Tag Archives: long distance relationships

Relationships

Glimmer of Love

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She is my muse, love.  My life.  My soul, which I never knew or believed existed until I felt her breath… my breath, filling my lungs.  Lately words have been flowing from my heart that I never expected to hear, feel, or believe.  It is as real and as drastic a transformation as I have ever experienced.  Apparently, it is wholely possible to look forward to speaking to someone just moments after hanging up the phone – to miss someone mere seconds following farewells.  It seems that, despite all doubt, in all appearances, potentially, probably, ipso. fucking. facto. that love not only exists, but that I find myself eyebrow deep in it.  This is a first.  Many firsts, in fact.  But, certainly the first time I find myself deep in something that did not require legal, medical, or moral assistance to get out of.

I am writing this for the same reason I’ve ever written anything, because I have to.  I have written, to date, a number of letters beyond my ability to count (which is to say, I’ve run out of fingers and toes) regarding the subject of love, the subject of my love, addressed to… well, you get the point.  I have killed four pens, 2.5 notebooks, and three packs of envelopes in just a couple of months.  So for anyone wondering if The Duke of Glimmer has been writing… he has, but only for one person as of recently.  And although she prefers not to share my attention, I’m sure she’ll grant me reprieve in this case.

My love is music, for I found her through music.  My love is friendship, for I found her through friendship.  She is dance, and light, and laughter… gorgeous hot days, and long desert nights.  She is drugs – I will not lie.  The greatest (seriously, the greatest) drug I’ve ever known.  I am convinced she is the path to my enlightenment – if that is a thing and it can truly be achieved.  And if not, I’m just fucking happy.  Really happy. Happy enough to write this sappy post that you will probably read, say “awww,” puke, then take an insulin shot.  And that’s fine.

The point is that it’s real and it’s out there – love.  It’s not something you’re expecting to find, or that you seek out on purpose.  It just grows, organically – non GMO, always fair trade.  I didn’t even know I wanted it until love found me, but now I’ll fight with the passion of a thousand souls to keep it, this fire that burns in my heart.  There’s no formula, just live your life and let it find you.  It will.  Somehow it found me.  Somehow there’s a beautiful woman in this world who is just like me, but better… so much better.  Genuinely, just ask Tracy, she’s better… and she loves me, lucky fool that I am.  So for anyone struggling or lonely out there – trust me, if you’re holding the glimmer, sooner or later the universe will send someone to share the burden.

Originally published by Hold the Glimmer at http://holdtheglimmer.com/

Photo by Anastasia Heuer

Photo by Anastasia Heuer

 

Relationships

Let’s Ask: A Thriving Long Distance Love

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Y:  The text read “Dude, Coachella is amazing! We’re all having a blast. Wish you were here! Btw, I met this awesome girl and we really hit it off. There’s just one thing… She lives in NorCal.”

I sent that to a close friend only a couple of days after meeting my girlfriend, the love of my life. Now let me back up and tell the story, because she loves it when I do (M: Oh boy, here it comes!!!). I met M for the first time at Los Angeles International Airport. She was joining me and a large group of my friends, including two mutual friends—through whom we were being introduced—on a weekend trip to America’s premier music and arts festival, Coachella (feel free to send us comp’ed VIP passes (M: for life, please) for the plug, Goldenvoice). From the moment we first shook hands, I was charmed. There is an air about her; her smile is warm and contagious, and her aura (if you believe in such things) is always welcoming. From that point on, the weekend became about more than just the music festival, it became about us getting to know one another: flirting, dancing, making each other laugh, and appreciating each show together. It was like packing 30 dates into a single weekend, and every date was even better than the last. I made it a point to look after her in a crowd of a hundred thousand people, because I wanted her to feel at ease and a part of the group. It must have made a good impression, because despite some of my more nervous moments, we kissed during one of her favorite acts, the Postal Service, and by the end of the weekend neither of us were prepared to let the other go.

M:  It’s true. He took care of me all weekend in a group where I only knew two others and that was more than enough to keep me interested. He was pretty much assigned to take care of me before we even knew each other and didn’t sweat about it even once. He also took me to see my favorite musician when no one else wanted to go, even though he didn’t know of him. Consider it our first date. I tried to return the favors as much as I could but really, it wasn’t enough; he was on point with everything. He even played Radiohead for me every drive back from the festival so I could sing off key. After the festival was over, I promised to introduce him to my favorite band, Tool and well, let’s just say he was most impressed that the song had a sound bite featuring Bill Hicks, one of his favorite comedians. Last weekend, we returned from our first anniversary celebration, guess where? Coachella! There is no other more perfect scenario for us to celebrate our love: music, dancing, great friends, amazing art and good food. Sums us up pretty well.

