I just ended my nightly Skype call with my beau. We laughed a lot about nothing and shared lame anecdotes about our days, and I felt so comfortable staring at his talking head; tonight was a good night. Still, I can't shake the fact that it's been a week since I've seen him in person. Sometimes it's so much longer. Days can turn into months where all I have is his talking head on a computer screen.
Some days I hate hearing the Skype call notification; I just want to be able to walk across campus and meet him in person. Some calls leave me unsettled afterwards because I constantly wonder if the conversation would have gone differently if we had discussed whatever it was over coffee. Some nights I just cry -- I know that I'm taking technology and our strong communication for granted. But sometimes long-distance relationships just suck.
We met on my second day of college three years ago when I walked up to the recruitment booth for the campus radio station. I told him how interested I was in college radio, and I could tell by the look in his eye that we were going to click. After I spent a few days getting to know him, I knew that he was special. I completely let my introverted self become a different person. Life with him was going to be such a journey and I knew it was going to last a long time.
After two years of seeing each other constantly and being completely intertwined in one another's daily lives, we learned life doesn't always go according to plan; he had to move back home, and we had to move into an incredibly difficult phase in our lives and relationship -- the long-distance relationship. Various components were going to make it extremely difficult. I don't have a car, so I wasn't going to be able to see him whenever I wanted. Three hours doesn't sound like much to work with -- little did we know, three hours were going to define so much for us as individuals and as a couple.
Because we were so intertwined in our social and private lives, I was a mess when he left. I would be going about my day and suddenly be interrupted through an onslaught of tears. I would curse fate and wonder why it had been unfair to us when it had brought us together pretty flawlessly and provided us with a life of smooth sailing; at least what we thought was "smooth sailing" in a college relationship. We had no idea how to be individuals and we had trouble recognizing the special traits that we both bring to the relationship to make it so strong.
Our communication was incredibly tested. Life handed us some incredibly dense situations; schoolwork, job complications, car trouble and emotional slopes all tested us. There were times when I thought these negative aspects were telling me it was time to go into a different direction. His love and patience taught me to never give up and to ride out the difficult times. Even though we were finding out who we were as individuals, we knew that life was so much sweeter as a collective unit. I know this is incredibly cheesy, but we know we have so much more of a distance to travel, and time apart, although difficult, has propelled us onward now and forever.
