Waiting together

Introduction

Intimate relationships have both spatial and temporal dimensions. Traditionally they have been conceptualized as attachment bonds which require the involved parties to maintain physical proximity (Bowlby, 1969; Hazan and Shaver, 1987; Shaver and Hazan, 1988). Proximity alone, however, is not sufficient for a close relationship. According to Baumeister and Leary (1995), intimate relationships also entail frequent and pleasant interactions in a continuous and shared temporal framework. Through continuous interactions, a couple keep participating in each other’s life and weaving their separate lives into a common one. Therefore a couple is tied together not only by an attachment bond, but also by a shared past, present, and future in imagination. To borrow a term from Sacks (1987), a couple share a ‘private calendar’ which is marked by mutually meaningful and significant moments, for example, the first time the couple met and their wedding date. The continuity of the shared temporal framework thus is an important aspect of relationships.

Sharing time together is believed to be good for family and relationships. The most enjoyable time for couples has been reported to be leisure time that is spent together (Sullivan, 1996). On the other hand, when one spouse becomes workaholic and refuse to spend time ‘doing intimacy’, the other often feels dissatisfied with the relationship (Duncombe and Marsden, 1995). Sharing time together implies that couples coordinate and have knowledge of each other’s daily routine and schedule. In other words, they synchronize their individual temporal frameworks in order to have a shared one. Thus, Reisch (2001) proposes that temporal synchronization between couples is a form of wealth which improves individuals’ well-being. Following Reisch, Warren (2003) argues that individuals are in ‘time poverty’ if they do not have much time to share with their partners.

For certain occupational groups, such as seafarers, fishermen/women, offshore workers, and military service men/women, however, they cannot spend time together with their partners on a daily basis, and they are likely to lose track of each other’s daily activities. Thus, their work patterns disrupt the continuity of shared temporal frameworks between couples and produce de-synchronization. Whereas traditional studies on such occupational groups mainly focused on the spatial dimension of separation (e.g. Lewis et al., 1988; Tunstall, 1962), Thomas and Bailey (2009) have recently attempted to explore temporal de-synchronization between seafaring couples caused by seafarers’ work patterns. Their study shows that when working at sea the seafarers’ temporal structure is different from that of their partners, and that seafarers live out of the temporal framework of their families and communities ashore. They argue that while it is important to understand the difficulties experienced by seafaring families in terms of physical separation, temporal de-synchronization and dissonance for separated couples is also worth significant investigation.

Long-term absence of partners is likely to cause stress associated with loneliness (Weiss, 1973). While this creates tension between couples (Foster and Cacioppe, 1986), it does not necessarily break up relationships. In this context, many separated couples wait in expectation for future re-synchronization. This paper examines the ways in which a group of Chinese seafarer-partners ¹ collectively coped with waiting time and mitigated relationship disruptions in an online community while their husbands/boyfriends were working at sea.

Seafaring and waiting

Seafarers’ lives are characterized by two cyclical phases: long periods of working at sea, followed by long periods of leave at home. For Chinese seafarers, the lengths of working periods range from six months to one year, while leave periods on average last for four months depending on different company policies and practices (Thomas et al., 2003). During the working period, seafarers work as well as live on ships, and leave their partners and families behind. During this period of time, it is difficult for seafaring couples to share time together as they have different schedules and follow different temporal rhythms (Thomas and Bailey, 2009). As a result, the continuity of interaction between couples in a shared temporal frame is disrupted and stopped, and they are in a state of waiting – waiting for the reunion at a future time when they can resume the continuity of the relationships.

Certainly, waiting is a common experience and it is part of everyday life (Adam, 1990). We, for instance, wait for the green light before crossing a road, and we wait for the water to boil before brewing a cup of tea. There also are many types of waiting. Gasparini (1995) points out that waiting implies anticipation – anticipating something happening in the future. In some cases, we are certain the anticipated will happen: the traffic light will turn green and the water will boil. In other cases, the certainty does not exist. When job applicants are waiting for the result, they do not know whether they will get the job or not. Thus, a distinction can be made between waiting with certainty and waiting with uncertainty (Gasparini, 1995). On some occasions, a waiting person remains inactive in expectation of something. This is waiting in its ‘pure’ sense – it is the only action the concerned individual is ‘doing’. On other occasions, however, people do not just wait while doing nothing. When we boil a kettle of water, for example, we may wait inactively until the water is boiled in some cases, while in other cases, we choose to do something else, such as talking to a friend, watching TV, or continuing other tasks, rather than just waiting. Therefore, another distinction can be made between ‘pure’ waiting and waiting while doing other activities. In the former case, waiting makes the present unused and empty of content (Mann, 1962), and as such it produces what Gasparini (1995, 2004) coined ‘interstitial time’, a gap between the present and the future. In the latter, waiting time is used for other purposes. A third distinction can be made between short-term and long-term waiting according to its length. While the former may take a few minutes or hours, such as waiting in a queue for a service, the latter can last for days, weeks, or even years. Seafarer-partners’ waiting for reunion certainly is long-term.

