oh yeah, 28 & 31 when we met. 29 and 32 now.
My current relationship started as a long-distance one (3 hours of train). We’d see each other every other weekend, the rest of the time we spent hours chatting online.
Eventually, about two years after we started seeing each other, she had to leave the appartment she lived in, and I offered her to move in. I often wish I hadn’t. We talked a lot more and fucked a lot better when we didn’t have to deal with the boredom of routine and all the miscellaneous crap that sharing a small appartment entails.
I’ve only tried long distance twice (both times with the same person), with not-so-good results.
The first time was with my First Love - we’d been dating for over 2 years when I went to spend the summer with my folks on the East Coast (they’d moved there earlier that year) while he stayed home in Toronto. That said, I was 19 at the time, and he was 21. At that age, we were in constant evolution, so a few months apart is plenty of time to grow in totally different directions… by the time we were back in the same place, we weren’t at all the people we were before. We limped through a week and then broke up.
A few months later, we decided to make another go of it and even moved in together, but it fell apart again a couple of years later when he went to work at a camp for the summer… clearly, our relationship never did well with distance. 
Occasionally there’s talk of The Boy going overseas on a short contract. While I’m not madly in love with the idea, I think we could manage to survive it so long as it was a manageable length (like 6 months or less)… we’re both at an age where we’ve got a good idea of who we are and what we want, after all.
I’m in one right now and I like it, but I am in a very different place in my l life right now than you are. We worked together and had been friends for a couple years and I was married. He never made a move on me or anything - with us and another friend that introduced us we were the 3 amigos. Then I got divorced and we still never did anything with each other and in fact I went out with lots of different people and would tell him about some of them. Then I decided to take my parents up on the offer to move back in with them in a town 3 hours away and they would help with the kids while I went back to school for a couple years and finished my degree. So with two weeks to go we went to lunch one day and ended up back at his place. We originally thought it was just going to be a fun fling since I was moving anyway but we slowly started calling each other and just kind of clicked in a way we hadn’t over the previous two years that we had know each other.
This works for us because:
(1) he enjoys his time alone being selfish
(2) he often spends long long days at work that would not be conducive to a “proper” relationship
(3) I enjoy having time to myself and being able to focus on my kids at this time in their lives
(4) I do not want a step-father for my kids so he and I have the same “non-marriage” goals
(5) I can concentrate on my studies without the interference of a full-time relationship.
We see each other about twice a month, but some of those weekends that I am in Bama I am visiting other friends so we don’t spend a full 48 together. We both seem to really enjoy having a faithful partner that doesn’t need a lot of upkeep.
I do not see me being able to continue this type of relationship for the rest of my life. When I am out of school in a couple years if we are still together I will reevaluate whether I want to live there (I have other ties there besides him) or move around. At that point I’ll be ready to fish or cut bait. He’s said his ideal situation would be for me to live across town. That is something I agree with.
We are both divorced. I have kids full time, he has a child that lives across the country. We are 33 and 44.
Mr. Del and I met online, so we started off long distance. I think we did the LDR thing for about 18 months, which included the time when we were figuring out how serious it was, what we were going to do about it (who was going to move where), and then the actual looking for a job and moving. We were about 1,500 miles apart.
I think we had success for a few reasons:
-
We met online, so it wasn’t like we were comparing the relationship to a time when we were geographically closer. Also, because we met online, I think we were both pretty comfortable with online communication as a way of staying in touch.
-
We were a little older and more established, so we had a little more control over our work schedules and could budget more flexibly to arrange for visiting.
-
We tend to be fairly independent people anyway. I know it bothers some people to, for example, go to a party alone, or go to a movie alone, but it doesn’t bother either of us. We continued to have active social lives with our friends and families during the LDR. Obviously we preferred to be together (wink wink, right?) but I didn’t sit home alone during the LDR either.
Fetchund and I met at a conference and had an 11 month LDR before I moved to be with her.
We’ve been living together for 18.5 years, now. Truthfully, we didn’t really know enough about each other to justify living together when we did. We just seemed to mesh and work well together, mostly without much effort. I guess we were (and are) just lucky that way.
mr emilyforce and I dated while living on opposite US coasts for two years, then lived together for five or six years, then got married. I think it’s going well. We met in 1995 when he was visiting friends of mine.
I honestly think the LDR is why our relationship got off to a stable start. Both of us had had a history of getting way too swept up in the early, rosy-eyed stages of a relationship and then rebounding in doubts. The distance forced a slowdown, and we never rebounded.
Yes, it worked. We met when I was in college (he grew up near the school I went to) and dated during my senior year. The plan was that he would eventually move to wherever I found a job. This proved to be difficult for a variety of family and financial reasons, and we weren’t really sure we wanted to live together- we wanted to both live in the same town and date each other “normally.” It never worked out that way. We did the LDR for about two years after I graduated from college. It was going well but we got tired of it and he eventually quit his job, and moved in with me. It was actually really stressful and didn’t go so well. Co-habitating in a tiny apartment with only one of us employed was enough to make us wonder. Eventually he decided to move back and I really thought we were going to call it quits. We didn’t see each other for a while, though we still talked every day. It went on like that for a little more than a year, and finally we decided we really wanted to be together, and that eventually someone was going to have to make a big change. He proposed, and we took a few months to work out the logistics, he moved, we got married and got a bigger apartment. All has been fine since. Been married about 2 1/2 years, living together almost 3, together almost 8.
