Tell Me About Starting a Relationship Over a Long Distance

In My Humble Opinion
1

I joined OKCupid because of the recommendations I had read here. I got to talking to someone 1300 miles away from me. Our original intention was strictly to be be pen pals. Well, the emails got longer and longer, more and more personal. We have the most amazing friendship now. There isn’t anything I feel I can’t tell him, and I feel like he knows me better than anyone else ever has. I am flying out to see him 3/9.

The problem is, our closeness temps us into romantic territory. We have nothing but a few pictures to go off of on either side. While we both find the others pictures pleasant, we don’t feel any major chemistry physically. We have both met people through the internet before, and have experienced that total fall on your face, don’t get along at all in person despite having great email/phone/chat rapport. So we aren’t letting ourselves think romantically, although it is very tempting because personality wise, we seem perfect for each other.

I know there are a lot of dopers who met through here and in general who have met through the internet. I am interested to know when things turned romantic - were you able to do it just from pictures, or did you have to wait to see each other in person? I would be most interested to hear from anyone who wasn’t expecting lightning bolts but found them when they did meet. I am also interested to hear any failures, too. Did anyone travel a great distance to meet someone they felt really close to and completely bomb?

So, please tell me the story of how your long distance friendship turned romantic - when and how it happened.

2

I’ll tell you I don’t think they’d work in reality. You can’t know someone if you aren’t actually physically with them very much. I like to see how people I’m interested in re-act to situations. For instance, traffic, bad service, mornings, children, etc. and you don’t see those small but, important trait telling situations when the other person lives 3,000 miles away.

3

neisha - Thanks for the reply - but I am not looking for editorial on long distance relationships’ viability. I have done them before, I know the dynamics. I have never been in one that started cyber, though - I always met in real life first, started the relationship, then had to deal with distance after the fact.

Paging Coldfire, Ginger of the North, and silenus, to name three I am aware of. How much did you interact with your partner before things turned romantic?

4

Don’t do it.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

5

I am not really looking for advice, at least not right now. I can pretty well take it or leave it. I am just curious how this has played out with others. I think I remember seeing your name in other long distance relationship threads, Agent Cooper. can you link me to a thread where you described what happened that prompts you to give this advice?

6

Its a long distance and internet relationship at the same time ? wow… hard…

I’ve never been through anything similar… but go ahead and try it. Don’t worry about “relationship” but having a good time. If you arrive with “lets see if this is the guy” it will just burden both of you and guarantee your time together will be a flunk.

On the other hand… long distance relationships suck IMO… but why not have some fun or try to work it out ? Giving up before its given a chance is worse than having to high expectations.

7

Since everyone seems hellbent on giving advice, let me give more of the details. Thanks - the plan going forward is that we treat this strictly as a platonic relationship… but once we are face to face, if any lightning bolts zap us, we won’t turn our backs on it. I am not going out there to “see if he’s the one” or any such non-sense. I don’t have these big expectations of what I am going to find. I made the arrangements to visit long before we had any idea it would have this weird overtone. I was just going out there because I needed a bit of a vacation and his horse should have had her foal by then and it just seemed like a nice way for me to get away from the ordinary city life I lead. I have been to his state before on business and thought it was beautiful - that I wanted to get back to it for pleasure some time. It seemed the perfect opportunity. I am not staying with him in his apartment and I will have a rental car for myself.

8

Hi Thinks2Much! I’m going to take a stab at answering your question.

Stonebow and I met at another online community. It was a chat/message board connected with a Robert Jordan fan site (since that fateful day, almost 8 years ago, the site has evolved into a broader fan site for misc. fantasy novels, and I am a chat administrator). Anyway, Stonebow just happened to be hanging around in the chat one evening. I was new to the site, and trying to get to know everyone, since it was and still is a fairly close knit community. He was one of about 5 other folks who I added to my instant messenger that night. We chatted about books, movies, music, classes, and just about everything else under the sun. The conversations got longer. The emails got more personal. Then we decided to speak on the phone. The phone calls were hilarious at first. He’s from NY, and I am born and raised in Arkansas, so we had a great many chuckles over dialect and accent. The phone calls got longer, and lasted late into the night.

