Distance relationships

France, evening

This morning I got to think about relationships. Distance relationships to be more precise. A few months ago, I remember that I read an article with a lot of tips on how to make a distance relationship working. The people who wrote the article (or the book, I don't remember well) were both above 40 and rich. Money is not everything, especially when talking about relationships, but for sure not having money is a big obstacle to distance relationships. The article was bringing as example famous couples who have successful distance relationships. Thanks a lot, it was also written in the article that they see each other every week end.

Now, if you are a normal person, like me (ok, normal in a broad sense) and you have a relationship with another normal person (again, in a broad sense), who is not a millionaire and let's say the distance is not a matter of a few hours by car, how can you effort to pay a monthly rent, live and then also move every week end to visit your partner?

I had long distance relationships between Germany and Italy, between Holland and Germany, between Holland and USA. I can thank skype if they last more than just some months. But at the end, we couldn't see each other every week end, we couldn't see each other every second week end either and at the end it was just really really frustrating.

I think distance relationships may work for someone who likes his/her spaces (fine for me in this case), is independent, live in a place where he/she has a lot of friends and the distance is just a temporary situation toward the time you will be together again. Otherwise, it gets really really frustrating. It is like not being free, not being single, but not being in a couple either. You want to go to a theater. You go alone or with friends. You want to do something or visit a place or whatever. You have to do everything with a friend or alone, because your partner is just not there. And you can't make this person feeling bad because he is not there. It is not his fault. All the interaction passes trough skype, phone, emails. Fine the technology, but how can we compare a hug with an email? a kiss with a sms? I honestly can't.

Then you meet somewhere, at his place, your place, somewhere else. You can't have your normal life either. Because if your partner visit you let's say for two days, you want to spend all the time together, to make up for the time you have been apart. And then imagine you want to do something one evening, something with friends, but you know that you have a window of an hour in which you can both talk without interruptions. And imagine that the window is exactly at the time when your friends plan to do something. People who think that distance relationships are an easy task then probably they never experienced one or they were not madly in love or it was for a short time or they were looking for the perfect solution to not feel completely alone without the need of being too involved.

It just doesn't work well for me. Not for a long time anyway.