It's a long way to the top if you want to be in politics. Ted Cruz and his wife, Heidi, learned that the hard way: For the first seven years of their marriage, they didn't live together full time so that Cruz could pursue his career in politics, The Washington Post reports.

The couple met in 2000, when they worked three cubicles apart for George W. Bush's campaign; after they got married, Cruz decided to take a job in Austin as Texas' solicitor general, moving 1,500 miles from Heidi, who stayed on at the Treasury Department in Washington. Eventually Heidi moved to Texas, but in order to get a job in banking, she had to live in Houston, not in Austin with Cruz. They would take turns making the three-hour drive to visit one another every weekend, but friends and family saw the move was hard on Heidi, who was without the support system she had in D.C.:

Heidi did not seek professional treatment and was able to function at work, [Heidi's mother Suzanne] Nelson said. But on one particularly worrisome night, while she was in Austin in August 2005, she wandered toward an expressway on-ramp, where she was found by an officer with her "head in her hands" and no car, according to a police account first reported by BuzzFeed. There was no car visible. The officer determined that Heidi was a "danger to herself." The Cruz campaign did not make Heidi available for an interview, but Heidi told The Post in September that the move to Texas "really was for Ted, and I wasn't comfortable with that." [The Washington Post]

Cruz moved to Houston in 2010, marking the first time in seven years the family was living full time together. When Cruz won a seat in the Senate, however, the long-distance relationship was launched anew. Once, when Cruz came home to Texas after a week in D.C., his older daughter ran to the door and exclaimed, "There's a guest in the house!"

The Cruzes, of course, are now eyeing a new place where they can be together — a nice little house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Read more in The Washington Post. Jeva Lange