Ian Derrer and Daniel James were married in August 2019 in the garden room of a restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with each of their 19 guests reading aloud lyrics to the couple’s favorite Stephen Sondheim love songs. After staying in Santa Fe for a weeklong honeymoon, the couple drove to Dallas, where Derrer, 45, lives. The next day, James, 33, left for Houston, where he lives.

Through four years of dating and seven months of marriage, the couple have never lived together. Most Fridays, one of them makes the 244-mile drive between the Texas cities. They live separately for their careers — both work in opera administration — and would be reluctant to ask the other to give up a job he loves.

Long-distance marriages are not uncommon. But for some, the coronavirus has thrown a wrench into their lives. Many are no longer willing to get on a plane, which for one couple means they are not sure when they will see each other again. For another pair, visits now involve a 13-hour car trip. Derrer and James are actually living in the same place for the first time, thanks to their jobs going remote during the crisis.

Some couples had always planned for their separation to be short-lived, so they are waiting out the time by increasing their hours on FaceTime. Others are finding that the crisis has cast a shadow over an arrangement they have maintained for a decade or more.

Danielle J. Lindemann, a sociologist and the author of “Commuter Spouses: New Families in a Changing World,” said that most of the 97 couples she interviewed for her 2019 book thought the arrangement was necessary to keep the momentum going in their careers. Those who study these couples, who are part of a group known as LATs (living apart together), agree that their numbers are on the rise, though figures are hard to come by, according to Lindemann.

Most of the couples Lindemann spoke with were highly educated. But their specialized training, she said, “shrank their universe of available job choices, as they saw it, rather than expanding it, as we might expect.”

When Jimson Mullakary, 31, and Dr. Roshini Mullakary, 29, were dating, they used to joke that they were in a long-distance relationship because he was in Manhattan, where he works as an accountant, and she was a medical resident on Long Island. They now live 1,137 miles apart. When Roshini Mullakary was applying for fellowships, she found only a handful of programs in the New York City area in her specialty, allergy and immunology. Jimson Mullakary encouraged her to apply anywhere that she thought would give her the best experience.

“He’d say, ‘Whatever happens, we’ll figure it out together,’ ” she said. He proposed in summer 2018 on a balcony overlooking the ocean on the Greek island of Santorini, and a few weeks later she moved to Rochester, Minnesota, to be a fellow at the Mayo Clinic. They were married last September.

To bridge the distance between them, they send each other handwritten letters once a week and connect via FaceTime from their respective apartments while catching up on work, leaving it on for hours and talking intermittently. Every few weeks one flies in for a weekend visit.

Many couples see living apart as a short-term solution to accommodate their careers, but sometimes it becomes a long-term arrangement. Patrick Donnelly, 50, and Alexandra Mascolo-David, 58, lived together in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, when they married in 2000, but he moved away a year later for graduate school and she stayed. In the 19 years since, Donnelly’s career in arts administration has taken him from Pittsburgh (a six-hour drive from his wife) to Kalamazoo, Michigan (a two-hour drive), to Newark, Delaware (a two-hour flight), and finally to Kansas City, Missouri (a two-hour flight plus a 2 1/2-hour drive), where he has been for a decade.

Mascolo-David loves her job as a professor of piano at Central Michigan University, where she has remained through Donnelly’s moves. They never had children. “The goal is to live together,” Donnelly said. But the time “was never right,” Mascolo-David added.

They have been seeing each other on weekends about once a month. She also stays with him longer over university breaks, when she makes the 13-hour drive, with a hotel stay along the road so she can take their dogs. They have given up flying for the time being and will only visit each other by car. But the coronavirus “has opened my eyes to the reality of our situation,” Mascolo-David said. “I am determined to find ways to share a roof with Patrick sooner rather than later.”

Many couples who are apart have a plan to live together, but not Lauren Class Schneider, 61, and Larry Moss, 64. They married in February, after having a long-distance relationship for 20 years, but each has stayed put — she in New York City and he in Chicago.

“I’m too happy with our romance to want to make a change,” Schneider said. “We’re grown-ups who each made choices in our lifestyles that we are happy with.”

Being together just a few days a month means they still act like newlyweds, sitting on the same side of the table at a restaurant so they can hold hands. They would fly to each other’s city for just one night if they can’t spend the whole weekend — a flyby, they call it. They light Shabbat candles together on FaceTime and hide notes in each other’s apartment.

Such arrangements are “a hall pass from constant companionship,” said Lindemann, the sociologist. One participant in her study explained, “You get the independence of being single and the benefits of marriage.”

Pamela Hinchman, 64, a voice and opera professor at Northwestern University, married Ted DeDee, 70, last year. Her outlook on marriage had always been that “you don’t have to be glued to someone’s hip,” she said. (She has been divorced twice, and he was a widower.)

When they got engaged in 2018, he was living a 2 1/2-hour drive away in Madison, Wisconsin, with no plans to move in with her in Evanston, Illinois, though he was retired. When he told her that the La Jolla Music Society in California needed a new chief executive, she told him, “That’s perfect for you.” Six months before their wedding, he came out of retirement to take the job.

For nearly a year, they have flown more than four hours about twice a month to see each other.

But in January, DeDee decided he would leave his job in June to focus on a health issue. When the coronavirus threat ramped up, he said he moved up his departure to mid-March “so I can be with my wife, simple as that.”

The coronavirus has changed Hinchman’s outlook too. “It’s surprising to both of us, but life together has been put into perspective,” she said.