Sure, I would not lightly or unthinkingly be okay with a potential husband entering into such an arrangement, but I also wouldn’t consider anyone as a potential husband if I would never allow them it for their lack of communication groundwork or trustworthy straightforwardness. If I have so little faith in him coming home to me after a once a year camping trip that clearly never became more before me, then I have no business marrying him in the first place! Sure, I may or may not like it — this varies rather sharply based on how readily they can bear a few days of jealousy with grace and good cheer — but marriage is no more about avoiding “do not like” than it is about confirming to the handfasted stereotypes of American monogamy and cheating. One campaign trip a year is three nines of reliability with a scheduled maintenance window rather than unpredictable outages and months of undiscovered foreign key violations corrupting the relational store.

Take a lesson from tech: Three nines of uptime is quite sufficient to build something amazing and valuable to the right customers. We women (and anyone of any gender!) don’t have to implement Six Sigma to enter into a monogamous marriage marriage, but at least here in the U.S. we do care a great deal about proper outage notifications and root cause analyses and considering how to schedule and conduct future outages to minimize surprise harms. I would far rather target a couple of nines with a healthy process that doesn’t unduly harm the personnel involved than target six nines and live a dull life full of control-heavy, energy-draining grayness. Some people will just naturally hit 100% uptime without breaking a sweat; others will design and commit only to 99.0% but will do so with such grace and courtesy that an unexpected multi-month monogamy outage after years of impeccable courtesy and communication evokes compassion and patience and excitement for their return, rather than outrage and viciousness as defective coping mechanisms for their absence. (Come home soon, AO3.)