After being penned up at home during the pandemic, Jen-Ai Notman couldn’t wait to travel when she got vaccinated. There was just one problem: Her husband had been called back into his office in Virginia Beach, Va.

So in September, with the couple’s nearly 2-year-old daughter, Emry, in tow, she flew to Europe without him. After visiting her parents in Cyprus, the 26-year-old Ms. Notman, who owns her own marketing firm, began working remotely from the Portuguese surfing town of Ericeira, while her husband, 30-year-old Rainer...

After being penned up at home during the pandemic, Jen-Ai Notman couldn’t wait to travel when she got vaccinated. There was just one problem: Her husband had been called back into his office in Virginia Beach, Va.

So in September, with the couple’s nearly 2-year-old daughter, Emry, in tow, she flew to Europe without him. After visiting her parents in Cyprus, the 26-year-old Ms. Notman, who owns her own marketing firm, began working remotely from the Portuguese surfing town of Ericeira, while her husband, 30-year-old Rainer Agles, kept up their old life at home, filling in extra time by using the Peloton more and meeting up with old friends for drinks.

Ms. Notman and Mr. Agles are among the millions of American couples where one partner has the flexibility to work remotely from anywhere but the other doesn’t. In some cases, this is opening a fault line, forcing existential questions about where and how they want to live and testing the relationship in ways they may never have expected.

For many couples, that means trying long-distance relationships—at least temporarily. Here is a look at some of those couples.

Jen-Ai Notman
and Rainer Agles

In Ms. Notman and Mr. Agles’s case, the couple had hoped to go to Europe together before Mr. Agles, a wholesaler, was told to return to the office.

Ms. Notman, born in Scotland to American parents who worked in nonprofits across the globe, says she has always had “itchy feet.” She and her husband had agreed they would travel often once they settled in his hometown of Virginia Beach.

Taking her daughter to Portugal alone, though, has actually strengthened the couple’s relationship, says Ms. Notman, who expects to return home in November.

“Rainer definitely carries the weight at home in terms of things like cooking and keeping the house clean,” she says. “Having a month apart offered time to take a step back and appreciate who the other person in your relationship is, and the value they add to your life.”

Mr. Agles, who visited his wife and daughter for three weeks in October, echoes that sentiment, saying the adage about absence making the heart grow fonder was true in their case. He also says that when he visited his wife in Portugal, he gained a newfound appreciation for the work she was doing to take care of Emry.

“This actually made us appreciate each other more,” he says. “It’s like couples therapy.”

Ms. Notman, Mr. Agles and Emry on the beach in Ericeira, Portugal.

Photo: Matilde Viegas for the Wall Street Journal

Dirk Bakker-Alvarez and Aubry Bakker-Alvarez

Almost every day, 34-year-old Aubry Bakker-Alvarez sits down to lunch in Orlando, Fla., while Dirk Bakker-Alvarez, 39, eats dinner in Antwerp, Belgium, and they share the meal over Zoom.

The couple says communicating long distance is nothing new for them. “We’re not the classic story,” says Mr. Bakker-Alvarez, an applications engineer who grew up in Belgium. He and his wife, a behavior analyst and psychologist, had an on-and-off relationship for nearly a decade before settling in Florida together in 2018. They married in January 2020 and have three children.

Mr. Bakker-Alvarez can work remotely, but Ms. Bakker-Alvarez must see clients in person. In March 2020, with global borders slamming shut, he flew to Antwerp to be with his 73-year-old father, worried that if he didn’t go then, he might not have another chance to see him. The couple’s 9-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter, both born in Belgium, went with him, while Ms. Bakker-Alvarez stayed behind with their 4-year-old daughter, who was born in the U.S. and doesn’t have Belgian citizenship.

“As soon as they made that announcement that everything was locking down, we said, ‘This is just how it has to be. If anyone can handle this, it’s us,’ ” she says.

Ms. Bakker-Alvarez says she isn’t resentful that her husband wanted to spend time with his father, stepmother and siblings during the pandemic.

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“Dirk is a little bit older than me and his parents are a little bit older,” she says. “I would have felt so guilty and I wouldn’t have been able to justify it to myself if he had been here when he should have potentially been somewhere else.”