I can relate to that. You go from looking forward to seeing the person to looking forward to the person not being there for ANY reason. “I think my GF is having an affair. Meh. At least I have the place to myself for a bit.”
In my experience, for a long distance relationship to work, there has to be an end goal in site. It can just be “oh I’ll live in Boston and you live in New York and we’ll see how that goes.” Because what will eventually happen is you’ll be like “fuck driving to Boston this weekend I’m too tired” or “No, this isn’t a good weekend to visit, I’m going to Vegas with Jeff.” which of course leads to “You can go to Vegas with Jeff buy you can’t come up and see me?”
I think it only worked for me and my SO because we were both in business school and working full time at the same time so we were both really too busy to do anything else.
And some people think cheating is ok. Whatever you think of that morally, from a practical standpoint, if you go that route, you will eventually “cheat” with someone you want to spend more time with than your LD girlfriend.
Him cheating isn’t something I worry about, I trust him enough to not stray. The real issue with me is not knowing when the LDR part will end. We talked about it a bit last night…and probably have to talk about it again tonight because nothing really got resolved or anything. His job keeps him there and not much else, but it’s his first real job and I guess in the field they will pay you a lot more for your second job if you had the first for awhile (is a computer programmer) and he’s just now coming up on his 2 years there. And me moving there would be stupid (smaller, crappier town) and I can’t for at least two years anyway while I work on my masters. He did pretty much say last night he doesn’t know when he will be ready to leave his job for another but that it won’t be super soon…but he is the type that likes to sleep on conversations like these so maybe I can get some clarification tonight…
If you only live two hours away from one another, what about splitting the difference? Is there a town halfway between the two of you? Then you could commute one hour to school and he could commute one hour to work, and you could see how things work out? I know an hour commute doesn’t sound like fun, but it would likely be easier than
a) him quitting his job and having to find a new one
OR
b) you quitting school
No, there is basically nothing in between us, or at least nothing except for me moving a half hour closer, which is not financially possible or logistically smart (having to drive much much further to school, then be 30 minutes from my friends, etc).
My husband and I met in Amsterdam at a “Dopefest” in March, 2001. He lived in Germany (though he’s from Denmark) and I lived in Los Angeles. We saw each other, IIRC, 5 times between April and December, and got engaged on December 31. He moved to Los Angeles the following April and we were married on May 26, 2002. I was 39 when we met and he was 34.
I know you’re looking for success stories to give you hope so you can convince yourself to stay. But since this is IMHO, I’ll give you mine; you’re both too young and he’s not even close to thinking about long-term or marriage right now. If you’re getting restless and he’s nowhere near the same place you are in moving this relationship forward, it won’t be long before you become miserable holding on to nothing more than a wisp of a dream. You can’t “converse” someone into giving up their career and their life, they have to really, really want to do it. It’s a major sacrifice. I sincerely wish you the best of luck, though. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll be that rare guy who, if he thinks he’s about to lose you, will suddenly realize how miserable his life would be without you and how desperately he wants to be with you forever and get off the stick and do something about it. It could happen that way, too.
This was my wife and I. Met online, me in SoCal, her in Boston. Met various places for a year, engaged for a year, married 4.5 years now.
My wife and I did almost 9 months apart. We met in March '03, I left in late April, then she moved up that Dec. We had planned on her moving up about 6 months later, but she got antsy (she’s reading over my shoulder and is saying “Antsy? Try your guilt trips.” But I digress). So, while it was only 9 months, we were prepared to go longer, and I think we would have been ok had it happened that way.
I was 33, she was 30, and I was going through some Navy training in Jacksonville, Fl, before moving up to Maine. We made a few trips to each other over the summer and fall, and did a lot of phone calls, emailing, and IM’ing. We met on match.com, btw.
I met my wife in college. I was starting my 3rd of college and she was starting her 4th. She graduated 16month later and got a job 2.5hrs away. I was 24 and she was 22 (I did 4 years in the USAF between HS and college).
We did the long distance thing until I graduated 1.5 years later.
We’ve been married for a little over a year now, and have been together a total of 6 years.
I’ve had two LDRs. The first started about a year out of college so we were both ~23. We’d dated for a short time sophomore year of college and then got back in touch after we’d graduated. We were both living in places away from family and friends, didn’t know anyone and were just lonely. It started as a friends-with-benefits kind of thing and turned into a relationship, which lasted for >2 years. I really liked it because it left me with a lot of freedom/independence to do what I wanted while having the security of someone around when I wanted.
