Everybody Does It | Long Distance Lovin’

In New York every relationship feels like long distance. Potential dates are spread among the boroughs and hectic schedules keep you from seeing each other more than a couple times a week, if you’re lucky. In the interim you’re relegated to chatting online, texting, or maybe late night phone calls so it’s easy to feel like you’re dating remotely. Those familiar with online dating websites know that there are constantly new prospects to consider not to mention that any event or evening out with friends could bring another potential mate to your attention, creating an endless cycle of fits and starts. And with new people constantly coming in and out of the city it’s not unreasonable to assume your next crush may even hail from somewhere far beyond the city’s seemingly endless boundaries.

Our generation came of age with the Internet readily available as the easiest resource to find someone to daydream about, to meet to satisfy our hormonal urges, or to possibly become our first or next great love. Though our identities or pictures are rarely if ever hidden from our online paramours, it was still easy to feel that while we are chatting with someone not too far from home they were still as mysterious to us in real life as the characters exchanging emails in You’ve Got Mail.

Adding to the long distance relationships we form with someone close by, in the early days and even now it is common to develop connections with guys who not only live on the other side of the country or world with the hopes we may someday meet. In high school I regularly kept up with boys in Chicago, Canada, and Lord knows where else in North America. In college, a wealth of gay and girlfriends from all over the place who wanted to set me up with their BFF got me involved with an even greater number of long distance lovers, some of whom I met briefly or continued sporadic and convenient affairs, others whom faded into obscurity without us ever crossing paths.

But throughout my young adulthood there have been some guys I’ve met from afar that made me feel like no matter the physical distance our connection and intimate conversations could surmount the distance. Some fizzled upon on eventual meeting, others linger and have cycled back over the years, even as we both have hopped from college to career in different locales. Nevertheless the idea or actualization of a genuine and exclusive long distance relationship has never quite come to pass.

Falling for a guy that may never play an immediate role in your life in the foreseeable future is a trap we fall into when our own prospects at home seem to be less than inviting. The distance makes it easier to make leaps and bounds in our feelings for them since they are not around to notice flaws, insecurities, or fall victim to realistic priorities. We talk to them when it’s convenient or carry on romantic conversations while actually out with friends or even other dates. We give them remote access to our hearts, and they come to feel like a security blanket for the disappointments of real life dating.

What we have to keep in mind is no matter what they divulge, we are never getting the whole picture. We may see countless photos of them online, learn all their favorite movies and music, but still not witness their emotions at actually experiencing them. We think we are falling in love with our Romeo cruelly separated not by the will of our parents, but by geography. Nevertheless we do it time and time again usually resulting in a gradual decline of communication or an abrupt dismissal of what we thought was blossoming.

So though we may pass the time putting an emotional down payment on something we think will be worth the investment, we are often left with nothing but phantom memories of how a stranger briefly made us feel special. Though dating in New York can be a fool’s errand most of the time, at least we share the environment where a relationship may grow. It’s not unheard of for lives to be changed by relocating or extreme circumstances, but our faraway Romeos are more likely meet a tragic end than a Sleepless in Seattle happy ending. It may we wiser to wait until we’ve actually felt their kiss before we let their xoxo’s count as affection. Love may come from the heart, but it begins with the head, and well, the loins.

B.B. Nichols lives and works in New York. He has been writing Everybody Does It since 2005.

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