Dear Jim: My husband and I have been married nearly thirty years, and he’s been in the food service business the entire time. After all the ups and downs of owning his own restaurants, he went to work two years ago as manager of a restaurant in a well-known chain. He’s done a great job there—maybe too great. The company has offered him a position in Southern California, where they plan to open three new restaurants in the next year and a half. He’d be handling everything at each location until it’s up and running, and then moving on to the next one. He’s excited, because the position comes with a big salary increase and also because he’s always liked the challenge of a new project. Unfortunately, I can’t move there with him (my 86 year old mother lives nearby and has numerous health issues), and I worry that our marriage may not survive a long separation. He thinks it will all work out fine, but I have my doubts. What do you think? (“L.B.” in Phoenix)

Dear “L.B.”: Like so many things in life, it will probably work out if you think it will work out, and it will probably fail if you think it will fail.

Look at it this way: your marriage has already survived years of late hours, financial stresses, and all the other headaches that the restaurant business is notorious for. As crazy as that business is, your husband seems well-suited to it, or at least to the parts of it that he’d get to focus on if he takes the new position.

A husband who’s happy in his career is likely to be happy in other areas of his life as well, including his marriage. Conversely, if he’s unhappy because he gave up a great opportunity because of opposition from his wife, guess who he’s going to blame his frustrations on?

I’m not ignoring your concerns; long-distance relationships present all kinds of problems. But if the two of you can anticipate those problems and come up with ways to minimize them, your relationship can survive and maybe even thrive.

The single most important thing in any long-distance relationship is to have frequent communication. It’s better to have a ten-minute phone conversation once or twice a day than a two-hour conversation once a week and nothing in between.

And the communication shouldn’t just be about the humdrum details of your daily lives, or complaints about what’s going wrong at home. With each phone call or e-mail, you should reinforce the idea that you love each other, you miss each other, and that you’re eagerly awaiting the time when you can be together again.

Despite the pressures of his new job, I’m sure your husband will have weekends off once in a while. Use some of those weekends to meet at a nice resort; with his pay increase the two of you can afford to splurge a little. And when he’s able to come home, enjoy a mini-honeymoon, maybe with gourmet meals prepared by a personal chef.

Could the separation cause him (or you, for that matter) to get involved with someone else? Sure. But if a person really wants to have sex outside the marriage, he or she doesn’t have to go five hundred miles to find it. If infidelity hasn’t been an issue in your marriage up to this point, I doubt that it will be an issue in the future.

Good luck, “L.B.,” and please let me know how this turns out.