The first time someone suggests geo-baching, it doesn’t sound that bad. Maybe you’ve already been living apart half the time thanks to TDYs and deployments. Maybe your last PCS ripped the kids out of a great school, and you swore you’d never do that to them again. Maybe you’re just so close to locking in that civilian job you’ve been chasing for years, and you can’t justify walking away from it for another temporary move.
So you have the talk. You and your spouse go over the pros and cons. You tell yourselves it’s just temporary, just for one set of orders, just until you get through this next phase. You map out a plan for regular visits, daily check-ins, a hard end date. You convince yourselves that it won’t be that different from a deployment.
And then the distance creeps in.
Not all at once. Not in some dramatic, earth-shattering way. At first, you do exactly what you promised. You text constantly. You FaceTime every night. You plan visits like your life depends on them. But then, slowly, life starts filling in the gaps where your spouse used to be. You get tired. They get busy. The check-ins become less frequent, the calls get shorter, and the first time you realize you forgot to miss them today, you tell yourself it’s just a fluke.
Until it isn’t.
At some point, geo-baching stops feeling like a temporary arrangement and starts feeling like the new normal. And when that happens? You’ve got a real problem.
The slow slide to separation
The scariest thing about geo-baching is that it usually doesn’t break marriages in big, dramatic ways. There’s no explosion. No betrayal. Just small, almost imperceptible shifts in the way you move through your life.
You stop calling because you’re tired. You stop checking in because nothing feels urgent enough to share. You start solving problems without thinking to ask their opinion because it’s easier than waiting for a response. It happens little by little, and by the time you notice the silence, you’re already comfortable in it.
This is what nobody warns you about. Geo-baching makes it easy to get comfortable alone. And once you do that? Once you get used to running the house, the kids, the bills, the routines without them? There’s a real possibility that the idea of moving back in together starts to feel like a disruption instead of a reunion.
And if that happens, you’re not geo-baching anymore. You’re just staying married because neither of you wants to say it out loud.
The red flags that should scare you
If one of you is thriving while the other is struggling, you have a problem. If one of you is putting in all the effort while the other is content to let things coast, you have a problem. If you aren’t fighting for time together—if visits start feeling like obligations instead of things you can’t wait for—you have a serious problem.
This is how you know if you’re heading toward trouble:
You stop making decisions together. You don’t check in before making big life moves. You don’t ask their opinion because you don’t actually need it.
You’re not texting, calling, or video-chatting just to talk anymore. Every conversation is about bills, logistics, and family admin. You’re basically co-managers of a household, not spouses.
You start realizing that you don’t actually miss them anymore. At first, this thought will come with guilt. Then, it won’t.
By the time you reach that last one, you’re already past the point where most people can fix it.
Geo-back couples who make it work know the rules
You can geo-bach and come out just fine on the other side, but the ones who do? They don’t just wing it.
First rule? You have an expiration date, and no one’s playing games with it. None of this “We’ll see where we are in a year” nonsense. None of this “Let’s just keep reassessing” avoidance. If there is no real, actual plan to live together again, you are already moving toward separate lives.
Second rule? Nobody is coasting. If you think you can get away with the occasional “Thinking of you!” text while going full autopilot on your relationship, you have officially entered the danger zone. The minute you start treating each other like supporting characters in your separate storylines, you’ve got a marriage running on fumes.
Third rule? Geo-baching isn’t supposed to be easy. It should suck. It should feel like a sacrifice. It should feel urgent because if it doesn’t, that means the distance is starting to make sense, and that is the biggest red flag of all.
How to survive it
Geo-baching isn’t automatically a marriage killer. But thinking it will just take care of itself? That’s a guaranteed way to end up wondering why you don’t feel married anymore.
The ones who make it work treat it like a deployment, not a casual arrangement. They create a real, structured plan for keeping the relationship strong. They fight like hell against the temptation to slip into separate lives, to start the walk toward divorce. That means putting in effort every single day.
It means scheduling calls like you would schedule an actual meeting, because if you don’t, the distance will schedule them for you. It means keeping each other looped into the tiny details of your lives—the dumb little anecdotes, the random thoughts, the small wins—because if you don’t, one day you’ll wake up and realize you just don’t know each other anymore. It means refusing to let the separation feel normal.