This was originally written as a piece for Planet Daemon UnderGround in Nov 2001.  The most interesting thing about it is that shortly after writing it my Long Distance Whatever She Is & I broke up... You gotta laugh.  I resisted the urge to re-write it & we both resisted the urge to throw in the towel permanently, patched ourselves up & are still "together"~~> or as "together" as you can be 2700 miles apart. 

Update: Sigh.  January 2003 the person this was written for & I broke up.  Not your typical "I hate you, you bitch!" break up.  We're still very close, very good friends, care about one another very much &~~  I don't know, maybe this IS the typical lesbian break up.  I have no clue having never done this before.  In any case, she's still in my life and me in hers & we're starting out on this whole new adventure of figuring out how you do THIS part. I've had three people in the last week ask me why the link to this piece was not working & I took that as an omen it ought to be back up.  So here it is. 

I've been thinking a lot about relationships.

My head is split between pondering the mysteries of the successful long distance edition and the all-too-frequent subsequent break up.

I'm pondering these particular situations in relationships for several reasons...  Everyone I know is breaking up (which only beats breaking out by a slim and smooth faced, somewhat dubious margin) and a good number of these people live a fair distance from one another; opening doors to reach conclusions I'm not particularly fond of dwelling on.  You see,  I am personally involved in a long distance romance, which inevitably slogs along through mediocre and down periods and then recuperates and bursts into joyful What Would I Do Without This Person in My Life moments.  Needless to say the latter emotions are the ones I focus on.

I've been in this particular relationship for almost four years...  Since May 1998.  May 2nd, to be precise.  I'm not positive but we may have set a record for successful long distance romance; insert-Deity-of-Choice knows that the other people who got involved at the same time are for the most part not doing nearly as well.  In fact, it seems like everyone I know (and a lot of folks I don't) are splitting.  There have to be as many reasons why as there are cotton fibers in a tampon, but a goodly sum of these relationships are those which have been conducted, for the most part, over a distance, leading even me to conclude~~  It's really fucking hard to do.

I actually sat down and made a list of people I "know" who were A Couple and who have lately informed me they are Not A Couple~~  Ok, I paused and figured them up in my head.  The day I sit down and make a list of anything is the day Osama and Laura Bush have an affair.  My sanguinistic, disordered state of mind does not alter the facts though and the stats are alarming;  People who I know were in love, people who I know had all the right things in common, people who had that intense spark of attraction and mutual adoration and who made it through the initial So What Next? stage....  are no longer together. 

When couples you know, some of whom you introduced to one another, are breaking up in droves all around you and some of those relationships had the same sort of energies that brought you and your personal Significant Other together~~  it gives you pause.  You can't help but feel a little hunted, like there's a ticking clock hanging just over your head.  A really heavy clock on a super slender thread.  You can't help but look at their situation, their now defunct relationship and wonder....  Who's next?

Relationships are tricky, period.  This has always been true and unless human nature undergoes some sort of evolution which simply doesn't seem likely given our five or six thousand years of history,  it will always be.  Humans themselves are elusive, bizarre creatures and this is never more evident than in any activity which has us bouncing back and forth between extremes of emotion.  We are the only creatures who both mate and kill for sport.  Think about it.  Not survival; not perpetuation of the species.  Sport. 

I am female, but I've been told numerous times that my approach to sex and to relationships is decidedly male; meaning, I gather, I see the difference and can separate sex from love and I do not necessarily believe there has to be both to maintain a successful relationship.  Oddly enough I have a sort of reverse prejudice in this area...  While some may believe it is worse to have sex with numerous partners with no love involved, I actually think it would be more fickle, less decisive, more inconstant to routinely surrender one's heart and mind to another being.  I can understand a one night stand; I cannot fathom the person who falls in love with the same casual, nonchalant attitude.  Sex is a bodily function.  Love is a thing of the heart and the mind and the soul and is much more slippery and sacred.

 Statistics show that marriage (whether the "sanitary" opposite sex variety, common law, or same sex partnerships) itself periodically teeters on the edge of extinction, and then is thoughtfully rescued from the cliff by some considerate multeity of disaster;  a plague, a war, massive destruction in a confined area in  the form of a volcanic eruption, mud slide, flood, economic depression (resulting in deaths by starvation, malnutrition, disease, suicide) and terrorist attack~~ and don't kid yourself; terror and terrorism  are nothing new on Earth.   The human population is occasionally devastated and winnowed out in much the same way our planet is both scorched and renewed by fire, and the subsequent statistics will show a decline in divorces and separations and the appropriate number of months later, an increase in births.  We know as a species when it is best to cling to one another. 

We're herd oriented creatures~~  Our naked skins and pitiful excuses for tooth and claw were never meant to provide the basics of survival for a mere one of us.  Add to that our contrary inability to reproduce offspring asexually as snails and worms are enabled, and the more elusive emotional needs we most of us possess and we're faced with the inevitable.  We're not meant to be alone.  We need the companionship, comfort and protection of others like ourselves with few and rare exception.  We humans, when viewed as a species, clearly are not meant to be solitary creatures, so if the presence of another human being who holds our presence on the planet to be of the utmost importance is of both mental, emotional, and even physical necessity (read the statistics about disease in an unmarried female or male as compared to one happily coupled) why then is it so freaking difficult for a mere two of us to manage to stay together? 

