Anyway Sable and I have been together going on four years. She lives in New York and I live in Illinois and we Skype all the time and play video games, mostly. It's just kind of in general pretty chill. We're like best friends with the added benefit of butt touches.
i feel like this is the best model for a relationship! \o/
MD lives in Stockholm and I live in Perth, so we have a six/seven hour time difference, which sucks in a big way. We have been best friends for several years, but we only started dating in June 2013. MD decided to come over and say hello, and then realised that i'm
hot stuff, if you know what i mean. we mostly communicate on skype and through text messages, but we like to send each other letters and things sometimes too.
How do you make the distance seem shorter?
we don't! I feel like that kind of thing is kind of pointless when it's constantly very obvious that you're apart all the time. There is no romantic way to say "there's only 13,437 km between us!". I feel like it's much more productive to acknowledge that you're far away, and it sucks, and that's kinda just how it is. There are a few (small) upsides to being apart that I mention a lot:
- i forget how pretty MD is in real life! so i always remember that when i pick him up from the airport i'm like "oh gosh!!!" and i get butterflies
- being apart means you forget lots of little mannerisms that your partner does all the time. when you fall in love with someone you notice all these things and they're adorable, so when you finally meet up with your partner it's like you meet them all over again.
- because we don't actively go on dates, we save money and don't buy things for each other very much. then if we do want to buy you something expensive, you can always say 'well if we'd been going on dates for the past x months i would have spent this much anyway!'
- you tend to not have arguments about really dumb shit like who did the dishes last. i mean, we don't have arguments about that because MD likes doing the dishes anyway, but you know what i mean.
we also do a lot of planning for when we do meet up, like how i've been meaning to take MD to the perth aquarium for two years. but things like 'when we get together, i'm going to make a creme brulee for you!' and 'when we meet up, we can go clothes shopping and buy you some jeans that aren't black!' are really good, because they're the kind of thing that cheers someone up. thinking towards the future is more helpful to us than pretending that we're not very far away, because we are. if you don't acknowledge that distance it can also kind of feel like 'why are you complaining? it's not even a big deal!!' and that's not nice at all.
How often do you actually see each other?
originally we intended to see each other once a year (every June), but I went to France in January, and
coincidentally MD happened to be there too. because flying is expensive, we aim to be with each other for at least a month. For the past two years, MD has come to Australia, but next year I'm hoping to go to Stockholm for a month. I'm excited!!!
We're both studying still so it's not really practical for us to think about moving somewhere together yet, but it's always kind of an 'in the future' thought for us.
we couldn't work out if we couldn't meet each other. We plan to live together at some point, and we're only really dating in the first place because we actually met up and were attracted to each other. it's kind of awkward in my experience if you haven't met up and you're trying to be romantic? because it's hard to imagine the physicality of not just sex, but also of just hanging out and interacting with each other.
If yours didn't work out, was the long distance the tear in the relationship?
MD and I already dated for a little while back in 2010, and distance was certainly a contributing factor for us breaking up. It was more about us not being able to see each other anytime soon that made it hard, though. When you've got the resources and the time and the money to go and see each other and hang out and have sex and things like that, you've got something to look forward to and it does make it a lot easier. If you don't have that, for us it was kind of like this period of loneliness that just extended out for an indeterminate amount of time and it's too hard to think about. We were also kind of immature! We broke up, and then we stopped talking for a little while, we saw other people (well, MD had two girlfriends and I asked someone out and they said no, hahaha) and we kind of just got lives. It's a lot easier to devote your time to a long-distance relationship when you kind of have the rest of your life sorted out, because you can't just do things spontaneously for your relationship.
I'm a year older than my girlfriend, and I plan to leave my city for university in a year from now, so a potential long-distance relationship is looming on the horizon. Both of us agree it will depend on how far away I am and I often I play to return to our hometown, but we are not going to rule it out or commit to it now. Generally, it isn't a fun discussion to have, and it really isn't necessary if the event's a year away. We hope we're still together then, but we can't know for sure.
i feel like this is a really good way to approach it! you won't know how you feel about it until you're dealing with it, after all. with MD and I we didn't really try and commit to a super long relationship, and when he went home we figured we'd just see how it'd go. So far it's been pretty neat! the distance is hard and obviously we'd prefer to be with each other, but we're just toughing it out.