One night, as we were speaking, I made a comment along the lines of “I can’t imagine not talking to you. I’m already half in love with you”. The chuckle I expected to share with him over that statement was instead “Well, I’m 3/4 in love with you”. He was smooth, huh? :smiley:

We were both speechless for a moment after that. Over the next three years we flew back and forth from Philadelphia and Little Rock about once every 3 months. In the summers, Stonebow would fly down here to stay from June until August. I spent Valentine’s Days and Thanksgivings with him on the East Coast, and he spent the week following Christmas until New Year’s day with me. We married once we’d both finished our undergrad degrees.

So, to sum up, we didn’t go looking for love. We met while involved in a shared hobby (reading sci-fi/fantasy). We were very good friends, and love just snuck up on us. We took the chance that was given us and ended up happily ever after.

There were naysayers who told us it was a bad idea. We ignored them, but we ignored them with the understanding that we were working against the odds. Long distance relationships often turn out badly, but neither of us were the type to give up a chance on love just because we might get our hearts broken.

9

I’ve done the internet/long distance thing three times. The two priors ended for the same reasons other relationships end, nothing specific to the distance or the ineternet meeting.

Currently, I’m dating my best friend. We were best friends, and hung out in person as best friends before we fell for each other. We’d spent hours and hours and hours chatting (we once went 21 hours talking to each other without logging off or getting bored or passing out), and got to know each other from A to Z. The first time we spent time together in person, we were pretty nervous. I was actually frozen with panic. The way we got around the nervousness was by repeating inside-jokes we’d formed in our long chats, and after that we very quickly warmed up to the point that you’d think we’d grown up next door to each other. Just a couple of hours after we met face to face, his brother said it was like having another one of him around. :smiley:

We developed major crushes on each other during the second visit, and on the third visit he asked me to be his girlfriend. In those three visits, comprising a week and two weekends, I have seen him deal with traffic, bad service, mornings, and children, and he’s seen what I consider to be my biggest faults. You have to focus on quality vs. quantity with LDR trips, but yes you can learn all about how the other person really is.

Wherever you meet, an LDR needs extra special attention. You can’t treat it as casually as you would treat a normal relationship. People who expect it to be exactly the same are going to get burned, and think it’s impossible to make it work. I just got out of a NetMeeting conversation with the man I love, who was touched to the point of tears by a box full of personal trinkets I sent to him. We can’t see each other for another couple of months, but the little things you do to feel closer to each other really help. Now I’m knitting him a scarf that he’ll be able to wear every day and think about the hours I spent making it for him and thinking about him. People who could see each other every day wouldn’t be touched so deeply by these things. It’s wonderful, and offsets the pain of having to be apart.

Now, Thinks2Much, if you are concerned about this, I think you already have the right idea. Don’t go into it expecting a big romantic thing. LDR’s are intense and accelerated, so anything you can do to slow things down and keep it a friendship for as long as possible will help. My boyfriend and I would always try and restrain ourselves from flirting, back when it was just friendly. We had our own joke about it, saying “gosh, it’s a good thing we don’t flirt!” after making some joke about body shots or saran wrap bikinis, to break up the sexual tension and take it back to a platonic thing. Now we’re liable to say it in the middle of sex or something to make the other crack up.

If sparks do fly, you could try “dating” online but not making a committment, and seeing how that works out for you. It’s important to learn how the other person will react to the distance, because knowing how to handle the intense emotions is a skill that both parties need to have in spades in order to make an LDR work.

10

Thanks you so much for your stories,** FaerieBeth ** and Miss Violaceous! :slight_smile:

FaerieBeth, I am curious how your first meeting in person went since you had already metioned you were feeling like you were falling before hand. Would you mind sharing that part of your story, too?

