I’ve been dating this guy since the beginning of the summer (I met him the night befre Porkapalooza). We hit it off, and even on our first date, I’ve always felt very at ease around him. We have similar interests, and he laughs at my jokes (I laugh at his, too). We can be goofy or we can be serious. We can go off for a night on the town, or stay at home, drink beer, and watch the Crocodile Hunter. We buy each other music the other has expressed an interest in. There haven’t been any galloping horses along the beach, but it’s been a very fun, yet very comfortable (not in a complacent way, but soothing).
Except he works in the Twin Cities area and at the end of the month I move back to Madison to start my fifth (and hopefully final) year.
About a month ago we had a brief discussion about this, and we both seemed rather cynical about long-distance relationships. I suggested we table the discussion until it was closer to the fact. I know that part of the reason I did that was because I wanted to prolong the happy, beginning-of-a-relationship phase. Yes, call me an ostrich, I wanted to stick my head in the sand.
So last night I brought it up again. I basically told him I wanted to give things a try, but I wanted him to be honest with me, and I didn’t want to pressure him into anything.
It appears he would also like to give it a try. I’ve never been in a long-distance relationship before, so we’ll see how this goes.
Yeah, I hope it turns out well. Madison and Minneapolis aren’t that far apart, anyway. After the fourth or fifth time, you won’t even notice the drive.
Tripler, I’d check the state statutes before dating your dog or fish. That just reeks of incest. Besides, most movie theaters won’t let your animal, date or not, past the front doors.
I understand a bit of what you’re going through… I’ve been dating this guy for nearly 6 months, and the time has now come for me to wander off to college. We may only be separated by a 7 hour drive, but I am not sure how I’m going to deal with that far when we haven’t been separated more than a couple of days at a time for the past 6 months. It’s going to be hard, but I’m giving it a try. I don’t want to give up the relationship I have with him.
easy e, I’d actually like a long-distance relationship. I have a very busy, quite contented life, that just happens not to have a man in it. A while ago it looked like relationship might develop with a man about 1,000 miles away, and I thought that would be just perfect. (It never got out of the e-mail stage, and went the way of relationships. . . .)
Of course I might have been kidding myself that I would have remained contented with the long-range thing, but it did appeal mightily at the time.
And I’ve often thought that a long-distance relationship, while not “saving” my marriage, might have greatly improved the its chances of survival.
What, you can drive this distance? Is this in the same state??
Wimps, that’s what you are. Feh. Try an Amsterdam - Los Angeles commute every two months or so. And I’m not talking Amsterdam, Texas.
[sub]Seriously, good luck! It can certainly be done, but you can’t do it forever. But ah, you’re all new and just fallen in love and such. You’ll be OK.[/sub]
My relationship went long-distance last month - my husband is living and working 800 miles away. I won’t be able to live with him again for 22 more months - we gotta get our kid into college first.
Granted, this is very different from your situation, but I wanted you to know that you’re not alone. (I’m not alone either, as I’m living with the kid and the dogs…) Wish I could offer you some words of wisdom, but I’m still new to this living apart nonsense. We’ve gotten together 3 times since he left, and he’ll be coming down here for Labor Day weekend. I expect to amass a lot of frequent flyer miles in the next 22 months. It’s not ideal, but we felt it was something we had to do.
Best unsolicited advice I can offer is to just see where things go. I’m enough of a romantic to believe that if things are meant to work out, they will. Just try not to let the situation make you crazy.
Mine isn’t as long distance, but I don’t have a car and can’t drive, so it is still a big deal.
My girlfriend of two and a half years just left for college. She is a grade above me, so I will (if I can get in and pay for it) be joining her in a year. But still, she is in Claremont and I am in Vista. We both miss each other, but she has lots of things to distract her and is meeting new people, while I am down here on my summer vacation going crazy. I won’t get my license until January, so I’ll have to get a job and get some money for trains and busses so I can see her more often.
Just a coupla months ago I finally came back to the states…I spent 8 months in France, thousands of miles away from my darlin’ peasea But I’m back now, so that makes me perky.
My contribution: I think it’s doable if it’s short term. When I left, we weren’t sure if I’d be coming back to St Louis (I’m from Boston) or what, as I didn’t have a job lined up. So we were still dating, and talking every week, but nothing was decided. In eight months I saw him for a week (since neither of us have much money). I think what kept me going was the knowledge (we decided halfway through that I was indeed coming back to St Louis) that I would be seeing him soon on a permanent basis.
So, easy e, I think that you can do it if you believe you can, since you said it’s only a year, and there are vacations in there I suppose?
I’m right there with you, easy e. I met my boyfriend right here on these boards, and we’ve been together over 7 months…nearly 8…with four-five hours between us the entire time. We’ll have three more years of this before I graduate college and can leave the state (I’m not in a position to switch colleges, financially, especially not where he lives, where out-of-state tuition is sky-high).
At least it’s only a year. And they’re really not so bad. I can’t wait to be with him full-time, but for now I just enjoy the fact that I’m not becoming too clingy and dependent on him since he’s far away and I can bond with my other friends.
It can be both amazingly fun from the anticipation, and amazingly torturous. (I’ve done it twice; once from NY to Chicago, and once from Chicago to Leningrad, pre-breakup of the USSR. Boy, did THAT suck!).
Communication is definitely the key. The hardest part about the whole Soviet connection was the lack of contact; he was living in a dorm, and Soviet dorms have no telephones, plus at the time you needed to make advance reservations for a specific time and number of minutes to make international calls from a public telephone center, plus the mail sucked (sometimes it would take 2 weeks to arrive, but sometimes it never arrived at all). E-mail? Fuhgeddaboutit.
I also second the thing about it not working forever. You can enjoy the thrills for a while, but the only ones I’ve even known to work out in the end were ones where the parties had some idea of when it would no longer be long-distance, or were at least able to envision the possibility. If you’re not goal-oriented at this point in your life, though, and you’re crazy about ach other, what’s the harm in trying?
My fiance and I were 10 hours driving distance apart for 2 years, so I can share some advice here. I think someone already said this, but communication is key. If you can set up an appointment to talk to each other that could help, it did for us, we were assured talking to each other at least once a week by phone. We entered into it with no definate plan as to when we’d be close to each other again, but we made it work…he’d come visit on school vacations since his parents lived close to me at the time. We did date for 2 years in high school before he left for college though, so that may have helped me realize how much of a loss it was for him to move so far away. But I digress…I was talking about communication, that is key. I think that if you can make it by only talking to each other, than you have it made for later on, because you can always fall back on the fact you can talk to each other to sort out everything that is going on, at least it is that way for us. Hope that helps
As long as the two of you can continue communicating, things should hopefully be ok. Long distance relationships do have certain advantages, and it can offer one a lot of time to think and reflect.
Best of Luck to you and hope things work the way you want them to.
On a side note, LNO, it might be time for another gathering and we can give EasyE another excuse to come up and see her sweetie.
But I’m back now, so that makes me perky.