While the result of waiting may make the concerned individual happy (for example, when a child receives his/her awaited Christmas gifts) the waiting process can give rise to stress (Gasparini, 1995; Hogben, 2006). Whether or not stress is produced and how intense it is depends on the expectations of the concerned individuals. Thus, we feel desperate while waiting for a green light if we are in a hurry, but may not feel anything if we have plenty time at hand. Since expectations are context specific, it is impossible to say which type of waiting produces worse/better feelings than others. Nevertheless, one thing appears self-evident: if uncertainty associated with waiting produces unpleasant feelings, a sense of certainty can make the waiting experience better; when emptiness makes the waiting experience unpleasant, introducing some substitute activities to a certain extent eases the bad feelings; and likewise, the unpleasantness associated with long-term waiting can be reduced by cutting down on waiting time.

Cutting down on waiting time, filling empty waiting time with other activities, and reducing the sense of uncertainty, in fact, are the measures commonly taken to mitigate the unpleasant feelings that arise in the process of waiting. Therefore, in the service sector such as banks and supermarkets, service providers tend to open more counters if there is a long queue in order to reduce customers’ waiting time. It is also common, Gasparini (1995) observes, that dedicated spaces are arranged by service providers for customers engaged in short-term waiting, for example, waiting lounges in airports and train stations, and receptions in various kinds of organizations. A range of facilities are likely to be provided in waiting areas, such as chairs, books/magazines, TV, and even cafés and shops. Such spatial arrangement makes waiting more comfortable: the waiting individuals can sit in a chair taking a rest, reading a book/newspaper, listening to music, watching TV, or doing other activities. Such substitute actions serve to fill up waiting time and divert the waiting person’s attention from empty time to something meaningful and more pleasant. Moreover, information is likely to be provided in a waiting space, such as the expected duration of waiting and, if there is a delay, the reason for that. Such information gives waiting individuals a sense of certainty. Waiting spaces thus can be seen as designed to help individuals cope with waiting and the associated unpleasant feelings.

In the case of seafarer-partners, waiting reportedly causes stress. This is because relationships presume sharing time together frequently, as discussed earlier, and therefore seafarer-partners have high expectations for reunion. Past research has shown that long-term disruption to a relationship negatively affects the well-being of the involved individuals to a significant extent. In their study of offshore workers’ wives, Morrice et al. (1985) found that the level of depression that wives reported they had experienced when their partners were offshore was five times higher than that when their husbands were home. In another similar study (Taylor et al., 1985), one-third of sampled wives reported to have felt stressed when their husbands went offshore. Studies on seafarers’ wives reveal similar results. For example, 79 per cent of the seafarers’ wives who participated in Foster and Cacioppe’s study (1986), and 60 per cent of Great Barrier Reef pilots’ wives in Parker et al.’s study (1998), reported that they experienced stress during separation periods. Stress caused by temporal disruptions can make relationships problematic. Forty-two per cent of the respondent in the study of Foster and Cacioppe (1986) reported feeling that their relationships were at risk due to their husbands’ work patterns. Thus, waiting not only damages individuals’ well-being but also erodes relationships.

In terms of long-term waiting, Gasparini (1995) points out that the person concerned waits at home rather than in a dedicated waiting area, and that the society also tends to give the person a social role: an unemployed person if he/she is waiting for a job for a long period of time, or a patient if he/she is waiting for recovery from an illness. It is not always the case, however, that individuals have to stay alone at home in long-term waiting.

