One more thing that I wanted to add after rereading some of your posts - grad school is very stressful. It’s a very hard time to make decisions about your future. Can you wait until you’re almost finished (like when you’re looking for a job) to make a decision on the future of your relationship? It might be easier when you know where you’re looking for a job and where there are jobs available in your field to have a conversation along the lines of “I’m not going to be able to find a job in my field in [your crappy little town]. I’m looking in [city x]. Now that you’ve got [3-4] years experience in your job, would you be willing to look for a job in with me?”
After dating for a year or so my wife went to school in DC for a couple of years while I stayed in NYC (~5 hrs). I was in my early 30s and she was in her mid 30s. Talking on the phone just about every night (hideous phone bills) and the occasional visit kept things going. I have family about an hour outside of DC so we’d coordinate a rendezvous at the metro station and go out to my folks or she’d take the Peter Pan bus up to NYC. I was busy with work and being in a band and she was busy with school so it went by pretty quickly. We’ve been together 16 years, married for 11. We were both happy and employed in NYC so there weren’t any relocation issues.
So far, so good. It was 2 years before we met face-to-face, and another year before he moved in. We’ve been living together 15 months now and are very happy.
How old were you and your partner?
26 or 27.
How far away did you live?
We were 2400 miles apart-- he was in Ohio and I was in Los Angeles. So no chance for weekend get-togethers.
Did you live in the same place first then one of you moved, or did you meet on a trip, online, etc?
We met online, playing a MMORPG.
If it worked, why do you think it worked?
Three things:
We are very compatible, and from the start we were on the same page on what we wanted from of our relationship.
We both treated the relationship like it wasn’t long-distance; it wasn’t an “online relationship” or anything less than anyone else’s relationship. We didn’t hide behind the distance, and we wouldn’t have made allowances for poor behavior just because we were 2400 miles apart.
We both knew we had a good thing going, and that neither of us had anything in so-called “real life” that could come close. As the relationship deepened, we became more and more sure that no person we met locally could result in a relationship better than ours. Neither of us are the type for flings or one-night stands, so there were no worries about that.
How did you overcome the distance?
We made it bearable by including each other as much as possible in our day-to-day lives. We talked often, at least 3 times a week. We acknowledged holidays and discussed things going on in our lives. I sent care packages every now and then, usually food and snacks he wouldn’t be able to find where he was.
I think if you are reaching your breaking point, it’s something you should talk about with your SO and see if there is anything that can be done-- more visits, longer visits, setting an end date, whatever. Set a limit for yourself, too-- ask yourself what’s the longest you’d be willing to stay long-distance. Six months? A year? Find out where he sees things leading. It’s not to push a commitment or ultimatum or anything, but to see if you still want the same things out of your relationship. If you are, then this distance is just a minor, temporary inconvenience.
Therein lies the problem with the LDR. You start your new job figuring you have to be there 2 years. Then you get promoted or some new project. Or whatever. Next thing you know, you are leading two separate lives heading in two directions.
It wasn’t a big deal for me. I wanted to move back down to NYC anyway so I started looking for jobs there my last year. And here we are still together.
As a matter of principal though, I don’t support LDRs.
Another success story here. We were 20 and 19. We never lived closer than 600 miles until we got married, which was 6 years after we met. We met when she visited a friend of hers at my college. This was long before there was an online - we kept in touch with letters and by phone - which was hacked on my side, luckily for my budget.
We actually broke up after a year, but couldn’t quite keep from talking to each other. I finally asked her to marry me, she decided it was stupid pretending we weren’t meant for each other, and we’ve been married for 30 years.
It worked because we never found anyone else nearly as interesting, though we both tried.
Good luck! I was in a very similar position a couple years ago-- GF in Kansas about to graduate college, me in Austin with my heels dug in. She graduated and had no real reason to stay in KS, while I wasn’t quite done with school, so I said “Well, we can wait until I graduate and see what happens (translation: I’ll try to get you to move here because fuck Kansas), or you can move here. No pressure either way.”