Here’s something we’ve both heard from other people more times than we can count…

“You’re in a long distance relationship?” *deep nervous inhale* “Wow, that must be, like, super hard.  I could never do that.  Good luck…”

Oh gee, thanks but I actually don’t need any luck because I’ve never been happier. In fact, we’ve been in an incredibly successful, unicorn-tears kind of magical long distance ‘agreement’ (Y: as she likes to call it) for a full year now.  The distance?  Exactly 300 miles between NorCal and SoCal.  Luckily there isn’t much of a sports rivalry as I like ice hockey (SHARKS TERRITORY!) and he prefers basketball (Y: LAKERS BABY!) Though I did drunkenly lash out on him being from LA when the Kings knocked the Sharks out of the playoffs last year. And how did he respond?  By sending me a beautiful bouquet of flowers to my office with a note that read: “Dear M, my deepest condolences for your loss. I hope these flowers brighten your day the way you do all of mine. Can’t wait to see you again. Yours, Y.”. Chivalry… not dead, my friends. And that is when it really sunk in that I need to hold on to this amazingly special gentleman.

Y:  WARNING: Here’s the thing about long distance relationships—they are not for every couple. Really, they aren’t for most. People are wary of them, including us. And for good reason: they don’t typically work. I had never been in one before, and she had tried it twice with really poor results over half a decade ago. All it takes is half an instinct of insecurity to hit you, coupled with a dead cell phone battery, maybe a half bottle of wine, and/or some Facebook stalking, and next thing you know you’re in world war relationship. M and I, insecurities and flaws aside, trust each other implicitly. Even more importantly, we love each other (queue the feign heaving and eye rolling) unconditionally (M: so far, so good ;) ) . We’re both independent people who are incredibly social and have many loved ones to tend to. We understand that we each need space and time to pursue our own interests and have our own fun. There is a genuine exchange of mutual support for everything we do.  So above any tips, tricks, or special anecdotes we share, remember that if you’re not continuously head over fucking heals in love with your long distance love, your relationship is headed for the rocks. That’s not to say we don’t fight (I am a man, after all, and it’s my first real relationship as an adult: I’m bound to fuck up a little) but we’re quick to make amends, and always show each other respect.

M: ^What he said… and it’s not about the distance, it’s about the people involved in the relationship. We’re grateful to have each other regardless of the constant physical presence. But of course it’s tough for us sometimes. It’s standard procedure for me to bawl on him before we part after yet another incredible visit. It’s not being able to partake in the mundane everyday activities you’re ‘supposed’ to do with your partner that makes long distance as hard as it’s hyped up to be. Also, not being able to be there for each other physically in tough times or special moments (doctors’ appointments, him moving into his new home, holiday parties, even actual birthdays—thanks for being born a day before Thanksgiving, guy…) can easily strain a relationship, so you need to get creative and accept the reality that you will have to celebrate it a different day to compensate.. But luckily we are always looking for excuses to party so we never skip occasions.

The good news is we take each other for granted much less. Every time we see each other, it’s a mini blissful vacation and we are just with one another 100% because our time together is so precious. Menial tasks like groceries and laundry become enjoyable. But then again we are party people and sprinkle fun into everything so perhaps that’s just us. We rarely ‘fight’ because neither of us can show up at the door to kiss and make up… it’s exponentially more painful being away from each other and not communicating because both parties are being stubborn about coming to a truce. Luckily he is practically ego-less and I can’t stay upset when he keeps showering me with warmth and love.

One time the Mr. was having an extremely hectic Murphy’s law kind of day, so I stole a genius idea from a friend: I called a nearby massage parlor and booked him his first ever hour long deep tissue full body rub down (I threatened the masseuse not to go near his-MY goodies), paid for it over the phone, and called him to tell him he’s to show up there immediately after work.  And the moment he arrived back home, a delivery guy arrived with Thai food. I scored big time.

Y:  It was by far the sweetest and most thoughtful thing anyone has ever done for me.  Take note ladies, don’t go by those bullshit tips in Cosmo, This is how to keep your man happy.  Anyway, that following afternoon, she wasn’t feeling well and had an unpleasant doctor’s appointment, so I returned the favor by having pizza, pasta, salad, peach soda, and two different desserts delivered to her home.

