Across the Water, Across the Deep Blue Ocean

I am actually away from my home town in the meantime, because I have been in a long distance relationship with my boyfriend (BF) for around a year and 3 monthes and I am seeing him right now, which put me into the house-girlfriend position that I mentioned before. Since this relationship has started, I have developed more thoughts about long distance relationships which I think would be interesting to share.

The first thing is that you never get to know the daily life details of your lover through the internet. I was amazed by how much I discovered about BF since I started living with him this summer. None of the discoveries are major things, but they all help in forming a more complete picture of who I am actually falling in love with. There are things like whether he snores or not, how he likes putting his personal hygiene products, how he likes his computer to be set up, how much he swears at the computer, how little vegetables he eats every day or approximately how many cans of club soda he drinks per day. These things are not material to the relationship, but they increase the feeling of intimacy. The fact of the matter is that if you want a relationship with a guy and he becomes a part of your life, then you would want to understand this person as much as you want to understand yourself.

The other interesting thing is that I got an illness after starting a long distance relationship and that is called "Lover-Waiting Syndrome". The symptons of this illness are the continuous usage of Facebook, and a deterioration of eyesight due to continuous staring at the online list on Facebook chat. When I have something exciting to tell or sorrow to share with my lover, I normally would not want to just disturb his daily routine by calling his cell. So what I would do is I would go on Facebook chat, check the online and offline status of the list as frequently as traders would check the ups and downs of a stock. As soon as BF pops up on the online list, I would just frantically type out the incident and hope that he won't just be too busy to check the chat box and just go offline. It actually took me a lot of determination to get rid of this habit as it basically can stop my day for an unreasonable length of time. Thanks to the SMS function of Skype that actually makes my life way easier.

Somehow it occurs to me that being in a long distance relationship actually requires a kind of faith like believing in God, even though I am not a believer of any kind of religion. You talk to him and he will respond (exactly like the way praying is supposed to work) and you basically have to believe in all that he said. The only difference is that there will not be any after life consequences in a long distance relationship and you can control whether you want to just get out of the whole thing or not. To be frank, you would never know whether he was actually in the office working or he was in the office but hooking up with the secretary (but then I doubt whether you would know it even if you are in the same city as your partner). Anyway, if you are the kind of person who needs a lot of reassurance and the sense of security, longn distance relationship probably is not the thing for you, and you should look around more to search for you true love instead of travelling across the deep blue ocean.