I haven’t talked too much about long-distance relationships on my blog. I’ve never really been in one, unless you count the summer between my junior and senior year of college when I went away to Ecuador while my BF was back home. But our summer apart had an expiration date. In early September, we were back in school together, and by then he had a new GF anyway. It was never built to last, which made it easy to romanticize and easier to forget.

Long-distance partnering requires a certain type of patience and diligence that I don’t possess. If I met somebody in a faraway city while visiting friends, I’d pursue it, knowing that it was a temporary fling. There were no logistics to figure out, nobody I set a time to Skype with. I never had to wonder about what he might be doing on a random Saturday night. I just had my little vacation fling and returned to my life, without the pressure of making it mean more than it did.

People in long-distance relationships don’t have this luxury. They want a real relationship, not a fling. They want to communicate regularly, and hopefully if everything goes well, eventually live in the same city. Each person has his or her own life, and the other is not a part of it. It’s a weird thing, being in a relationship but then living life alone, too. It takes dedication, good communication, and trust, which is something that has always scared me.

I was having drinks with a friend the other day who is considering a long-distance relationship. The city of L.A. has ten million people, but I understand when one of us gets sick of the dating scene here. So it shouldn’t have surprised me that he decided to look outside of his comfort zone and try dating someone who lives on the East Coast. Short story, they hit it off online, and now they’ve visited each other a few times. The chemistry is great, and I hope he’s successful.