That said, they never expected to be apart 19 months later, and they admit there’s a limit to their patience with the situation. They have committed to being back together full time by March 2022, either in one household or splitting time between Florida and Antwerp. Meanwhile, they have flown to see each other several times, and have started side businesses—she a consulting business and he a home-services referral agency—in the hopes of turning them into full-time careers.

They say they came to the realization that their professional lives may have to change if they want their relationship to last.

“We have so much at stake, so it’s worth it to us,” Ms. Bakker-Alvarez says.

Nikki Gomez and Emmanuel Pineda

For Nikki Gomez, a 44-year-old photographer, going long distance was a mental-health decision. In early 2020, she was living with her boyfriend of 10 years, Emmanuel Pineda, in the Bronx, which for several months had the highest coronavirus rates in New York.

“We were in a one-bedroom apartment in the epicenter of the epicenter,” she says. “I felt overwhelmed just being in that enclosed environment for so long.”

Itching to get out, she was accepted to Tulsa Remote, a program that gives remote workers $10,000 to live in the Oklahoma city. Mr. Pineda, a 40-year-old social-media manager, had hoped to join her, and the couple began making plans to go together. In July 2020, however, he was told to return to the office.

It was tough to stay behind, Mr. Pineda says. “But Nikki is a very sensitive soul, and the energy in New York was dark. I knew this was a time where so many people were going through so much change, and I had to say, ‘You go do what you need to do.’ ”

Nikki Gomez and Emmanuel Pineda on a Zoom date. Ms. Gomez moved from the Bronx to Tulsa, Okla., while Mr. Pineda, her longtime boyfriend, stayed behind for work.

Photo: Nikki Gomez

To make it work, the two of them have regular movie nights together, sharing their screen on Amazon Prime. They chat multiple times a day.

Since Ms. Gomez left, Mr. Pineda has been lobbying his managers to allow him to return to remote work. In late September, he was granted a 90-day trial period of working from home, with a promise to review at the end.

He is now in Tulsa and will spend the next three months with his girlfriend, who has fallen in love with her new city. “I can’t even express the surprise that Tulsa is,” she says.

Mr. Pineda says that when Ms. Gomez left, his feelings were complicated—his happiness for Ms. Gomez’s new situation was mixed with his own sense of loss.

“As much as she and I are a unit, Nikki is very much her own person,” he says. “And I respect that. I don’t see a relationship thriving if you suppress the other person.”

Taylor Cannon
and Claudia Law

For Claudia Law and Taylor Cannon, a temporary shift to long distance is an investment in long-term goals.

Ms. Law, a 27-year-old vice president at an infrastructure renewal company, and Ms. Cannon, a 30-year-old project manager, were planning to marry in Brooklyn, N.Y., in July 2020. After the pandemic put their wedding on indefinite delay, they decided to put the money they had saved toward a down payment on a house.

The couple, both avid snowboarders, in May closed on a chalet in Hunter, N.Y., with a view of Hunter Mountain and are fixing it up with the long-term goal of turning it into a vacation rental. Ms. Cannon, who works remotely, lives there full time and is shouldering most of the home renovations. Ms. Law, who must be on construction sites across Brooklyn and Queens, makes the three-hour drive from New York City every weekend with sports radio to keep her company. The couple gave up their Williamsburg loft when they moved, so on weeknights she stays with friends or in her childhood bedroom on Long Island.

“If I didn’t have my work ethic, and I didn’t see this as sacrificing a little bit now for a lot later, I think it would be pretty intolerable,” Ms. Law says.

Ms. Cannon, meanwhile, spends her days alone in the house, taking care of the couple’s two pit bulls, Mello and Luna, hiking and getting to know her small-town neighbors. She has embraced her new role.

“I now know how to use a power drill. I’m learning things I’ve never done before in my life,” she says. She also says that she is more of an introvert than Ms. Law, and that much of their success as a couple in this situation comes from the fact that they started couples therapy while in lockdown. They are relying upon the communication skills they learned early on in the pandemic, making sure to have a conversation at least once a day that goes deeper than work gossip and updates about their dogs.

“It has been a little bit of a roller coaster navigating how to maintain that closeness in a long-distance relationship,” Ms. Cannon says. “And if our situations were reversed, it wouldn’t work as well. But when two people are happy alone, they’ll be happy together. So we’ve embraced those differences.”

Ms. Kamin is a writer in San Diego. Email her at reports@wsj.com.