Is it wrong that I like my spouse more when they're away for a few days than when they're actually home?

Distance does something seductive: it lets you love the one you've invented. The spouse-shaped absence you populate with every virtue that absence conveniently excuses you from verifying. No dishes. No particular way of breathing. No specific, irrefutable presence that refuses to stay the figure you've cast them as. Of course the ghost is easier to love — you wrote the ghost. Home is the harder demand. They are actually there, needing things, being themselves with a specificity no longing can replicate. The real question isn't why you prefer the curated version. It's whether you'll keep choosing it — or turn toward the person who will disappoint you in precise, particular ways, and whom you must choose again tomorrow, without the mercy of distance.

“Hell is other people.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

The longing that returns with distance is real — but it is the smaller gratitude. The Quran says He placed between you affection and mercy, and that verse was not written for the clean feeling of missing someone across three time zones. It was written for the friction of proximity. For the Tuesday morning when they exist too loudly, when the covenant feels less like a gift and more like a weather system you live inside. What you are savoring in their absence is the idea of your spouse — rinsed of inconvenience, shining in recollection. That shine is not worthless. But it is not the full weight of what was promised or what is owed. The larger gratitude lives precisely where you find it hardest to locate.

“And He placed between you affection and mercy.”

— Quran 30:21

Don't make it a conversation. Don't schedule the vulnerability. Don't call it distance, because distance is the word for something broken, and nothing here is broken — only full. The wheel turns on thirty spokes, and what carries the load is the hollow at the hub, the place that holds nothing. You are not loving your spouse less during those days. You are finally holding the shape of them without gripping. The Tao that crowds itself cannot flow; the house that never empties cannot be entered. Stop filling the quiet days with guilt — guilt is only the ego insisting it requires less room than it does. When they return, return. That is all the instruction there is.

“Thirty spokes share one hub; where the wheel is not, that is where it is useful.”

— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11

The person you miss when they're gone doesn't leave dishes in the sink. Doesn't breathe too loud. Doesn't want anything from you at 9pm when you are finished wanting to give things. You have not fallen in love with your spouse across a distance — you have fallen in love with the absence of anyone requiring you to be present. The trouble with this diagnosis is that it follows you everywhere, including into your longing, including into your relief when they leave, including into the gentle warmth you feel on day two of their trip. Solitude is the only companion you have never resented. That is not a confession about your marriage. It is a confession about your nature. The Cynics would tell you to stop pretending the ghost is a person and live accordingly.

“I am a citizen of the world.”

— Diogenes of Sinope, as recorded in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

The Garden's oldest insight is that pleasure rubbed smooth by constant exposure is not abundance — it is a failure of attention. What you are describing is not a flaw in your bond. It is your nature registering that the shared life has grown too frictionless, too continuous, for either of you to taste it with any precision. A few days of separation restores the specific texture of that person: the particular weight of them in a room, the exact way they set a cup down. From invisible, these things become vivid. That vividness is the actual thing — not a consolation prize for togetherness, but the real flavor of it, briefly recovered. The only error would be leaving it to accident. Protect it deliberately. Build the absence in.

“Of all the things that wisdom provides for living one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.”

— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus