Weddingbee Blog

Not the sort of “be apart” you might be thinking of. When we get married, Mr E and I will have been dating for a little over 4 years. 2.5 of those years were spent long distance.

Backing up a little: At the end of my senior year of high school, I had to go back to New Zealand. I was 17, and under the Indonesian visa system that my family was on, once I finished school I had to leave the country before I turned 18. That’s just how it works.

Mr E was staying on for one more year in Indonesia (he is one year and 5 months younger than me), before he headed to California. At this time we had been dating 7 months and we knew we had to make a decision about our future together. Breaking up… just wasn’t as option for us. We already knew that we had each found the person that we wanted to be with forever. (In Mr E’s words: we wanted to grow old and wrinkly together and sit on the front porch yelling at kids to get off of our lawn.)

But the alternative (dating long distance) sounded so hard!

Friends and statistics told us that long distance never works, that it would be too hard, yada yada. But we ignored them and we decided that we were going to make this work. Maybe it was young idealism, but hey, it was the right decision for us, so in this case, young idealism was the way to go.

We didn’t enter this long distance thing without a plan though, and thank goodness for that. Without it, it could have been much harder than it already was.

Elements of the plan:

1. We had to have an end point. That is, a point where we could be in the same location again. Permanently. Which means we planned for eventual marriage… a slightly scary (but exciting!) thing for us at that age.
2. We had to visit each other. This was the expensive part. Over those 2.5 years, I visited the USA twice, Indonesia once while he was still there, and he visited NZ once.
3. We had to communicate. For us this meant talking on Skype/MSN every day (except when absolutely impossible to do so). And sending each other an email. Every day. This might sound extreme but these talks and emails were essential. We have grown so close as a result, probably even sharing things with each other (everything!) that we would have found harder to do otherwise.

Our plan worked. But let me tell you, it wasn’t easy by any means. There is a reason long distance relationships don’t often work, it is frickin’ hard! We argued, we got stressed, extremely lonely, and sometimes we felt like the world was doing everything it could to keep us apart. But we didn’t give up and I’m so deeply happy and thankful for that. There is no way I could not be with my best friend.

Anyway, sorry for the mush. So at the end of my senior year, both our families were spending some time in Bali. Mr E and I exchanged cheap little promise rings (that we replaced the next year for proper ones) by a pole labeled B9 in the parking lot of a mall, ate strawberry ice cream while walking on the beach at night, and just enjoyed every moment with each other that we possibly could. I didn’t know then how hard the next 2.5 years were going to be, but I did know that whatever we went through that it would be totally worth it.

Have you spent a significant time apart from your FI? How did you handle it?