In 2003, a Chinese seafarer set up a Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) website called Home of Chinese Seafarers (HCS). It provides a group of Chinese seafarer-partners with an online space where they can share their experiences and offer mutual support. As far as seafarer-partners are concerned, the website can be seen as a space (a social space rather than a physical one) for them to cope with waiting. Dedicated waiting space in short-term waiting, as discussed above, helps to mitigate unpleasant feelings associated with waiting. How do seafarer-partners’ activities on the website help them to cope with long-term waiting and to sustain the disrupted relationships? This is the question that this paper aims to investigate.

Research context and methods

The HCS was set up to provide a communication platform for people in the seafaring community. The participants of the website are exclusively Chinese. The most common way of participation is making and replying to postings in public forums. The website also provides each participant with a public online diary. Although its title suggest it is a website for seafarers, seafarer-partners are actually the major contributors. Some participants joked that this website should be named the Home of Chinese Seafarer-Partners. This may not be surprising taking into consideration that seafarers’ involvement in it can only be periodic, since while at sea they have very limited access to the internet.

Past research on seafaring families has indicated that seafarer-partners hoped to meet and socialize with similar others because they felt that non-seafaring people could not share their concerns and experiences (Foster and Cacioppe, 1986; Thomas, 2003). However, most seafarer-partners do not have the opportunity to meet and know each other, because they live in different cities and regions. In this context, the HCS provides seafarer-partners with a social space where they can share information and experiences and offer mutual support.

This paper is derived from a study which looked into how seafarer-partners’ activities on the website served to ameliorate problems associated with separation and loneliness caused by the seafarers’ work patterns. The study took an ethnographic approach. In order to acquire an in-depth understanding of seafarer-partners’ activities on the site, I logged onto the website and observed their interactions almost daily over a period of two years. During this period, I viewed, took notes of, and analysed seafarer-partners’ postings and diary entries. In this process, a number of themes were identified, including: seeking/providing information; confiding problems/providing support and advice; reflecting on the relationships and writing love stories; the perceived impacts of participation in the HCS; and making friends with each other (for detail, see Tang 2009, 2010a, 2010b). In order to facilitate the research, I also wrote my personal stories on the website for others to read and comment, and had private chats with a few participants. This not only gave me insights into the functions of the website, but also enabled me to make friends with the manager and several seafarer and seafarer-partner participants.

To complement the observational data, I interviewed 30 seafarer-partner participants from different parts of China. Three strategies were utilized to recruit informants. With the help of the website manager, a recruiting letter was sent to all participants in the form of a group message. I also sent out 220 private recruiting messages directly to those active website participants. (‘Active’ was associated with the number of postings made. Active website participants in this paper refer to those who had made at least five postings.) The response rate was very low and only 22 informants were recruited through these two ways. Snowball sampling was used as the third strategy. When I was doing face-to-face interviews in China, the website manager introduced me to three informants, and two seafarer-partner informants led me to five of their online friends. Therefore, altogether 30 seafarer-partner participants were interviewed. Thirteen interviews were undertaken face-to-face in three places in China: Shanghai, Nanjing, and Shandong Province, and two were conducted by telephone. The remaining 15 were interviewed via email. In the interviews, they were asked about their motivation for participating in the HCS, the ways they participated in it, and the perceived impacts on them.

The low response rate as indicated above and the snowball sampling strategy may introduce a bias: those who had a positive view of this website were more likely to agree to participate in the research, and as a result those who had negative experiences on the site were under-represented. Another limitation of the research is also related to active participants of the websites. As in many online communities, although active participants were the minority, they produced most of the web content and their voices and opinions were prominent and influential. As such, the data collected from the website were likely to reflect experiences of active participants.

Among the 30 respondents, 29 had received, or were receiving, higher education; 25 were below 30 years in age; and 11 were married at the time of interviewing. According to my observation, the profile of the interviewees reflected the general picture of seafarer-partner participants on the website – relatively young, well-educated and living in cities. The data were translated from Chinese into English. The first three interview transcripts were translated by me and a professional translation company independently, which enabled me to authenticate and double-check my translations. The comparison suggested that the three professional translations were similar to mine. This gave me the confidence to translate the rest of the data alone, since it was expensive to use professional services. In the process, I utilized an online Chinese/English dictionary (http://dj.iciba.com/). It gave me not only the corresponding words and expressions, but also the sentences that such words and expressions were embedded in, which helped me to choose words most appropriate for contexts. To be sure, these strategies would not guarantee that nothing was ‘lost in translation’, for language is subtle and culturally specific. However, they helped me to be as faithful as possible to the data.