11

I don’t have any pearls of wisdom about long-dstance relationships, but I have a very close friend that met her fiancé through a mutual friend, emailed him for months and found they had a lot in common. She thought that this guy was perfect for her and she made the desicion to go out and see him, although his picture didn’t impact her as much as she would have hoped. Well, as she tells it she saw him and was underwhelmed. No attraction whatsoever. She immediately panicked, wondering what she would do now with the rest of her weekend and how she could make arrangements to stay someplace else.

After a tense silence in the car, the guy broke the ice by making a joke–the same type of wit that had so attracted her, and she decided to try talking to him as if they were still writing.

Two years later they are very happy, getting married in October. She tells me that she is attracted to him because of his mind now, but that it was a process that she had to put time into, and she’s glad she did.

Hope it helps!

12

hey,

this is my first post, so bear with me.

i actually had a long distance relationship with a guy for about 3 years, every couple of months hed come down to see me and we spend time together, and it was great. The thing about long distance relationships and online ones is that you dont really know the other person until you meet them and even then, you both lead totally different lives away from eah other. i was totally in love with him, and i assume he felt the same, but after we split up, he wanted me back and I found out things I never dreamed he could possibly do…and the whole relationship fell in a heap and after 3 years i assumed i knew him, but i never really did, because he only allowed me to see what he wanted me to, unlike me who was an openbook :slight_smile:

I do hope your meeting goes well, and that if he isnt mr. right that you find him :smiley:

13

I’m going to be very lazy right now, and paste is a post I wrote back in November. It was KSO’s thread about meeting your significant other.

Keep in mind that we had already (long before he even booked the plane ticket) verified to each other that we had romantic feelings. We also had the talk about what to do if the spark wasn’t there in person. No pressure and no recriminations. Other than that, I don’t know what to tell you. We had three years of being 1200 miles apart, and worlds apart (He was in a major metropolis area, I was in the backwoods of the Ozarks). I’ll be happy to answer any specific questions about our particular chain of events.

14

Thank you so much, FaerieBeth - I was quite happy with the copy and paste - I didn’t realize you ahd already explained it somewhere else. You could have just given me the link, too. I wouldn’t have minded the extra work.

But Damn! That was beautiful!!! sniff I may write you offline for some more personal advice… thanks again. :slight_smile:

15

You’re welcome, and my email is in my profile!

16

I should have said it earlier - Welcome to the SDMB! Thank you for using your first post in my thread, and I appreciate your thoughts and well wishes. Take care. :slight_smile:

17

Thank you for this information, too. Not everything can be fairy tales, so it nice to hear that others have had a happy ending without the lightning bolts. Thanks for sharing. :slight_smile:

18

If anyone has anymore examples, keep them coming. :slight_smile:

19

I’ve had two long ones, the first failed because of normal reasons, The 2nd is a woman in London-long!

We met by accident sort of, but i fell in love with her right away. Went to visit her in April. the first few days were ok, she seemed a bit distant. After that though we got closer and she wanted to see me again when I left. We were both too busy so i didn’t back until Nov. It was even better, and I think we got closer again. She cried when I left and I almost did too. I trid to get there for xmas but couldn’t, so planned on Feb. Now it seems she is going to get a new job and move to Cyprus for at least two years. I have a feeling she’ll really like it there and her job, and I have a feeling it’s over now. I can’t really move to the middle east. Since then, she’s been talking less, and our communication is less and less. My luck-I find the only woman in the world who doesn’t want to discuss her feelings.

Communication is the hardest part-by far. She’s at a computer less, calling her cell is ridiculously expensive and if I could the time she is on is bad for me, 80% of any snailmail/packages I send to her get stolen-her landlords fault not the Royal Mail I think. The mail just gets thrown thru a mailslot for everyone in the apartment complex, believe it or not. She’s from Hungary originally so our wonderful gov’t and immigration (don’t get me started on them) won’t give her a visa unless she has a good job in Hungary and owns property(which she does).
Well you asked! If you want it to work, it can-it’s not difficult but you both have to want to. If you go, just go and have a good time. It’s so hard to find someone you really care about in this age. If something happens, great-if not at least you have a new friend. Good luck.

20

I married my LDR. It seems to have worked just fine.