Social Networking Sparks Commuter Marriages

The honeymoon officially over, Lisa Cramer stood at the Peace Arch, weeping.

A border guard had accused the 33-year-old Langley native of illegally attempting to smuggle her new American husband, Tim, into Canada. Hours after a Disneyworld vacation, the couple had their marriage certificate and proof of marriage in hand, along with Tim's belongings. Married or not, barked the guard, Tim needed permanent residence status -- another year's wait time -- before getting a visitor record necessary to come and bring his belongings into B.C.

Cramer was at her wit's end.

"I said to them, 'This is ridiculous,'" Cramer recalls just days after the confrontation. As she's talking, she deconstructs a wall of wedding gifts behind her couch.

"I've been working on immigration papers for the last three months. I came to the border and asked three different immigration officers what to do and we did exactly what they told us to do.'"

A cross-border marriage sounds romantic, even dangerous. In reality, it is the essence of tedium and a boon to the Pacific Northwest's struggling pulp and paper industry.

Lisa Cramer could have a black belt in filling out forms. In addition to work as an insurance manager in Surrey, she has a home business selling microfibre cleaning products. But nothing prepared her for the bureaucratic nightmare of an international commuter marriage.

They met online

The guard eventually yielded and granted Tim a six-month visitor's visa. Disaster neatly averted, the couple is still staring at a stack of paperwork and a monster commute for the foreseeable future, especially at the beginning of her marriage. Tim owns a commercial janitorial business in Everett, Washington, and will commute three times every week, staying over one night, while spinning nearly 50,000 kilometres on his odometer each year.

It may be a stressful start to ever after, but the Cramers' show how social networking may be creating commuter marriages. Instead of meeting within set geographical confines -- at a bar, work, church, or through friends -- Lisa and Tim met online on eHarmony. The American-based internet dating juggernaut pooh-poohs the chance of proximity, boasting instead that its 258 questions and sophisticated algorithms will net you your better half. While the company closely guards information about how many Canadians use the service, they claim 20 million worldwide members and an average of 236 eWeddings per day.

"It was the best system," says Cramer. "I didn't have to look and research and search. It just got matches that were good for me."

While Cramer credits the service for an excellent match, she actually specified "no Americans" on her survey. When eHarmony kept insisting on Tim as an option, she couldn't help considering him. And while they may have matched well based on affinity, the logistical nightmare of the border is already wearing thin.

"I love my husband, but just don't marry an American," says Cramer. "I think we'll be commuting for the rest of our lives."

Love in the time of 'motordom'

Technology is no panacea for a commuting-crazy culture.

Every techno-advancement comes with utopian promises. Skype, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) service used for video phone calls, pledges to "set your conversations free," or at least nearly. The main page of their website features a man and a woman embracing at an airport -- they're connected, see -- and all for the low price of mere bandwidth.

But technology also pushes people apart. A high-tech global economy means increased job specialization. Just like going 150 kilometres for a perfect match in love, workers go farther to find a perfect match with an employer. The trouble happens when getting down to trying to balance it all.

Technology can't be trusted to solve commuter woes since it's the root cause. Beyond the existential choice to advance my career, the reason individuals commute across the country really comes down to one thing.

"Because they can," says Gordon Price, a former Vancouver city councillor who directs Simon Fraser University's urban planning and sustainable development program. "People are trying things out because these options exist."

Price sees commuter marriage as a "real aberration" of what he calls "motordom," Motordom is built on technology and the false assumption of nearly free transportation. Lives, in turn, are constructed on road accessibility, a calculation of the trade-off between distance and quality of life, or where they can commute and afford a mortgage. The more people on the roads, the more congestion creates demand for bigger and wider roads. The bigger the road, the further out of town the commute takes. It makes heads spin and cities massive.

Skype me

Commuter marriages are based on similar algebra: quality of life -- distance and time. While the average commuter will tolerate a trip of up to roughly 40 minutes, commuter marriages just come up with a bigger number and a different way of eliminating the remainder. In a sense, we're all commuters, Price says. Because we can.

Motordom is often blamed for congestion, sprawl and blight. But Price identifies another problem -- ballooning infrastructure costs -- which assume continual growth, cheap service land, and secure energy. Whatever you think of motordom, the fundamental question is whether its infrastructure is sustainable.

"Can government keep doing that?" Price asks. "I think the odds are practically zero."

Sprawl aside, Price is a fan of the possibilities of technology. Advances in telecommunications are on the cusp of providing corporations a virtual face-to-face alternative to moving employees across the globe.

"The technology is getting good enough," Price says, that long-distance commuting "will be increasingly offset by the quality of the telecommunications."

But even if video-conferencing is embraced wholeheartedly in the corporate world, it won't be the death of the commute. As long as families are able, they will still plant themselves within an affordable 40 minute radius of their other destinations. Because they can.

It may be driven by planes, and not cars, but one of the hidden costs of commuter marriage is carbon emissions. Especially for those who fly back and forth.

Commuters leave big footprints

Remember Alison Wilson from yesterday's story, who commutes between work in Ontario and her married home life in Alberta?

According to the International Civil Aviation Organization carbon calculator, the aviation regulator of the United Nations, Wilson's weekly flight from Edmonton to Toronto will consume an average of 8,631 kilograms of fuel, generating 243.09 kilograms of CO2 per passenger. If she makes the trip 40 times over the course of her year in Toronto, that's a whopping 19.5 metric tons of greenhouse gases just to go to work. The average Canadian, already the eighth worst generator of CO2, generates an average of 16 metric tons each year.

But that's a conservative estimate. The numbers at the carbon offset dealing website Less.ca are less rosy. Ranked by the David Suzuki Foundation as the best dealer, Less estimates Wilson's weekly commute creates nearly 80 tons of CO2, costing a whopping $3,733.20 to offset.

Wilson can't help but think about the environmental impact of her weekly airplane trips. She even catches herself rationalizing her trips.

"You start thinking, 'Even if I wasn't on the plane, there's still a hundred other people on the plane and the flight would still go if I wasn't there,'" laughs Wilson.

Like most people, the Wilsons try to make environmentally-friendly choices, even if they know it doesn't balance their current lifestyle: Smart car, fervent recycling. But Wilson doesn't buy into any delusions of cosmic balance: the decision to commute is to lessen the psychological toll.

"It sure does bug me, but man oh man, I can't not come home," says Wilson.