She’d spent the previous two years saying she’d NEVER move to Texas for the same reasons you cited, but when it came down to it, she wanted to be with me more than she wanted to stay out of Texas, so here we are. And now I think she wants to stay. 
Anyway, the point is, it can be done. Austin kind of sells itself.
Yes, with my wife for three years. I was in my mid-20’s and she was in her early 30’s.
Thousands of miles away. We met in Korea while in the army and were together for about a year, but then we got transferred to different duty stations.
A few reasons. We were older, and we were both used to spending time single and on our own. We were both nerdy bookworms, even in the army, and so it wasn’t as if we were desparate for company. We trusted each other to behave. The only things I cheated on her with were language and algebra books.
Also, as I mentioned above, Mrs. Fresh is a few years older than I, and she was very mature. To this day, I always ask for her input in important decisions, and back then I didn’t have any worries.
How did we handle the distance? Letters and phone calls, and we took our leave together so that we could see each other. I think AT&T’s stock dropped five points when I ETS’d and went out to marry her. I had promised myself never to get hitched while wearing green, and wouldn’t you know that was one of the very few promises to myself I managed to keep.
I don’t think it would have worked if we weren’t both geeky loners.
Have you been in a long distance relationship?
Yes, for about 17 months before we married.
How old were you and your partner?
30 (me) 31(him)
How far away did you live?
700 miles, door to door.
Did you live in the same place first then one of you moved, or did you meet on a trip, online, etc?
We met on a message board. I am originally from the midwest and he’s originally from PA though lived in NY when we met.
If it worked, why do you think it worked? How did you overcome the distance?
Well, we’re very compatible 
But seriously, we talked EVERY day on the phone, usually for an hour or two. Emailed quite a bit as well. We spent 2 weekends a month together, usually. We often met halfway inbetween – so we are very familiar with parts of Ohio now!
We married after dating 17 months and have been married for 3.5 years now.
I’m getting a masters in HR management and development, so that job isn’t really bound by location as much as some jobs, just gotta find a company with HR department that has an opening I can score. He doesn’t love his job and has said he definitely does not want to live in his current town forever, it’s just an issue of how long he should stay at this job in terms of what is best for his career in the future. I don’t want him to mess that up for me, just want him to see if it’s possible to figure out when that might be, which may be an impossible request.
Who: A Japanese ex-GF
How Old: me 21, her 29.
How Far: About as far as you can get without getting closer again
How Long: 12 months, with 2 short visits in between and one summer together at the end.
Where Met: Online, FFXI.
End Result: Mutual break-up
Memories: Painful, difficult, but extremely positive
I met a guy online, and had an LDR with him for a while; we were both in our 30s. We lived about a 12-hour drive away from each other, so never got to travel to meet face-to-face. We talked and e-mailed and IMed constantly, several times a day. We talked about me moving, in maybe 2-3 years.
Until he finally came to visit me, after 8 months, and we packed up my stuff that same day and I moved in with him. We’ve been together 5 years, married for 3, and have 2 little sons (plus my son and his daughters from a previous marriage). We’re quite happy.
Have not read the whole thread, but thought I’d throw in my 2 cents anyway.
I probably qualify as having had a very long distance relationship:
Me in the US, she in Germany, and no, it did not work.
The reason?
We were both too “needy” living apart. Together, on the same continent, same city, okay we wre fine when we didn’t see each other for a couple of days, but that was because we knew we could get to each other if we needed or wanted to.
Distance changes everything. It takes that “comfortable” feeling away, and then things start to get intense and demanding.
To wit: “E-mail me your agenda on a daily basis and call me in the morning and at night every day. Yes, Liebling, I know we’re 6 hours apart, but if you love me”…, und so weiter, und so weiter…
Wasn’t long before Quasi was sayin’, " Fuck this shit, ich bin ein goner!", and we broke it off.
I know: Your mileage varies, doesn’t it?
