When my ex-wife and I were together we worked for the same company. I was the marketing manager and she was the senior installer/on-site engineer for our interactive voice response product (Press 1 to be disconnected, 2 to be sworn at, etc.).
She got assigned to do an install for a company in Mexico City. It was supposed to be a two week deal. It ended up being three months. At one point her boss/my friend took mercy on us and let her come home for three days while the network techs there tried to riddle out an issue that didn’t have anything to do with us.
The longest ever was about 3 months, while we were still in a LDR. Since than, there have been several trip that were in the 3 week range, and a week apart happens every year or 2.
I’m coming up on two months away from my wife and it’s really too much. We talk on the phone every day, sometimes more than once (unlimited long distance with the cable where I am is great!) but it is not the same.
We live in an apartment in Chicago, and my brother and I have built a very nice apartment for me here in Kansas City. It’s very comfortable and most of my work is here, but I really don’t want to be away from the woman I love.
Don’t know if this is off-topic, but has anyone else noticed that long separations have a negative impact on your sex life? I’m not talking about the obvious, but when you do finally get together, performance anxiety can rear it’s ugly head?
Some of it is doubtless age related (I’m 49), but common wisdom would make one believe that a six week separation would render me as rampant as a seventeen year old.
Anyone else having performance issues after the long wait?
I was one (in addition to being the wife of Tom Scud, above). It involved a semester studying in the then-USSR in 1989, meeting someone there, spending the semster attached at the hip, and then having to go home. The short version is that he came to visit me in the U.S. the following August, but decided to go back and finish his degree.
We dragged things out for more than two years after that without ever seeing each other in person, including having me go through about half a billion hoops to send him another formal invitation to get another US visa. It sucked - this was pre-e-mail, maybe 1 in 4 physical letters would make it to its destination, and phone calls were operator-assisted at more than $2/minute, IF you were lucky enough to get through (and he didn’t have a phone, so it involved him going across the metro area to his cousin’s house to wait for a call that might or might not ever get through).
It ended when I got through to his cousin on the phone one day, only to be told that he had just had a baby with another woman. (Which I don’t even know was true, but that’s another long story.) A subsequent registered letter to him was returned unclaimed several months late, and I haven’t heard from him since. Which, in retrospect, is a good thing (if we’d ended up together, it would have been a train wreck for all sorts of reasons), but it sure sucked at the time.
That, and other experiences, including kidnapping Tom, have led me to believe that LDRs are almost doomed to fail unless there is a plan for them becoming non-LDRs at some point.
About two months ago, I started a relationship with an old friend… who lives 800 miles away. :smack:
We’re flying back and forth every two to three weeks for long weekends (the pattern we’re falling into seems to be fly out Thursday after work and fly back Monday morning before work). He flew out the morning of June 2 and he’ll be back here Thursday evening; the time between then and now can’t go fast enough.
My husband was in the Navy throughout most of our marriage. He was deployed for almost 8 months during the Gulf War; plus several 6 month deployments, and many, many shorter deployments (a couple days up to 3 or 4 months).
Meaning no job, and a month-to-month lease, and not a ton of other infrastructure. (Everything he owned would have fit in a cargo van if it hadn’t been for the huge-ass bookshelves, and we packed it all up in a morning.)
But I still recommend the experience. Well, except for the accidental detour into West Virginia.
My ex and I went just over a year after meeting in person until we shacked up. We met in 2004, started a relationship but didn’t meet in person until September 2006, and didn’t see each other again until he moved in in mid-September 2007. We broke up last June.
The longest my current boyfriend and I have been apart is two weeks, when I returned from a week-and-a-half-long trip on the day he left town for the weekend.
I picked the wrong option, because I misread the poll and I’m plum tuckered. I have only spent two nights apart from my husband since we’ve been married. Not two days: two overnights. He stayed with me during the day at the hospital when I had our daughter, but he had to take our son home overnight. So that’s 2 nights in 12 1/2 years.
I was seeing someone when I left Chicago in June '08. The breakup happened that December (-ish . . . it wasn’t a clean-cut breakup and dragged on for a while starting from that fall), so we were in a LDR and unable to see each other for somewhere around 6 months.
With my current boyfriend, maybe a month or so. His father was ill for a while so he spent a lot of the winter going back-and-forth from Seoul to Belfast. It was very difficult for both of us, being apart at such a time.
gaffa, it’s funny you say that because performance anxiety after separation happens to us all the time, even when we’ve only been apart for a week! It’s a combination of extreme eagerness + nerves I suppose.
Not more than a week - Mrs Piper and I are both lawyers, and occasionally court takes one of us out of town, but since court doesn’t sit on weekends, we’ve never been apart for more than a week.
