But you can't touch boobs by phone!
Like yin and yang or chocolate-chip morsels and spoonfuls of peanut butter — for every good, there is a negative. What’s so negative about the latter? Caloric intake, people. And I’m trying to curb my emotional eating.
We’re meeting again to continue our talk about long-distance relationships. Today: cons.
As most would predict, you cannot gauge one LDR by another - as differing personalities and values make for different relationships, just the same as a handsome-man-with-brown-hair-and-brown-eyes is not akin to the doppelganger to his left.
Obviously if you allow jealousy to rear its ugly green head, it will control your thoughts, emotions, heart and possibly even prompt an evil use of your vagina. I am happily of the non-jealous breed. I truly wouldn’t be able to handle yet another throw-away emotion in my arsenal where with social anxiety, fear of ladders and severe impatience impeding already on my daily activities. And if it makes any sense, I am non-jealous to the point of being overly perverse.
The hardest part for myself is loneliness. It could be as mild as the need for a body-length pillow for comfort or as major as a comfort for pillowed-lengths of bodies. But feeling lonely can be severe. In a lot of people, loneliness can equal pain. Pain, as I see it in that reference, can be unbearable. And then that pain gives us fear and disdain that relationships can even thrive under such circumstances. It’s also a different feeling of loneliness — one very unlike when you don’t have someone in your life, which leads to a depressive spiral. I believe that encountering loneliness while in a normal relationship far outweighs that of an LDR. And as the title of this post suggests, distrust is lonelier than loneliness.
Trust is an essential element to LDR relationships. So many relationships rarely have even that on which to base itself, which makes dating sometimes a sad position to be. We’ve all been burned — I have even admitted to jadedness. But you can’t go on through life and love thinking every thing with a penis has his a unique set of boobs in six states. And to be brutally frank, I wouldn’t even want to know who is touching you where. OK, maybe I do, but you need to put on your dirty voice.
When you care about someone, you need not only reach them, but touch them. I’m a firm believer that feeling up your own breasts can occur only so many times before you need a new hand. Touch is so extremely important. But on that same hand, if you’re able to resist from sexual relationships while maintaining an annoying single status over the course of MONTHS, then a short amount of time without a tongue and a penis never hurt anybody. Just wait. I have never felt my clothes come off faster than when the bad-businessman-that-does-his-business-while-he-can-but-does-his-business-bad knocked on my door. Completely intense. (And kudos if you caught the Squirrel Nut Zippers reference).
I’ve never considered the cons of an LDR to be so negative that they would dissuade me from pursuing an international man of mystery. As I stated in the pros portion of this two-part blog post, if you find someone that’s worth it — it’s worth it.
What are your pros and cons in long-distance relationships? Is there any one aspect that would prevent you from delving into the depths of LDR?
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November 30th, 2008 at 10:51 am
The whole debate over pros and cons of long-distance relationships assumes that you have the ability to choose one over the other. That one day you wake up and decide, “I want to date someone” and then only need to decide where that person lives.
Not all of us are so lucky.
Some of us are so lonely and feel so hopeless in life that any relationship, long distance or not, would be one of the best things for us emotionally. Some of us have gone YEARS, not months, without a nice kiss or more. And no, its not just about getting laid; its about the fact that we aren’t meant to be alone in the world, and no matter how badly we want to date, no one will give us the chance.
The debate over long distance relationships is like a luxury to us. Don’t take it for granted, or you might never know what its like to be truly lonely.
December 1st, 2008 at 11:40 am
This is interesting - mainly because I have participated in LDRs at two points in my life; once at the beginning of a relationship, and once after about 4 years in.
Both ended, but I can’t honestly say it was because of the distance itself. In one case I was more jealous that the bf, and it made me become a person I did not like - though at least I was able to keep this side of myself hidden from him most of the time. In the other, he was VERY jealous and he let me know it often, which just made me angry.
Looking back, the loneliness wasn’t the biggest problem - it was figuring out how it was going to work in the long haul. This is where being a planner came in handy - it kept me busy planning our next meeting instead of thinking about him not being there.
Regardless, there’s no way I would do this again - at least not for an extended period of time. And especially now that I know how great it is to live so close to an SO.
December 1st, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Jose and I were in a LDR for the very first 7-8 months of our relationship — it was especially difficult because we were just beginning to get to know and fall for each other. . .
How do you trust someone when you don’t even know them?? I think he had a harder time trusting me b/c I was still in a college environment, going out all the time. . .but, oh well
But, I think what helped ensure and strengthen our trust was the constant contact that technology allowed us to keep with: email, text messages, AIM, phone calls, etc. etc. reinstating that, although we were in different parts of the state, we each were thinking of the other non-stop*
December 15th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
[...] like to start this particular post off with a plug for Mel, who takes a look at the pros and cons of long distance relationships via a two-parter post on her [...]