And while we’re on the topic of food—one of our favorite things to do is stuff each other’s faces.  She will literally have a spoon full of food in front of my face while I’m still chewing the last bite. While she is vegetarian and I am… well, not, I still love sharing food with her, because it’s such a pleasurable experience (with acceptable public moaning to boot) that we get to immerse in together. We even eat together over Skype. Shared pleasures should go beyond the bedroom, and certainly should be relished together even if from afar.  Like communication and-

M: -LAUGHTER! Jinx, you owe me a soda! I win. It’s important to be connected constantly and to share a great sense of humor.  We’re lucky this works for us because we are of the kind that despise constant texting/phone calls. But, our sheer adoration of each other trumps that hard. And we are always laughing, oh man do we laugh… like hyenas on meth.  Why we are glued together from a 300-mile distance is because the hilarity makes the constant contact much more appealing.  We’ve had an ongoing conversation for the last year now: emails, chat, texts, phone calls, Skype, and, get this, over a 100 handwritten letters (multiple every single week)…  I mean, how can you not die laughing (warning: grown up jokey time): Y was on speaker phone while I was doing yoga, and I said, “I’m lying here in child’s pose for 15 minutes because my health guru told me so…” and he goes “Why don’t you come here and get into adult’s pose with me?”  Needless to say I keeled over in a perfect transition from child’s pose to fetal position guffawing. There is also a lot of shit talk, which leads to hilarious conversations we wish we could record to share with the world. I was teasing him about how I annihilated him playing foosball on an epic bar arcade date we had one night (we tag teamed killing zombies and yes, he died first. Milla Jovovich taught me some tricks… He’s lucky I love him enough to protect him during the apocalypse. Y: I sacrificed myself for you, chivalry does still exist, remember! M: See what we mean about shit talk…), and I started laughing maniacally, followed by heavy coughing due to diseased flu lungs… and I said to him, “You’re choking me from afar.” And this Star Wars newbie (it’s true, he watched it at the tender age of 28 thanks to yours truly) responds, “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” To which I retort, “I find you fucked up!” To which we both responded with fits of laughter. You get the point. We’re pretty quickwitted folk.

So the bottom line is that apparently you can fall in love and make it last at a music festival and in long distance… with humor, creativity, constant communication, distance pampering, and truckloads of love. Oh, and to end… here’s 2 nightmare-ish pictures he drew of us (Tim Burton would be proud) because he thought it would be romantic. We’ll let you decide which one is attempt #1 and #2. In the words of the Moldy Peaches, we sure are cute for two ugly people…

1 & 2

1 & 2

Long live (long/all distance) love,

Y&M

Relationships

We Don’t Know: Is Love a Choice?

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In the description of Martin Ingle’s video, You don’t fall in love, you jump., he admits, “I do my best at trying to explain this. But I really have no idea (don’t tell anyone.)” We feel the same way, we don’t know. So we want to hear from you: do you think love is a choice?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLZ_YiWngXw&w=560&h=315]

Martin argues that love is not something you feel, it is something you do.  That real love is not the fiery passion but the “slow burning embers” and that we must choose to make the effort, to do the work, that keeps those embers burning. That love is not something you know, but something that you are figuring out. An action, not an emotion. Love is a battlefield where fear meets choice. It is not a destination. It is the burn in your muscles after you’ve been swimming up stream.

What do you think?

Photo by Michelle White

Relationships

When I Was Catfished

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Once upon a time, I was “catfished.” It was an experience that messed me up for a bit, but now I’m pretty glad it happened. “Catfishing” is the act of interacting with another person under a false identity on the Internet. You may have heard of it from the movie that came out back in 2010 or the reality TV series with the same name currently running on MTV (oddly enough, I haven’t seen either). It’s a very obvious process, but as a naive and hopeless romantic, I let myself see what I wanted to see.

I was lonely, and had started talking to strangers in chat rooms. I promise it was innocent chatting! When I first started, I was already in a long-term relationship. But my boyfriend and I had been drifting apart for at least a year, and I think each of us was waiting for the other to say it was over. And, in addition to that excruciating situation, I also hadn’t been keeping up with any of my friends. So the people of the internet became my social outlet: blogs, chat rooms, Tumblr, and message boards.

And then I met “him,” and we just hit it off. It was as if we had been best friends our whole lives. His name was Matthew, and we had stupid mundane things in common, like our enthusiasm for mashed potatoes, an affinity for puns, and our birthdays, which were one day apart. He was way too cute. He was athletic, played at least three instruments, was the lead singer in his band, and was getting over the wounds of an ex who had cheated on him. He was basically a character in an indie rom-com. How could I not fall in love? Five days after I met Matthew online, my then-boyfriend had a party where I proceeded to get sloppy drunk for the first time and realized that I had feelings for this online dude. We broke up the next morning.

