For 23 years, some part of my life has revolved around commercial trucks. Mostly as a driver, but sometimes as the one who stayed behind. So I have a view of this life from both sides.

My husband taught me to drive after we were married, and soon we were going back and forth across the country. Driving over the road is a very insular world where few people not in the profession venture. You get to know about their spouses, kids and numerous ex-spouses. The number one killer of relationships for truck drivers is stress. The mental stress involved in doing their jobs, plus the stress of not being home to help deal with the everyday things, plus missing many milestones in the lives of their children.

Yes, we chose this profession, and understood the risks and stresses that go along with that profession. But, if you do not have a strong support team on the home front, it’s hard to get motivated to push that truck down the road. I hope everyone remembers that if you have it…a truck delivered it, and give consideration to the people doing that job.

Back in the day…you only heard the drivers’ side of family and marital problems, but never the side of the ones at home. Then we entered the computer age of electronic bulletin boards, AOL chat rooms, and now MySpace and Facebook, and sometimes it’s like Jerry Springer without the fist fights. Everyone knows everyone’s dirty laundry.

We all know what the problems are, they haven’t changed since the first person figured out they could make money by transporting someone’s “stuff” across town or across country and get paid money for the process.

There was a time when couples would rather chew off an appendage than admit that they were having problems. They stayed together for the kids, religious reasons, or whatever they told themselves to get them through the day.

Life and relationships have changed drastically since then. Driving truck has been and will probably always be in the top ten most hazardous professions. It is not always the hardest work physically, but mentally the stress of being constantly on alert to your 80 feet of truck with 24 tons of freight and the conditions around your truck is horrendous. At the end of the day, the muscles in your body are stiff and sore from sitting in one place for hours at a time, and your mind is totally exhausted.

After you fuel your truck, grab a shower and dinner, you call home. Or if you live in the 21st century and travel with a laptop, you can video chat from the comfort your truck, and get to say goodnight to your family almost face to face. After the kids get off the call, you and your spouse can get into what broke and how much it costs, and what you can afford, how’s your expense money holding out, and all the things spouses discuss in the course of a day. Everything is normal except you’re in Baltimore, Maryland, and the family is in Kearney, Nebraska.

When you do finally get home after being gone 7, 10, 14 days, a month…all you want to do is sit in a chair that doesn’t vibrate or have a steering wheel. And sleep. Oh blessed sleep that isn’t interrupted by the reefer parked beside you cycling through the defrost stage, the smell of the bull rack that parked beside you after you went to sleep, or the knocking on the door wanting to know if you want ‘commercial company’.

While the spouse and kids are rearing to go do all the things you promised while you were gone, you just want to “veg” out in your favorite easy chair and pretend to watch TV while you sleep some more.

This starts the age old arguments about ‘we never go anywhere, do anything, see our friends, (insert favorite gripe here). We then proceed into ‘being stuck with the kids, I’m lonely, all you ever do when you’re home is work on the truck’, (insert favorite argument to push spouse’s buttons here). Eventually ending one of two ways, divorce or he has his life and she has her’s.

Now we live in the ‘microwave me’ generation. They want to have their gratification instantaneously, and whine about… “I didn’t know, “I didn’t think it would be like this”, “You never want to do anything…”, etc. At the first sign that life isn’t going as they envisioned, they bail. They build a scenario of how they think their lives will be without taking into consideration the other person in their scenario. When that person doesn’t perform to their expectations they’re accused of ‘not being the person I married’, and soon the relationship become another statistic.

The part where I get confused in all this is this…when this couple got together, one of them was a truck driver. Everyone in the relationship was aware that the driver was gone for days or weeks at a time as their job dictated. If it wasn’t an issue before the relationship started, why did it become one after. What factor changes after you say “I do” that wasn’t there before?

As a spouse of a truck driver, and a driver myself, there has been stretches of a few years where I have stayed home and worked in an office or drove locally. So I have the benefit of having been on both sides of this equation. He pulls out on Sunday evening and gets home Saturday morning. We talk several times a day on the phone, and once in awhile he gets by the house for a few hours. During the week, my time is mine to schedule, but on the weekends I only make tentative plans until I see what day he’s going to get home. If it turns out he can’t get home then I have to decide if my plans are something that I need to go ahead and do without him or if I want to stay home rather than go alone.

I suppose the moral would be that if you’re going to be in a relationship with a truck driver you need to have a life that is flexible to mesh with their erratic schedule. With today’s technology…cell phones, video chats, etc. it’s cheap to stay in touch, which helps alleviate the some of the loneliness that the separation brings (though a cell phone can’t warm your feet at night). You have to be enough of your own person to give the extra it takes to make a relationship like this work. No relationship is 50-50, and if you think it is then I’m very sorry for you. At any given time in any relationship one person is always giving more than the other. This is especially true when you’re involved with a truck driver. There’s always uproar in your schedule when your driver is home. It’s inconvenient and stressful, and a lot has to be jammed into those few hours. You have to be very careful here because it’s very easy to resent this person that you love and pledged your life to simply because for 5 or 6 days a month they want your attention to be on them and not on your regularly schedule programming.

So consider carefully before going into a relationship with a truck driver, and be honest with yourself and them. Are you truly the type of person that can cope with only having telephone contact for long periods of time? Can you be a strong support and not make every little thing become high drama in order to be the center of attention, and cause more stress in an already stressful life?

It takes a special type of person to be the spouse of truck driver, and my hat is off to everyone who stands support for those that keep everything from your toilet paper to the gas you put in your car moving over the highways of America.