The Agony and the Ecstasy: Life in a Long Distance Relationship
by New Dealer
I was always suspicious and extremely cautious about long-distance relationships. They always perplexed me. Why would you choose to enter a relationship with someone who lives hundreds or thousands of miles away when there are plenty of people nearby to date (note: I’ve always lived in or very close to big cities). When I was doing on-line dating, I would never respond to messages from women who lived in places like Sacramento or Davis or Santa Cruz because it seemed like they lived far enough away that we would only be able to see each other once a week at most. Sometimes people would complain to me about how infrequently they saw their significant other because he or she lived in San Francisco and their partner lived in Marin or Walnut Creek and both places are under an hour from San Francisco. When I was in New York, people complained about dating people who lived in different boroughs or sometimes different sections of the same borough. I am also not a person who throws caution to the wind and moves to a different place without a purpose. I am pretty sure I ended up spending most of my twenties in New York because I grew up in the New York suburbs. If I grew up in suburban Chicago, Seattle, or Boston, I probably would have ended up in those cities. I only moved to San Francisco because the right law school was here for me both intellectually and emotionally. In short, it is not in my nature to move to a place without a job lined up.
This is the story of how I ended up in a long-distance relationship anyway.
My girlfriend and I went to the same college and we were acquaintances but she graduated two years before I did. This was in the days before social media so we were out of touch for a while and went our separate ways. We became facebook friends sometime after I moved to San Francisco. I can’t remember if she friended me or I friended her. We had a typical facebook relationship until she contacted me out of the blue in September and told me she would be in town in February and wanted to hang out. She also found my dating stories hilarious. Like many Jews, I can also turn my dating woes into hilarious stories. February became a sudden visit in November and we hit it off well. We decided to make our relationship facebook official in December.
We are in a strange place. We knew each other but barely when we were very young and this provides some familiarity or at least people in common, values, stories, and interests. However, we had 13-14 years of silence and distance from 1999 until now. In some ways this helped because we have both grown and matured. She is not as daunting as I thought when I was an eager sophomore and she seemed like a too cool for school senior. She thinks I am more put together than I was back then, there are no more dorky t-shirts in my wardrobe. But we are also a new couple and still in the getting to know you process. This is hard enough when you live in the same city but even harder when you are a country-wide distance apart. My visit to New York in January was our third date or third-eight or so date depending on how you count.
Romantic relationships change a person’s life and in many ways my life is changed but not completely based on the distance aspect. My social life is still largely the same as is my day to day existence. There isn’t anyway to text or call her randomly and ask if she wants to get a last minute drink or spend the night at my place or vice-versa.
Weather becomes a more fraught thing. My girlfriend is supposed to visit next week. We are going to Napa on Sunday. Winter Storm Pax is predicted to wreck much havoc on the East Coast from Wednesday night to Thursday night. I’m hoping with all my heart that it does not delay flights and my girlfriend leaves on time because after this trip we have nothing planned and March is out, April might be out. May is a maybe. I can probably be in New York at the end of June/July, and then I have a wedding in Boston in September. Our time together is also super-jammed packed. When I was in New York, it was two activity filled weekends mixed between a week of work. The best moments were when we were just hanging out in her apartment with take-out.
There is also the fact that one of us will eventually have to move. Neither of us are interested in dating other people and have said so to each other numerous times. But we also both seem to acknowledge that in some or many ways we are good friends who get together romantically while in the same town and this will change only when in the same city. But both of us have built lives and careers in different parts of the country. I did not move to San Francisco with a feeling of permanence but made friends here during my five plus years, in many ways a much better social life than I ever had in New York. Plus the market for lawyers collapsed and getting a job cross country is hard if not impossible in the Great Depression. This is where my cautious side flairs up, I don’t want to move without a job or apartment lined up.