Matthew and I would talk for hours on MSN Messenger, and when we weren’t online we were constantly texting. He was like my own personal diary: I could tell him everything and anything. I could be completely real with him! We exchanged many photos of our lives, and this was what abated my concern over his lack of a webcam. At this point, I was still in that initial high and I wasn’t thinking about the plausibility.

As we started getting more romantic, he started getting darker (of course). He would pick fights with me over nothing. If I didn’t respond to texts immediately or if I was out with friends for a night, he assumed that I was out “sluttin’ it up” and cheating on him (and we weren’t even in an official relationship). He would get drunk and hurl hurtful accusations my way, all the while revealing personal stories of abuse and deception. These included stories about how his father abused him and threatened him, how his ex-girlfriend cheated on him, how he was responsible for the death of his best friend, and how he attempted suicide. He would say to me, “No one could ever love me,” and I tried to reason with him that it wasn’t true.

There were so many red flags, I saw them and ignored them. “What if this isn’t a false alarm? How could I abandon him?” I felt I couldn’t live with those what-ifs, so I continued to talk to him. Plus, I thought he understood me, and that felt so rare.

About a month after we met, he had another one of these episodes where I had to talk him down and reassure him that he was deserving of love. He ended the night by telling me that he loved me, and then I didn’t hear from him for three days. Three days of nothing was like a slap in the face after a month of constant conversation. I was extremely worried, given his past threats. I searched the internet for his name, location, and the keyword “death” and was relieved when nothing popped up. Relieved but, at the same time, unsettled. Nothing came up for him, even without adding “death” to the search. His MySpace was just his band’s page, and  even that had only one photo of an indeterminate person and four untitled songs. No bio, and only five “friends” who were just advertisement pages. He had a Facebook, but it was private and offered no helpful information. Googling his email and usernames only ended up with “no results found.” And a reverse look-up of his phone number gave me a name that didn’t match his or any of his immediate family members. So after not hearing from him, I sent him an email and decided que sera, sera (what will be, will be).

Of course, once I let go, I received an IM from him. He said it was hard to explain, but he had OD’d the night we last spoke, and had spent the past couple of days in the hospital under supervision. As a result, his mother cancelled his phone subscription in order to prevent him hanging out with the people from whom he had received the drugs. This added up with what he had been telling me for the past month, so I believed it. But cue the creepy music: this is the part in the horror movie where you don’t understand why the main character has to go deeper into the woods—just turn around and go back home, you darn fool! I decided to not bring up what I had found (or what I hadn’t found) when searching for him. I was more concerned about appearing like a complete creeper than getting direct answers. Maybe I was also a little afraid of finding out the truth as well. And so things continued on, just as dysfunctional and needy as they were before.

Exactly one month later, he drops another bomb on me—he has Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and has known about it for the past year. Now, I know this is all bullshit, I KNOW IT. But there’s still that .01% of me that can’t turn my back on him. It could be real. I usually like this quality of mine, this overwhelming need to find the good in everybody, but man, it would be so much easier if it wasn’t there. Anyways, I’m worried sick about him and prepared to do anything he wants in order to help him get through this tough time. But just like last time, I would wake up the next morning and wouldn’t hear from him. This time, the silence lasted for about three months. This time, I was really done. Or at least that’s what I told myself, in between writing him weekly emails. Welp.

When he contacted me again, we pretended like nothing happened. The intensity was also gone. I would try to subtly drop hints that it would be okay if he were to tell me who he really was, that I wouldn’t judge him. He never did. One day, I tried Googling the name that I had found linked to his previous phone number, and I found a family tree blog. The woman had the same birth date as his mother, and the ages of her husband and children matched the ages of Matthew’s family. I Facebooked all of them, and found out that the daughter was basically a male version of Matthew. Her school, major, favorite television shows were all details of his life. She only had one band listed under favorite music, and wouldn’t you know it was just the craziest thing—all of their songs were his band’s songs.

I felt so triumphant that I had finally solved this mystery, and had found what I was looking for. But was I satisfied? I never confronted her about it: I wanted her to be the one to tell me. The one thing that I never got from my search was a “why.” I’m sure this is just me overthinking emotional situations and motivations again, but maybe I gave her the chance to figure herself out. Maybe she wanted to try out being in a relationship with a female, and didn’t have the courage to do it any other way. Maybe we really did connect in that initial meeting, and it snowballed from there. I’ll probably never know. As for me, it gave me the chance to figure myself out. I was unhappy with myself and that led to loneliness, which made it easy for me to be emotionally manipulated. Honestly, I probably needed something stupid like this to happen to me. Now I love who I currently am, the loneliness is gone, and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I genuinely hope that she is too.

Photo by Remi Coin