Managing empty time

Having positive and significant interpersonal relationships is believed to be a basic human need (Baumeister and Leary, 1995). The continuity of interactions with significant others is part of life. Once the continuity is disrupted, life can lose part of its meaning and become empty. This is what seafarer-partners felt when their seafaring husbands/boyfriends left home for work. Snow, a seafarer’s girlfriend in her early twenties, mentioned this feeling in the interview:

[M]y boyfriend had been with me for a while and then he went onboard. I suddenly felt that my life had become empty and lost its meaning.

Certainly seafarer-partners had, and most of the time they were engaged in, their own lives – some of them were studying while others were working. However, there was also time usually reserved for family life, such as evenings and weekends. Without the presence of the partner, such time could be felt particularly empty.

One effective strategy to cope with empty time is filling it up with activities. On the website, thus, when some seafarer-partners complained about empty waiting time, the common response from others was to fill it up with other activities. For example, Lotus responded to Rose:

My husband has been at sea for four months. I have arranged myself a busy timetable: taking care of my baby, working full-time, and at the same time busy with preparing for the coming certificate exams. Time is just passing away unnoticed. Rose, while he is not home, you can go to visit your friends more frequently, find more things to do, and learn some new skills. Then time will pass very quickly.

As mentioned earlier, Chinese seafarer-couples were likely to separate for a period of between six months to one year. This was a long span of time and seafarer-partners chose to divide it into several shorter intervals in order to cope with it better. The division points were marked by phone calls. The most significant and meaningful time for seafarer-partners in waiting probably was the moments when they were talking to their absent husbands/boyfriends over the phone. Though mediated communication was not as satisfactory as a physical hug (Holmes, 2004), it nevertheless helped seafaring couples to resume the disrupted relationships. On the website, there were seafarer-partners writing about excitement and happiness when they received phone calls; there were also seafarer-partners counting the number of days that they had not heard anything. For a period of time, Lily always started her public diaries like this: ‘15. It has been 15 days since your last phone call’. Every phone call, then, was an important marker in Lily’s private calendars, marking a new starting point for her waiting. Lily’s diaries also indicate that she turned her focus of waiting from her boyfriend’s coming back to his next phone call. By doing so, Lily divided a long waiting period into several shorter waiting cycles. In this way, waiting might become more manageable.

Keeping track of time

Phone calls not only allowed seafaring couples to ‘do’ their disrupted relationships, but also helped seafarer-partners to keep track of and (re)synchronize their anticipations with their husbands’/boyfriends’ schedules. During separation periods, seafaring couples live in different tempo-spatial zones and they follow different schedules (Thomas and Bailey, 2009). While the timetables of seafarer-partners at home is structured according to conventional work patterns, seafarers follow the schedules of ships which are often not fixed but irregular – when to go to which port and load which cargo may be contingent on a voyage-by-voyage basis. In this context, phone calls informed seafarer-partners of their husbands’/boyfriends’ next voyage plans, and helped them to predict where their partners were likely to be in the following waiting days and when they could expect the next phone calls. Thus, phone calls offered seafarer-partners a sense of certainty in the next stage of waiting.

However, the communication between the ship and the shore was still far from convenient despite the advancement of information and communication technology (Thomas, 2003; Thomas et al., 2003). Mediated communication between seafaring couples was not frequent as Lily’s diaries quoted above indicate. Although there were email facilities onboard some ships, the majority of seafarers had no access (Kahveci, 2007). Phone calls from the sea with satellite phones were often very expensive (Thomas et al., 2003), and therefore most seafarers chose to call home when they arrived at ports and had access to land based facilities. In certain cases, however, due to fast turnaround times seafarers might fail to find time and opportunities to go ashore to make calls in a port. The communication difficulties affected seafarer-partners’ ability to track their husbands’/boyfriends’ locations. Furthermore, ship movement was also influenced by other factors, such as tide, weather, and availability of berths. Without effective communication, seafarer-partners could not predict their husbands’/boyfriends’ whereabouts and were likely to be waiting ‘in the dark’ and without a sense of certainty. Uncertainty, however, produces unpleasant feelings (Hogben, 2006), because it makes the future seem unpredictable and out of control (Bauman, 1978). Spring, a young seafarer-partner in her early twenties, for example, recounted her feelings when her boyfriend failed to communicate with her in two months:

After he left, I did not get any of his information for two months. I was very anxious. I did not know where he was and what happened to him.