Still, without having even read the thread, it’s a sure bet that most of your reponses will be negative ones.
Quasi
I started dating a girl in the junior year of high school. It worked out well, as we continued seeing each other for the rest of high school.
Then, it was time for college. We grew up on the west coast. She stayed on the west coast, but I went to college on the east coast. When I left for school, we made it clear that there were no promises between us. We’d just see how it worked out.
Well, it sucked. I missed her immensely. We talked on the phone often and explored the early stages of chatting over the internet (early 90’s) through the schools’ computers, but it still sucked. I wasn’t interested in any other girls, even though there were opportunities. When I came home for winter break, I gave her my high school class ring, as sort of a placekeeper for the engagement ring I planned to give her one day. That still left us with 3.5 years of long distance relationship to overcome.
Remarkably, we made it. I came home each summer and most winter and spring breaks, so that we could stay in touch. The summer we graduated, we got engaged. She came with me when I went back to the east coast for law school and we got married after a year. We’ve been married 13 years now, and together for almost 20. We have three children together. And, we’re as much in love now as ever and she’s the best friend I’ll ever have.
So, it can work even when the long distance relationship starts when you’re young. Why did it work for us? We were pretty mature for our ages. We stayed in constant contact. Most importantly, we grew closer together during the long distance phase. Unfortunately, I don’t pretend to know why we were so lucky when so many other couples aren’t. I can’t point to any one thing and say, that’s why it worked. I just thank God, karma, fate, and random chance that it worked for us.
Good luck.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Anyhow, I hope Austin sells itself. Right now, I live in Round Rock, so while I’m close to work, Ikea and a Chuy’s, the likes of the real funky weird artsy hippie organic live music Prius-driving co-op shopping Austiny Austin are about 25 to 30 minutes away. (When I FINALLY sell the Cleveland house and save up enough to buy a domicile here, it’ll probably be in Wells Branch or Millwood, a bit closer to the action.) I talk with my girlfriend every night, but I’m always hearing about how horrible Austin is from her; “I heard a story on NPR about how illegal aliens working on houses in Austin aren’t getting paid”, “I looked online at houses for sale in Austin, and they’re all ugly”, “I heard that Texas is among the worst states in the country for groundwater pollution”, and so on.
I’m excited about her visit, but I’m worried that being in Round Rock, the Austin area be an even harder sell, even if we make the trek into the city every night. I’m also afraid that the area’s cost of housing might be a letdown to her; it’s affordable further out, but I can’t afford to live in the kind of neighborhood like I lived in in Cleveland (a suburb that has a Hyde Park-ish feel, only with much bigger houses. Which sell for about a third of the price of a tiny bungalow in HP, thanks to the piss-poor economy). She wants to be with me, but in Cleveland, and that’s just not possible.
I really, really hope that, like you, she wants to be with me more than she wants to stay out of Texas.
I’ve had 3 LDRs now… The first and second ended in break up after 1 and 5 years respectively. The distances in each of them wasn’t that much, a couple of hundred miles at most and we had good transport links.
I don’t think either of them failed because of the distance, but in both cases conflicting things out of what we really wanted in life was the downfall. There was also the fact that I simply was not able to place a timescale on when the long-distance part of the LDR would end; being in academia, on short term (2-3 year) postdoc contracts, not knowing where the next one would be (especially in this market) was the main problem, and that I didn’t want to give up astrophysics…
The current one is really long distance (India to CA at the moment, has been CA to Europe earlier); we’re totally out of phase with each other timewise (thank goodness for email!), and with both of us in the same field and being equally career motivated, knowing when we’ll be together on a more permanent basis is difficult to gauge. There’s a rough plan in place (mainly dictated by where he has a promise of a permanent position), but current global circumstances have pushed the timetable back a bit and so we’re doing the age old academic two-body dance… Ho-hum.
