Sunday, May 22, 2011

Loving from a Distance

I am a proud member of the forum know as Loving from a Distance (www.lovingfromadistance.com). It's for people who are part of a long distance relationship. I am in a long distance relationship. My boyfriend lives all the way in England while I live in the deep in the heart of Texas. It's hard sometimes. You don't always know what you're doing. You don't always know if you're doing the right thing. My relationship is everything a relationship should be with just one minor hiccup: we live almost 5,000 miles away from each other. It takes a lot of time, patience, and energy to keep up a relationship when you're not physically with that person. It's hard when you go 3 or 4 months in between visits. It's hard to not be able to hold the other person's hand or just call them whenever you want. Sometimes you have to rely on other people, strangers even, to help you get through the hard times.
That's where Loving from a Distance comes in. It's a forum with it's own community. The one thing that's the same for all of us is that we're all in a long distance relationship. We have some of the same problems. We share similar experiences. We all go through hard times and we all go through amazing times. The thing I love most about this community that I'm a part of is that we celebrate with each other and we commiserate with each other.
I'll never forget when people seemed to all be breaking up at the same time. It was hard to see all of those relationships end, knowing that yours could be next. No relationship is 100% guaranteed. You have to take things in stride. Being one of the ones to survive and having the other that survived made a huge difference for me. Seeing other people go through it made me realize that we, Gareth and I, could make it too.
I've seen international relationships make it. I've seen international relationships that closed the distance or are in the process of closing the distance. It gives me hope. It inspires me to make mine work because if they can do it, we can do it too. They've already proven that it can work. I just have to make it work for me too.
Loving from a distance is a website where people from all over the world come together not only to share problems but also come together to celebrate one another. We inspire each other and prove that long distance relationships can and do work.