While Steve Bono was playing in the National Football League (NFL), his wife Tina Bono was busy taking care of their two kids, setting up a lease on their house and the car, and finding a new gym to teach aerobics at.

“I would do the physical work,” Bono said.

In the same year that Steve Bono was entering his second season of playing for the Pittsburgh Steelers (his fourth year in the NFL), Wendell Davis was being drafted onto the Chicago Bears for his first season in the NFL. During the time that he was playing and practicing, his wife Trish Davis worked in the city to help provide for her family of three.

Three years prior, Shelly Pederson was organizing her family’s move to Los Angeles. After living in over six different states and two countries, her husband Stu Pederson finally had his Major League Baseball (MLB) debut with the LA Dodgers.

Over four million professional athletes reside in the United States alone. But what does it mean to a be the wife of a professional athlete? Is it traveling across the country, or even the world, meeting and bonding with new people, getting clothing contracts, financial security, and free leases on cars for a season? Or does it mean something else?

“People think you have this really magnificent life and [those are] things that go along with being a professional athlete and it’s always nice,” Shelly Pederson said. “But you have to really be able to handle the change and traveling.”

Living easy and magnificent lives may not always be the case. Four million spouses and families are constantly making sacrifices for their partner, moving around the world or coping with living apart. These wives have a crucial decision to make: Do they pack up their lives and move from city to city with their busy husbands, or do they stay behind, completely readjusting the dynamics of their relationship?

Mutual trust and independence was a unanimously stressed aspect of marriage by the wives The Viking met with.

“As I told my son Joc, make sure you find someone that’s really comfortable with themselves and is okay with being independent,” Shelly Pederson said. “You have to have a lot of mutual trust because you are apart for so long.”

Many wives decide to move with their husbands because of the difficulty of maintaining long distance relationships.

“It kept us together if I moved with him and the kids,” Bono said.

Pederson dealt with a similar situation.

“To be any kind of professional wife you have to be there for your husband to support them, otherwise you are separated,” Pederson said. “You’re away from each other, and long distance is very difficult.”

However, some wives were lucky enough that they didn’t have to move or make any huge sacrifices for their husbands. Trish and Wendell Davis lived only in Chicago while he was playing for the Chicago Bears.

“After he got injured, he tried to come back with the Indianapolis Colts, but I was pregnant at the time and I was working a lot so I decided to stay in Chicago,” Davis said.

Along with talking on the phone several times a day, Davis also drove to Indianapolis once or twice a month so they could see each other.

Wives of coaches, however, have a totally different life. Coaches move around just as much as players do, but they work more hours. Wendell Davis became a coach as the assistant wide receivers coach for the San Francisco 49ers in 2009. His wife quickly noticed the differences between being an athlete’s wife and a coach’s wife.

“[Coaches] don’t get any time off. I would never see [Wendell]. He worked from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. and he would sleep there once a week,” Davis said. “Players are coddled. People do everything for them, but its not like that for the coaches.”

By the time Wendell would get home from work, his wife and kids would already be in bed.

Another professional coach, Geep Chryst, the quarterback coach for the San Francisco 49ers, is rarely home and can’t always be there when his wife Shelley needs him to be.

“Some days are longer than others,”  Chryst said. “He has a really unpredictable schedule.”

On a typical week Geep is at work for countless hours.

“He leaves the house at 6:30 a.m. and doesn’t get home until between 11:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. on Monday through Wednesday,” Chryst said. “Thursdays are a little earlier and on Fridays he is home in the afternoon.”

Chryst says one of the hardest things is having to make decisions without the luxury of picking up a phone and consulting her husband, since there’s almost no way to reach him during the day. She feels that she has to do a lot so her family can stay focused on what they need to do especially because Geep is not always there to help.

“I have to be on task all the time because there’s no other person to pick up the slack,”  Chryst said.

These wives also lack the ability to consult their husbands about important decisions is if they live in different states. Meg Tolbert, wife of Stanford football’s strength and conditioning coach, Kevin Tolbert, lived in Michigan for two years with their three kids while her husband lived in Palo Alto for his job.

“Doing [everything] without Kevin around was very hard,” Tolbert said. “There was a lot going on with graduation, going to college, proms, etc. and my husband missed a lot of that.”

There is a general agreement, however, between these wives that in order to maintain a healthy marriage, it is important to make time for each other.

“Friday is our only night for [the family], the kids won’t see [their dad] the rest of the week,” Chryst said. “We have to make the best of our time together, even if that means only family dinner once a week.”

Bono agrees that it is important to spend as much time with her husband as possible.

“Go with your husband,” Bono said. “Set up your family, be the strong one because you’re gonna go though ups and downs with your husband. Go and support him; everything will work out.”

Bono is not alone; Lisa Kerr, wife of former Euroleague Basketball player Darren Kerr, also feels that it is the wives’ job to be there for her husband, no matter the circumstances.

“Either he’s a hero or a zero, but you have to be there for him at all times, even if he’s a zero,” Lisa Kerr said.

Although these wives sacrificed their lifestyle for sports, moving around and dealing with constant change, not one of them has regrets. Whether it was the excitement, the financial security, meeting new people or traveling, all of these wives had positive experiences with their husbands’ careers.

“[Kevin’s] career has given us all opportunities that we may have never had if it wasn’t for football,” Tolbert said. “I think it has really just been a positive experience for everyone.”