Long Distance Relationships; Why they're horrible things.

Every relationship I've been in since High School has more or less been a long distance one.


In some way I've never knowingly entered into a long-distance relationship.  When Hannah and I started dating she was home for the summer, so she was only 5-10 minutes away from my parents home.  Liz was even closer, she lived one floor above me.


That changed eventually, Liz and I moved back home for the Summer, hers was about 45 minutes away.  Hannah moved back down to school about 2-2.5 hours away.  For each I had different experiences, I think with Liz the distance was the beginning of the end, with Hannah some of my favorite memories of us together were the times I'd go to visit.  Even so I don't know if I'd ever enter knowingly into a LDR.  There are a few aspect of a relationship that can't develop living that far away.  For one, there's no spontaneity, you can't just call them up and say, "Hey, let's go do something." everything has to be planned.  That can be a good thing, planning gives you something to look forward to, in the case with Hannah it worked out well because we're both pretty structured, we know when and how to create free time.  With Liz it was a little harder to predict when we'd have free time, in the dorms it was easier because I could pop upstairs for a few minutes.  That could be why things with Liz didn't work over a distance, we got so used to being 15 seconds apart that adjusting to 45 minutes was just to dramatic of a change, going from filling in free time together to trying to plan free time was too much.


As well as things have gone with Hannah I'm still not sure distance relationships in general are worth the hassle, even though I've been in a couple I don't understand how people meet online and pursue relationships over a distance of a state or two.  Beginning a relationship over distance seems like a high-risk, low-return investment of your time.  As I like to say is that at most you're only going to have one successful relationship over the course of your life.  So odds are that you're going to have long distance relationships that fail, and if you were traveling a long distance to be with someone, that's a lot of time, and probably money that's going to seem wasted when it doesn't work out.


I'm not a negative person, there's a good chance a long distance could work out, but that causes a whole new set of difficulties.  One side-effect of being in a relationship with someone is that you tend to want to spend all of your time with them, with a long-distance relationship this is impossible.  You're probably not going to see your LD even close to the amount you want, and every time you do you'll feel rushed to do things together before your time is up.  Of course there are some traits that could assist you in successfully pursuing an LDR.  Being a phone-talker is one of them, I'm not a phone talker, I think I pick up too much on visual cues so speaking over the phone I feel lost, I need to talk face to face or text.  One thing that will be utilized if things with Hannah work out, since she'll pretty quickly move away for school again, is Skype.  Too bad I didn't know about Skype back when I was dealing with LDRs, it probably would have helped a lot.  A few other things that could help a LDRs success:  A job with hours other than the traditional five-eights(my situation luckily), a job with a high rate of PTO accrual, high personal independence, a near by airport, a personal jet?

Right now I feel I'm in the ultimate long distance relationship, it totally sucks all the time.  I was so optimistic at the beginning, but now I would honestly tell anyone who is considering waiting not to bother, it's an unnatural situation.  Let's say hypothetically I met a girl from Price, UT at a party and somehow in the course of a night became crazy about her, would I knowingly enter a long distance relationship from the beginning?  Assuredly No!  It's my opinion that you can MAINTAIN a relationship over great distance, but you can't DEVELOP one.  Unless one of you owns a jet.