My twenties will be defined as the time in my life when I was attracted to love from a distance. I’m 28 and the only two real relationships that I have ever had—meaning we were exclusive and called each other "boyfriend" and "girlfriend"—were with one guy, when I was 23, who lived across the country, and another guy, when I was 27, who lived in another country.
I met the first guy right when I was about to move home from California, after living there for a year and working a temporary post-grad job with an expiration date. The second guy I met on Facebook, when he sent me a message about a party in New York City to which a mutual friend had invited us both.
I’ll defend my heart, and myself, by saying that I didn’t mean to only fall in love with guys who didn’t live within walking or driving distance from me. I worked overtime to try and find someone I was interested in dating and who I shared an area code with, but it never seemed to work out.
After breaking things off with my first LDR boyfriend, I downloaded three dating apps, worked as a blogger for a dating website, sat down across from a matchmaker on several different occasions, and even went on a blind date (or three) with friends of friends of…you know how it goes.
I met nobody that I could even stomach going on a second date with, and found myself furiously deleting the dating apps on my phone, before canceling any hope of meeting someone in New York City—a place that’s infamous as a hub for singles who are always looking for the next best thing.
Most of the time, when a relationship ends, the person desperately wishes they could get back their time, energy, and all the items (tickets to concerts, jewelry, books, records, etc.) that they gave the person when they were dating them. But not me. My two ex-boyfriends can keep all of those things, donate them to Goodwill, re-gift them to their next lover. More than anything, more than my emotional sanity, and half of my twenties, what I wish I could get back from my two failed relationships is my money.
People will tell you a lot of things about LDR’s, like how hard it is to communicate with someone you can’t look at in the eyes, or how it’s tricky to keep things hot and heavy when you can’t plant your lips on theirs after a hard day, or dealing with another lonely Friday night.
But nobody will tell you that LDR’s are expensive and, suddenly, a relationship that should be about managing love becomes more about managing your finances.
In a month, you can spend close to $1,000 on a person you get to see maybe a handful of times a year—and that's if you're lucky.
When I was goo-goo eyes for the guy in California, I was blind to the fact that I was spending hundreds of dollars on airfare every other month, using thousands of my saved up airline miles, upping my wireless plan so that I had enough data to Skype him anywhere and everywhere—including the time he was only able to speak for ten minutes that entire day and I happened to be at a Jacks Mannequin concert at the time. There was also the night we were fighting, but I was out with my best friends at a nightclub in the Lower East Side and FaceTimed him from the bathroom. There were even costly “I miss you” gifts that I’d send once a month, and “I’m sorry we fought” gifts that I’d send once a week.
But those costs tripled when I started dating Boyfriend Number Two, who lived in Canada. The prices for flights were always above $500 and when we first started chatting, when I got a $300 phone bill during our first month together, I learned the hard way that I needed to add international calling and data roaming to my wireless plan. For this out-of-country relationship, I spent a whole lot of time researching the currency exchange to find out the best spots to switch my US Dollar for the Canada Dollar and get the best rate.
It might be true that money can't buy love. But in an LDR, it buys time, it buys sanity, and it sure as hell bribes your heart into thinking that what you have with the other person is something you couldn’t find on your own soil.
I’ll never know if those two relationships would have lasted longer or shorter if they'd happened in my backyard, but I have a long list of things I would do if I could get back the thousands I spent on keeping those relationships alive. I’d perhaps dump the money in a retirement fund that I haven’t started yet, or maybe even book myself a solobackpacking trip around the world where—let’s face it—I probably would have met another love of my life. Maybe one who lived on a different continent this time.