Seafarer-partners also sought information about shipping companies’ websites and/or other contact details in order to check the positions and movements of their partners’ ships. For example, one seafarer-partner asked on the website:

Sisters, does anyone know the website of [X] shipping company? I want to check the movement of my boyfriend’s ship. It would be very convenient [for me to keep track of where he is], if I can get it.

Compensating for lost time

Waiting can make the present feel empty and unutilized (Mann, 1962). As such, waiting time passes away and slips into nothingness. For this reason, waiting is often experienced as a waste of time (Gasparini, 1995), and waiting time is regarded as lost time. Willow, a seafarer’s girlfriend, described her sense of loss on the website:

Whereas the basic unit of time for others is days, for us it is years. While others say what happened to their husbands yesterday, we discuss what happened to him [when he was home on leave] last year. If we can live 100 years, we have only 100 last-years. But other people have 100 times 365 yesterdays.

Time being lost had its implications. Continuous interaction enables a couple to explore and to gain mutual knowledge of each other. For couples working onshore, they can share job related matters on a daily basis after work. This was not the case for seafaring couples, as Willow’s words above suggest. As a result, seafarer-partners were likely to have a poor knowledge of their partners’ work. This was particularly true with inexperienced individuals.

Seafarer-partners tried to make up for this deficiency by searching for information about seafaring. Half of the informants searched online, which led them to the website. Cherry, a seafarer’s girlfriend in her early twenties, explained this in the interview:

I knew little about the nature of my boyfriend’s job. After all, he is doing this job. [I] wanted to know more of this. Therefore, I searched online and found this website.

Besides providing seafaring information, the discourse also made the website a symbolic object. We are all aware that between loving couples, photos, gifts, or other particular objects can be infused with a special symbolic meaning. These symbolic objects, in a sense, embody the virtual presence of the beloved other. (Many people would say to their beloved one, ‘when I see this, I feel as if I see you’, or ‘when you see this, you will remember me’.) The symbolic meaning is derived from love, and it must have a significance that is underpinned by love. In the long-term physical absence of the other, the emotion of love may drive one to imagine the spiritual closeness of the beloved with the aid of the symbolic objects. The writings on the website caused the HCS to function in a similar way to such symbolic objects – it helped seafarer-partners to imagine, feel, and recall the closeness with their beloved. Rose, for example, wrote on the website:

In every waiting day and in every longing day, the HCS is my only spiritual sanctuary … Reading the postings makes me feel that he is very close.

The website thus acted as a proxy for real contact with partners. On the website, seafarer-partners ‘talked’ to their boyfriends/husband about their daily activities and feelings. For example, Tulip wrote in her public diary:

My darling, are you all right in these days? I image that you should be sleeping now. Have a good sleep! I just came back and switched both the TV and the computer on. A waster of energy, isn’t it? But the TV adds some sounds [to the silent house] and makes the house alive.

Thus, as Rose wrote, the website was a ‘spiritual sanctuary’. It provided seafarer-partners information regarding their husbands/boyfriends, and also allowed seafarer-partners to ‘talk’ to their beloved on a daily basis, albeit in an imagined way.

Bringing the past to the present

A symbolic object, such as a photo, is able to bring the past to the present, and thus keeps the past alive (Adam, 2006). This seems to be the reason why, as mentioned in the last section, such objects are able to produce a sense of closeness between separated couples. The HCS also had this ability, as indicated by Butterfly’s writing on the website:

Without your message, I feel spiritless and restless. Everyday I depend on the HCS to soak up bits and bits of information about you, which helps me imagine [your life] and evoke memories.

Seafarer-partners not only replayed the past in their minds, but also recounted their past stories and happy moments on the website. For a period of one month or so, Butterfly, for example, wrote one episode of her love stories every day on the HCS. Another seafarer-partner, Red-Apple, who had been married for 12 years, wrote her experiences and stories of her 18 years’ relationship with her seafaring husband for a period of three months. More commonly, seafarer-partners wrote short postings on the site in memory of the past. Such postings tended to put seafarers and the relationships in a positive light by describing seafarers as caring and hard-working. For instance, Lily wrote a posting titled Seafarers Are Great:

Clearly, in Lily’s memory, her husband, and more generally all seafarers, were heroes. Being in a relationship with a hero was an honour and a great happiness.