Lesson learned from that one: Short visits are filled with fun and can mask or minimize personality differences. Or at least make you want to minimize them. I knew we were really different people (me: neat freak, morning person, outgoing, ambitious. Him: messy, night owl, preferred to stay home playing computer games), but the two to four days that we’d have together would be lots of fun so I’d ignore the differences. My advice would be to take a long, hard look at what your interests/personalities are and make sure you’re compatible or, if not, that you’re willing to communicate a lot and work through any differences.
2nd LDR: met him here while he was in grad school and I had recently finished. We had a lot in common - same goals, similar interests (e.g. we like going to the zoo a lot and don’t go out to clubs/bars.), similar upbringing and outlook on life, etc. - and realized that we wanted something permanent. We spent a year doing the long distance thing while he finished school, but in the interim he proposed and we both found jobs in a 3rd location (i.e. not where either of us lived previously) and moved a little more than a year after we met. We just had our 2nd anniversary (wedding anniversary plus a year and a half before that) last week.
Lessons learned from this one: Having an end date is good. It really helped knowing that we’d be together after a set time. That being said though, the first year of actually being together was still really rough. It can be hard going from independent and able to do whatever you want, eat what you want, watch what you want on tv to having someone around constantly. Those short weekends together are all about fun; real life is very very different. We’re happy, but it took a lot of commitment on both of our parts to make it through the learning-to-compromise stuff.
Recommendations: Set an end point. If you know that you’ll be together at some point, even if it’s 2 or 3 years out, makes it more bearable. And makes both people less likely to look around for something else. It gives you a sense of permanence, an idea of commitment.
Also, take a good look at what you both want out of life and if you’ll be able to work through problems together. I know how hard it is to talk about problems on the phone or on those short weekends together. But it’s critical to learn to do so. (That’s another lesson learned: if you never mention the problems that you’re seeing/feeling, it comes as a big shock when you break up with the guy 'cause he hasn’t had any warning that you’re not blissfully happy.)
When you’re together are you doing things that make you happy or are you just going along with what he wants to do (or is he going along with what you want to do) because it’s just for a weekend and no one wants to rock the boat? Do you know if you’re on the same page on the major issues: marriage, kids, finances, actually being together someday? They are tough conversations to bring up, but the answers can help you to decide if it’s a relationship with a future.
I’m currently in a long-distance relationship. I got laid off from my job in Cleveland, Ohio in April. I couldn’t find another job in my field (urban planning) in the Cleveland area, or anywhere within a reasonable driving distance. I eventually found a planning job in Austin, Texas.
My girlfriend (along with my house, which will probably be an albatross around my head until I’m able to sell it months from now, if ever) remains in the Cleveland area. She’s attending graduate school, and graduates next May.
We decided that we’d try to maintain the relationship at least until she graduates. Thing is, she really, really wants to stay in Cleveland. She’s very close to her extended family, most of which live in Northeast Ohio. Also, she’s getting connections that would benefit her in a job search there.
Meanwhile, I’m here in Austin for the long haul. My new job (planning manager for a suburb of Austin) is going great; a progressive and forward-thinking community, terrific work environment, great co-workers, much better salary, and … well, it’s the Austin area. Not only is it a fantastic city, but it’s also weathering the recession quite well. Austin just clicks with me better than Cleveland.
My girlfriend is visiting in me in Austin in a couple of weeks. She’s politically very liberal, quite artsy, and leads a Stuff White People Like lifestyle. I think Austin would be a much better fit for her than Cleveland. That’s not to mention better job prospects in her field, too.
Despite the appeal of life in Austin, it’s going to be a hard sell. It’s in Texas, after all, where people love their George W. Bush, guns, executions, gas-guzzling pickup trucks, and animal cruelty. The summers are hot and humid; her least favorite kind of weather. She’d be 1,600 miles from her nearest relative.
I’m not going back to Cleveland. She doesn’t want to leave Cleveland. I want things to work out, I really do, but … if she lands a job in Cleveland after she graduates, it’s probably going to be over. 
While in our late twenites, my now-wife and I lived 6 hours apart. One of us drove to visit the other often enough that we were together at least two weekends a month (ususally more). We also added in a lot of other communication (email, IM, telephone) during the week. This continued for about a year until I finished my degree. We’ve been happily married for just over three years now.
I think, as others have highlighted, that the distance thing can highlight some issues that you might otherwise overlook, but if it’s going to work, it’s going to work.
We’ve been married for 2.5 years! So far, so good.
I met my husband when we were both living in Boston, both of us were in school. He already had plans to go to grad school out here (St. Louis, he goes to WashU), so we were only really together about 3 months before he left.
We were apart for about a year, and saw each other about once every two months or so, which sucked. Flying was the only really convenient way to see each other, and that is expensive. We got in longer times when we could - he came to Boston for 2 weeks over his vacation. Also, we IM’d & talked on the phone a lot.
In the end, I moved to St. Louis. It was heading into “marriage territory” anyway, and I wasn’t enamored of the job I had at the time.
The odds are stacked against you, b/c long distance IS hard. It sucks and you miss the other person, and you miss the physical contact too. But it can work out, especially since you two aren’t all that far away from each other.