Something needs to happen and eventually something will but determining when to move is very tricky. We are still in the dating stage. It seems to me that stress and anxiety are measured in the long term. If I am in a successful long-term relationship or marriage with my girlfriend, these will seem like trivial things worried over too much and I will ask myself why didn’t I live in the moment more. If the relationship does not work out, I might ask myself why did I put myself willingly through so much pain and anxiety. The only answer I can think of is that my girlfriend makes me happy and I love her and sometimes you need to take a gamble.
I’ve long found it weird that Facebook didn’t put some effort into matchmaking. The possibilities are endless.
I hope things work out well for you.
My wife and I were long distance at the outset. I have found that I am incapable of enjoying the sort of relationship that you have. We talked almost immediately about what was going to happen as far as who would move where and when. We set benchmarks and talked marriage. That this didn’t freak her out was actually a relief and an indication that we were a good match.
This is me saying that you’re doing it wrong, just that I couldn’t do it that way just (as you probably couldn’t start talking marriage within a couple weeks of meeting someone). I always give advice on stuff, but of course it’s more geared towards
Love’s disregard for convenience is aggravating.Report
I did the LDR for a year, ofc I’d been dating her for several years while in college so there was that. We drove from the east coast out to Seattle and had a blast. Later, after I’d gotten laid off and found another job back in the east, she flew out and we drove east. She was a peach.Report
@damon
I find that dating for a few years before probably helps. The fact that this is a new relationship adds a lot of pressure.Report
You got that right! Good luck.Report
Totes hoping it works out, my friend.
Not a LDR story, but an acquaintances got together later story…a guy and a girl from my high school graduated class ran into each other at a Cubs game about 5 years after high school. We had a small enough school that of course they knew each other, but they weren’t even close to being in the same social circles. She was the well-dressed slightly snooty girl; he was the goof off. But they ended up sitting just a couple rows apart, starting talking, and when I saw them at our 20th reunion had been happily married for over a decade.Report
My Husband and I met through MIRC (essentially online chat) and our first two years were a LDR with me visiting him for half a year after that and then four years of LDR punctuated by visits over the summer terms. It can be a challenge but it worked out for me. Absence can make the heart grow fonder.Report
How did you handle the pressure?
Right now, all I want is to be able to spend 7-10 days as a couple when we just live and act normally. Work, come home, eat, chat, hang out, get to reknow each other.
The fact that we see each other potentially very rarely just seems to place me under an incredible amount of pressure and we always jam pack too many activities when what really seems nice is if we just hung out at the Park and walked aroundReport
My attempt at LDR failed. But I was in law school and could not devote time to press on with it, and she wanted to relax things under those circumstances as well as do graduate school herself (which she did after a short time).
NewDealer and NYGirlfriend are at a different phase of life than that, and that makes a big difference.Report
@burt-likko
I think we both feel a lot of pressure and so far have had our relationship expectations and disappointments but everything has been handled like calm, communicative adults.
It doesn’t help that she is really my first girlfriend and the rest of my dating life has largely consisted of going on lots of one and two dates that went nowhere. A few times I’ve gotten up to four. She’s had a lot of long and serious relationships and finds it a bit startling that she is my first girlfriend. Or that someone can make it to their 30s without a super-serious relationship.
On the other hand, she has told me that she doesn’t think she will be able to find a better spouse and that I am a genuinly nice person.
In some ways, I am behind the learning curve. In other ways, maybe I am ahead of the curve. I’ve been told that most people would hem and haw in my situation and wait for as long as possible for commitment because this is where real hurt can happen. I seem to jump right in.Report
Oi. you think your dating stories are bad…
You have not been hit by a literal clue-by-four, ya? [not my story.]
Sidenote: breaking up with people in a construction zone is not a good idea.Report
I tried a long distance relationship back when it was still possible to meet a partner via Yahoo! Groups for music tastes and we couldn’t do it for too long. Instead, I moved to Canada and we got married and stayed together for a decade, which was a really good run.Report