The Superhero and I met via the internet (a different message board) in the spring of 2001 (with him in Colorado and me in the SF Bay Area), met in person in the summer of 2001 (he flew out for a family event and spent most of the weekend with me). We were in an LDR for about 18 months before I packed up and moved to Denver. During the time we lived 1200 miles apart we saw each other on average about once a month; I think there was one stretch of 6 weeks that was really tough. Things worked out pretty well - we got married this past March.
At the time we met, he was 24 and I was 22. Which is partly why it took us so long to get around to getting married.
The things that made it work for us - we were both ready for a commitment, but a long-distance commitment was easier to keep for the first part of our relationship. We had set times that we knew we’d be talking to each other each week, and we always knew when the next visit was going to be. And I think we knew pretty early on that one of us was going to move. It made more sense for me to be the one that moved, so I did.
I’ve had three LDRs, and am thirding, or fifthing, or whatever the advice that VERY few people can make it work unless there is some kind of idea when it will cease to be long-distance.
First one: I met him in January of my senior year of high school, and we started dating in June, right after graduation. I went away to school 800 miles away in September. He visited once, I went home on vacations, and we talked on the phone almost every night. We broke up in March of my freshman year, largely because he realized that we were heading in very different directions (he was not college-bound), and he, as he put it, “didn’t want to hold me back.” 20-plus years later, he is married to someone else and lives 1200 miles in the other direction, but we still talk now and again and I consider him a friend, who I can still talk to about anything. Good guy, but he was probably right - even if it hadn’t been long-distance, it wouldn’t have worked int eh long run.
Second one: I met him while studying in the Soviet Union right after college graduation. I have no freaking idea what made me think that that one would work: no phone contact after I left the USSR, e-mail basically didn’t exist then, and letters could take weeks to arrive, when they arrived at all. He came to visit once the summer after I left, and I would sporadically call him at his cousin’s place (cousin had a phone), but we were really from two different worlds: me, the secular American feminist, and him, the small-town Dagestani boy who was the first in his family to pursue higher education and who didn’t understand at first why a woman might want to, you know, do something besides have babies. That, and the lack of communication, probably doomed us, but it ended when his cousin told me that he’d had a baby with someone else (if that was even what really happened, but that’s a REALLY long story best told over alcohol).
Third one (the Reader’s Digest version): met him when we were (and still are) co-authors on a blog. A bunch of us from the blog got together in D.C. over Memorial Day 2007, I convinced him to come visit a month later, and by Labor Day, we were driving all his earthly possessions to Chicago in a U-Haul. So far, so good. 
When I first started going out with the then-future Mr. Neville, I lived in Santa Cruz (well, near Santa Cruz) and he lived in Oakland. I would drive up to Oakland to see him most weekends. We’ve been married five years now.
We handled the distance mainly by email and IM, with the occasional phone call.
When we got married, by then I was working in the Bay Area (though not that close to where Mr. Neville worked). My moving to the Bay Area was very much not a planned thing until I dropped out of grad school and lost my job in Santa Cruz (neither of which was planned), though I was seeing him during the whole time all of that was happening.
I think it helped that we’re both homebodies, and neither of us is much into the whole dating scene or looking around for other attractive people. I know I’m very relieved that the part of my life where I had to date is behind me now, and I suspect he feels the same way. It probably also helped that I can’t read non-verbal cues, for the most part. So if someone else was interested in me, I wouldn’t have a clue unless he told me in so many words.
Neither of us is or was exactly likely to have other people hitting on us, either. I’m fairly plain. I think he’s attractive, but my taste in men is not exactly conventional. I prefer a nice fat or skinny geek to a guy with visible muscles, and I like chest hair and even back hair. In fact, you can count the total number of people either of us have dated in our lives (excluding each other) on the fingers of one hand, though you do need both hands if you count me in his total and him in my total. You get the picture- neither of us ever dated much, or was likely to find someone else that would have made us want to get out of our long-distance relationship.
I had a nice girlfriend in college, and when I graduated (a year before her) we tried to make the long-distance work. But realistically, a guy right at hand has many courtin’ advantages over one 300 miles away, and within six months she let me go.