Butterfly, Red-Apple, Lily, and others like them served as ‘the generalized other’ whose views and attitudes could influence readers (Holdsworth and Morgan, 2007; Mead, 1972). In fact, their writings were highly attractive and influential. All informants stated in the interviews that the postings they were most interested in were those revealing seafarer-partners’ feelings and love stories. Those postings evoked in readers positive memories of their husbands/boyfriends, and inspired them to cherish the relationships. In the interview, Seagull, a seafarer’s girlfriend, explained this:

The biggest help this website gives to me is that it consolidates my relationship with my seafaring boyfriend. There are many touching postings written by seafarer-partners, for example, Red-Apple’s. I copied all her postings and reread them when I have time. I make her my example.

By bringing the past to the present, the website helped seafarer-partners to keep their relationships alive, to ease their resentments, and also to have strengthened the relationships.

Discussion and conclusion

While waiting is inevitable and inherent in everyday life (Adam, 1990), the associated unpleasant feelings can nonetheless be mitigated. In short-term waiting, as Gasparini (1995) has pointed out, dedicated waiting spaces are likely to be created to help waiting people deal with empty time and unpleasant feelings. Such spatial arrangements are not available for long-term waiting. Nevertheless, the HCS website served as a waiting space for a group of seafarer-partners.

Dedicated waiting spaces provide a range of facilities to help people fill time up with substitute activities, and they also offer information regarding waiting durations to make the situation clear (Gasparini, 1995). On the HCS website, seafarer-partners advised each other to fill empty time up. It can also be argued that participation in the HCS itself was a substitute activity. Although the website did not provide information regarding their husbands’/boyfriends’ schedules, seafarer-partners offered each other advice on how to find out such information. This allowed seafarer-partners to better (re)synchronize their anticipations with their husbands/boyfriends’ movements and to gain a sense of certainty. With such information, seafarer-partners were more able to predict when they could receive phone calls. Phone calls helped seafaring couples to re-synchronize their temporal frameworks and resume disrupted interactions for a while. As a result, phone calls were important markers in seafaring couples’ calendars, and they also provided seafarer-partners with points to divide a long waiting period into shorter and more manageable ones. Dedicated waiting spaces and the HCS thus have similarities: both help individuals to ‘kill’ empty time and to gain a sense of certainty, although the assistance the former provide is more direct than that offered by the latter.

Sharing time together and continuous interactions between couples in a shared temporal framework are believed to be necessary for the maintenance and quality of intimate relationships (Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Reisch, 2001; Warren, 2003). However, seafarer-partners are deprived of these during waiting time. Therefore, coping with waiting also means coping with temporal disruptions to relationships. This reveals the differences between dedicated waiting spaces and the HCS. While in the former waiting individuals may not share anything in common other than waiting, in the latter everything (the website name, its content and participants) was related to seafaring. This leads to another difference: in one case the coping strategies are more individualistic, by contrast seafarer-partners were coping together in a group as they shared information and narrated their stories. These features of the HCS made it a ‘sanctuary’ for seafarer-partners, as one seafarer-partner, Rose, pointed out. In addition to providing seafarer-partners with much needed seafaring information and knowledge, the ‘sanctuary’ for seafarer-partners represented the virtual presence of their husbands/boyfriends. It gave them the feeling that they were close with their husbands/boyfriends and could ‘talk’ to, and ‘do’ intimacy with, them on the website. It evoked seafarer-partners’ memories, and encouraged them to write down the moments that they shared and enjoyed with their husbands/boyfriends in the past. Through these ways, seafarer-partners reconnected with their husbands/boyfriends in the present, even though in imagination. This helped seafarer-partners to mitigate disruptions and keep their relationships alive.

This paper thus reveals the ways in which a collective social space can help individuals separated from their partners to cope with long-term waiting. It not only enables seafarer-partners to provide peer support for each other to manage the present and to ensure better (re)synchronization in the future (with their partners), but also provides a space for them to narrate their past (when they were together with their partners). Through these narratives, individuals can relive the shared past in the present, imagine the virtual presence of their partners, and thus refresh the disrupted relationships. These activities help to mitigate disruptions to the temporal continuity of relationships.

Seafarer-partners’ activities on the website further demonstrate that continuous interactions and temporal synchronization are important for relationships. When the continuity is disrupted, the concerned individuals search for symbolic objects in order to find a sense of connectivity and evoke memories. Such activities provide them with a feeling of continued engagement. Furthermore, they also try to keep track of the future in order to better (re)synchronize the different temporal structures.