‘Those evenings can be lonely.’
Relate counsellor Arabella Russell says: ‘We all have this idea what a marriage should look like — but there’s no one cookie-cutter print for a good relationship. If people can cope well with this arrangement and they’re able to spend some real quality time with each other at weekends, with a good sex and social life, then who are we to say it’s not working?’
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