Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Long Distance Relationships

It is a matter that has been the subject of many successfully running TV shows of the past and the present. Actors shed out the best of their tears and sorrows to carry this message out to their viewers and try to teach them a lesson in life along with gaining a nomination for a Golden Globe. And as those viewers look at the mirror images of their own personal life being displayed on that idiot box, they nod with agreement and say “So true, so true”.

Despite the countless souls trying in vain to prove it wrong in the most bizarre way or the other, so true is the long lasting phenomenon about long distance relationships.

THEY JUST DON’T WORK

We all know that they don’t work and give this advice to all those who go ahead in doing it because they believe “Nothing in this world can set us apart”

But have we ever wondered what is it that causes that rift in the first place?

Why is it such an epidemic and what is the bug that makes the long 5 hour conversations (that used to last till the birds started chirping and the stars began to fade away) shrink, compress and completely microminimize to 5 minutes of “ummmms… aaaaahs…. So what else ? and finally… I gotta go”

Some of us try to convince ourselves that it’s just a case of over-extended PMSing or just another “we need a break” phase.

Scenarios such as these create the best of terms such as ‘she’s such a slut’ and ‘men…always jerks’ but what made us jerks and sluts in the first place?

Which gutter was it that swallowed up all that “No you hangup, no you hangup oh no you hangup” or the “Oh My god ! It’s morning already ?” Some innocence is lost during that phase that arrives without a single sign and seems to hang in there FOREVER.

And then we start spying on their Facebook/Orkut profiles and are shocked to our socks as we see them alive and well, no calamity has happened, nobody has died and no crater has struck them on their forehead to make them forget you… they seem to be living a perfectly, care-free, normal life altogether except for one thing,

‘We aren’t in them anymore’

We are only sentences and comments of a date long gone and are nostalgic memories of things of the past and how they used to be. How things were not so complicated, how the reply of an ‘I Love You’ was as easy as ‘I Love You Too’.


In this part, I do not stress on what all happens in this shitty phase or how to get over it, instead I look for an answer for the cause of this phase in the first place. So I pose this question to all those girls out there who seem to have gone through this phase where they feel that their boyfriend has of late been to touchy and mushy and trying to be too close.


WHAT THE HELL HAPPENS TO YOU ?

Lets see if a couple of options posted can help you clear out that decision

1) You don’t see that same boyfriend anymore in him, he seems like a changed person

2) You need your own space in this relationship and don’t seem to find it.

3) You’re just PMSing for way too long

4) You just wake up one day and say – “I think I need to torture my boyfriend”

5) You just wake up one day and feel NOT IN LOVE anymore

6) You really have no idea why it happens

7) You really ARE sluts

8) You’re affected by some external factor like friends, family, A BETTER POTENTIAL BOYFRIEND, etc.

9) Someone tells you that long distance relationships don’t work that well

10) You were never in love in the first place, he had it all figured out wrong.

Please feel free to choose more than one option and if you feel you are offended by these options, DON’T, its an honest questions that probably millions have been wanting to ask, I just thought I’d lend a helping hand.

Just as a final note, you feel that men are jerks and the perfect man is never going to be there. But, whenever he does come along with the best jokes, best romantic lines and the best ears to listen what you have to say… You choose otherwise to abandon all hope of true love ever making it through the history books of your life and find something else better to do.

Without even informing the one person whom you believed at some distant dimension and space…

Was the one

14 comments:

D. said...

Kya hua!

Kara Marie said...

this is so true. they dont work. tried it for a few months til i couldnt take it anymore. it just turns out to be more painful than good. Nice post!

Wendy said...

I get what you're saying but I'm still sticking with my..."falling in love can happen anytime its when all goes wrong can you really find that true love, it's up to you to keep it."

eccentricenigma said...

Captain Grim,

Ah how you made me laugh!

The secret to long distance relationships is simply that there is no secret. Once you exit that honeymoon romantic phase (i.e. five hour long phone conversations, and romantic daydreams), it is a whole lot of work. I have been in a long distance relationship for over three years. Unlike some people who could travel every other weekend to their other half in another city, I had the Atlantic Ocean seperating me from him for most of the time.

