(50) Long Distance

Hubs takes off for New York tomorrow. He’ll be up there for about a month before I join him. It should be a day of desperate touching and cloying sadness, maybe. It’s not. We’re just hanging in the living room, Netflix and the AC filling our home and ornamenting the mutual peace in our hearts. I think we’re more stressed about what we’ll do for dinner than we are about the upcoming month.

We’re good at long distance. The first three years of our relationship were long distance ones. We’ve done the summer apart thing at least four different times prior to this summer. Distance has never been something that’s affected our relationship. It maybe amplifies whatever is currently going on in our relationship, good or bad. But the actual distance itself doesn’t fundamentally change who we are to each other. And it wasn’t like we ‘got good’ at it. We just are. (Like how some people are patient people. They just are.) When we first started dating, we had a three second conversation about long distance. It went like this:

Him: So it’s going to be long distance, I guess.

Me: I don’t care. I have zero desire to be with anyone else.

Him: Oh ok. Me too.

We talked a little about not wanting distance to be a permanent aspect of our relationship, and that’s where we differed. I flat out didn’t care if we were always long distance; he’s my partner, and I like to travel. I also like when he visits. It’s all good news to me. He was very specific: he wanted to build a future with me, he wanted to grow with me and be a part of my everyday bonanza. His immediate frankness about it made me realize that his response more accurately articulated how I view relationships. I enjoy my plateau-ed relationships because they are uncomplicated and clearly delineated. There are no challenges and there is no mystery; maybe trust is easier because the lines are clearer. But, there’s also no growth.

Someone once told me they didn’t understand the concept of growth in a relationship; they felt that relationships just exist in a state of constant flux and so the concept of growth didn’t really apply to them (relationships). I understand the constant state of flux, because duh, but I don’t feel that constant state of flux negates growth. If I look at my relationships, even the ones I tend to see as ‘plateau-ed’, they have all fundamentally changed over time. It’s not just exposure to other people that potentially change my environment and character (granted, slowly and often after much deliberation); it’s the actual relationships as well. How I relate to someone, and how that communication and trust deepens (or not) over time, can fundamentally change who I am.

I get why that understanding of relationships could be a disastrous/terrifying experience. Allowing someone to change your reality is a huge allowance. A gift, even. Or, a horrible idea. It doesn’t always go well. Sometimes it is catastrophic. Trusting someone with something as exquisite and fragile as your care is as vulnerable as it gets. Obligations can be trifling. Compromise can feel yucky. Hearts get broken. And, there’s nothing wrong with my relationships that involve growth on a much more minute (nonexistent?) scale. So, why bother with it? It’s fraught.

I bother with it because growth makes me splurt joy water from my eye sockets. Truly. It’s why I stick with music even though nothing I do is ever good enough (FUCK YOU BRAHMS just kidding i love you pls come back shhhh kitch focus on writing shhh), and why teaching only partially gives me hives. It’s why I forgive people and why I have learned to forgive myself after many years and much practice. It’s why I can see people clearly and embrace their differences and why I can imagine a world that is better. If I can’t grow with just one other individual, how will I ever grow with an entire community? How will my contributions be worth anything if I can’t value change for its fundamental, exposed, and necessary, awkwardness? If I want a world that loves better, then I need to be a person who loves to grow. So even though I am bad at loss and heartbreak and power plays, I will continue to fight for opportunities to be better. I will prize my sown relationships and admire their soul encompassing roots from inside our woody woven cave.

Anyways, hubs is off to NY tomorrow, and we’re fine. Probably we’ll order sushi.