I think it is perhaps because we choose, most of us, to view love as something fixed and impenetrable, immoveable and unchanging which is therefore, necessarily, rendered static.  That this is against every law of physics, chemistry, biology and simple human nature is obvious; but we persist.  Why?  Despite what every cell in and on our body demonstrates to us daily, from the hair on our heads to the taste buds on our tongues to the innermost doings of our livers; that we, like everything~~everything~~ must be mutable and fluid, we persevere with this notion that love must somehow remain steadfastly, unwaveringly the same as it was the moment we first felt that initial attraction for our chosen mate and if the flame hesitates, changes form, or deviates in any way we are no longer truly in love with that person. 

Bullshit.   

 What’s happened is the curtain’s come down, the lights gone up, the orchestra has  stopped playing and the dancers are limping off on calloused blistered feet, blinking through smeared eyeliner and cracked, sweaty pancake.  We got to the last chapter of the book and we’re stumbling on “…Happily Ever After”.  What’s intruded on our shocked senses is reality.  What’s steathily crept up and leapt out in our faces is life.     

And we’ve been reared with literally centuries of bullshit to delude us into thinking that unless everything is arranged in our own personal version of perfection then it simply isn’t really love.  We’ve been told and we’ve believed that unless it is easy it isn’t real when nothing could be further from the truth. 

Love, however you come across it, whatever ribbons you personally tie on it, whatever plaid flannel you deck it in,  is a gift; not a right.  When it’s there in your reach you must guard it, build a wall around it and remind yourself constantly what it was about the person you first fell in love with~~  At the same time understanding that you cannot set limits and demand the emotion never seep into certain corners and that it must stay solidly within your grasp.  Everything is fluid.  Everything changes.  And love, being a trickier emotion than most, will be the first thing to slip nimbly out through your fingers.   

And when you take this elusive, much-sought-after thing and then factor in the incredible obstacles of a long distance relationship…  that couples break up is not surprising.  That anyone ever makes it through, is.   

There’s an amazing amount of trust necessary in a long distance relationship.  You have to believe this person isn’t violating whatever personal limits you have erected; you have to believe this person understands and respects those limits in the first place when the both of you are coming into the relationship from two quite possibly opposite poles of existence.  No one ever goes into a relationship alone as it is; you drag along your childhood, your first love, your first heartbreak; you careen into every new relationship tugging everything you’ve learned whether good or bad behind you.  When you cannot be within a reasonable physical distance of the person you are involved with, there’s not the normal dating/courting rituals.  You learn one another across space and time and distance and the periods you’re actually together are so precious you don’t want to waste them on petty logistics such as “Can you balance a check book?” “Do you let dogs sleep on the bed?” “Do you put the lid back on the tooth paste?”, etc.  And you couldn’t even if you wanted, not if you’re in love with this person you only see once every 3 or 4 months…  There’s a constant sense of urgency underlying every visit because you know your time together is limited and from the moment the plane’s wheels squeak down on the tarmac there’s a terrible ticking sound in your head, counting those seconds and minutes and hours off until they’re gone again.  I catch myself sometimes saying goodbye to my lover before her bag (and only one; she’s that kinda gal) is even loaded into the back of my SUV.   

And when you do not have that normal courting/dating time to learn one another’s quirks and faults and limits then you are forced at some point to confront them head on because the whole point of enduring a long distance relationship is to at some point actually be physically together…  And a great many of my acquaintances have told me that this is when the real test of the relationship begins.  That it’s hard to maintain a long distance relationship is a given.  It sucks to be celibate, to be faithful, to be constantly physically alone when you are in love with someone, to not have that person with you for the minor details of life, to make every decision as a single/involved person, to have to depend on a phone and a computer for contact with someone you have said you’ll spend the rest of your life with.   You can dress it up and play games with it, you can pretend the person is on tour or off on a campaign of some sort, you can remind yourself that rock stars and movie stars and other various professionals do it all the time~~  But then you have to stop and realize how many of those people can’t make it work either.  

I think that everything in life is a gamble and a risk and we simply have to weigh what we are bouncing in our hand against what we have lain down on the table and what we have stashed behind us we’re willing to lay on the line.  I believe that in the end it all comes down to choice.  We don’t choose who we fall in love with, no.  But we choose whether or not to remain in love, whether or not to invest enough of ourselves to keep it alive, and to keep allowing it, and the person we love, the room to grow and change and shrink and expand without throwing our hands up and leaving the game.  If you are not willing to make compromises, to be open to changes and sudden unexpected twists in the road, then that is a choice as well.   

In my own situation, I choose to stay in, and my best friend/lover has chosen the same.  We’ve got lots of strikes against us…  everything from family to immigration laws to homophobia to my annoying habit of feeding/adopting every dog and cat who wanders into my sight to her anal filing and sorting of CD’s.  Some new developments have just made our already rather slim chances even more narrow and during the course of this piece being written we’ve undergone a series of loops and dips worthy of any rollercoaster~~  But we’re still together despite the odds stacked against us.  Being one of those people whom Lady Luck seems to benevolently grin upon, finding myself up against some seemingly insurmountable obstacles has been a revelation…  in not only what I am made of, but all the things I am not.  

Know this though~~>  If sheer stubborn fuckheadness has anything to do with it, y’all are invited to attend our 50^th Anniversary.    

Roll the dice, baby.   I’m in.