And once that honeymoon phase went over, he began to annoy the heck out of me. We would rip each other apart over the silliest things, that of course at the time seemed incredibly important. The one that still makes me laugh is a fight we had over coding on a document that he thought I stylized too much and I took as an insult to my ego.

It took a lot of work and long nights. There were moments that, as a college student, I should have been sleeping for an exam but was instead talking to him about something that was weighing on his mind. Just like any relationship, you have to balance each other and not let the distance drive you insane.

Now I can say that I'm rather happy in my relationship. Don't get me wrong, while we may not have the Ocean separating us it's only been reduced to being separated by six states and sure as heck isn't a pillow apart. -laughs- And there are moments (usually around Christmas) where he annoys me by being a bit too clingy (and I do the same), but in the end all I've learned that we are both imperfect individuals who will always be working on this thing we call a relationship.

I hope I don't sound like I'm throwing drivel your way- your post quite simply caught my interest.

JollyJo said...

Nice post and totally right! me 3 years seem like waste of time! but i will keep only good memorries thouh :)

Unknown said...

I've been doing the long distance thing for two years, and now we're getting married. People expect the love and phone calls to last forever, and I won't tell you that they do. We spent many phone calls with nothing to say. I made sure to call him when I was happy, sad, angry, frustrated, and meh. We called each other to discuss which classes we should take, how the football team was doing, and to procrastinate on homework. You cant assume that your relationship will flourish, but you can't allow it to flounder either. Being open to change is one of the best qualities you can have in these kinds of relationships, otherwise you take that baggage with you to your next one.

Meg Luby said...

i agree with wendy. but i have the biase of being in a long distance relationship for two years now.

i feel like you're projecting when you reach the end. it's not always the girl, nor is it always the guy. some parties are just have different needs then others at different patches in a relationship...

it's a matter of being able to get what you need without causing harm, guilt, or otherwise.

as many other couples said, the long phone calls and all that slowly tapering off is no different then a couple who have the luxury of being in the same place no longer having dinner conversation and falling into a rut. you just have to find a way to keep your relationship alive past the honeymoon phase that ALL relationships have.

and since you're forevers apart, that's probably why it gets hard and often doesn't work...

Anonymous said...

I randomly stumbled across this as i clicked "Next Blog" on my upper left screen. It gennerally spoke to me , im in a similar situation as my girlfriend recently moved to Australia and i havent really decided on how we go from here , i guess i really needed to hear it from someone who knows what they are talking about and this helped a lot , thanks.

Dreaming like a Mariposa said...

Hi Captain,
So, yes, you are somewhat right, long distance relationships just cannot work no matter how hard you try...I was in one for 3 years and boy did it suck...I look back now and I am like why??? why did waste so much time believing that it WOULD work...
For when we finally were able to live together and be together we were 2 completely different people trying to find what we had lost...and it just made us fight more and more...it was horrible!!

I have been out of that relationship for 5 months now and a lot of things are becoming clear to me and this was just one of them....
So thanks for clarifying my thoughts!!

Invstg8or said...

I'm in a long distance relationship and it stinks. He won't commit. I have done everything. Our problem is this. Emotion can not be felt in words written in a blog or e mail or in a text to one another. We often misunderstand what the other is trying to say and there you go, he's wiped me off the facebook, deleted all my e mails, dumped my phone number and there is no contact whatsoever. I hate it.

Colleen Courtney said...

I was in a long distance (3000 + miles)relationship for a year and now we're living close to each other and more happy than I can explain.

So, with all due respect, I am going to have to disagree with you.

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sunny said...

i though ur post was to narrow a vision and hope to find a ritic in u to my posts

Elle Solace said...

I feel that you're right, for the most part. It takes a lot of time and effort and persistence and loyalty to make a long-lasting, long-distance relationship to work. I've been with the same guy for five years--three of which we have been separated for. It's difficult. You get bored, or you get tired of not being in the other person's physical life. Even if you talk every day, they're still just a voice on the other line, or letters in a text. You really need to work at it. And even then, sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. It just depends on each unique, individual couple.