Remote Year Reflections: My Love Story

We met in my fourth month, and I was so exhausted from traveling that I was barely conscious the first time we encountered each other.

By the fourth day, I began to notice a (confusing) tingling of an attraction. The fifth night, I consciously became aware of a strong desire to interact as much as possible.

On the sixth day, I orchestrated us into holding hands on a bus ride and found an excuse to give my number. I came home and showered, we texted and agreed to meet up that evening.

I stood in the kitchen in my robe, barefoot, palms sweating, heart racing and wrote my therapist:

It’s so hard for me to take it one step, one minute at a time. I know I have to just slow my brain down and let it be what it is right now and deal with that situation since there are so many unknowns. I just am so torn between liking and wanting her and feeling terrified of what that means for me and my life and how I feel about myself and who I am and my relationships with other people and the perception that has in the world.

So there it was and there it is.

I was 29 when we met, and I’d only dated guys before. I’d had sex — and enjoyed it, a lot — with guys. I’d fallen in love and had my heart broken by guys. I’d dreamed of finding a lifelong partner and getting married, and I always pictured a man. I’d never met a girl or woman that I was interested in. I never had any reason to seriously consider the idea that I’d ever be with anyone but guys.

Until I met her.

5 days into knowing her, I had a deep feeling of attraction — in the forces-pulling-me-to-her sense of the word.

The night we got together, I left feeling a calm assurance that the doubts and confusion about our genders and what our relationship looked like were small potatoes compared to the simple but capital-t Truth that was: I am meant to be with this person.

She adored me. I adored her. I had never, ever adored someone before. Obsessed over, yes. Loved, yes. Appreciated, yes. But never complete, utter adoration.

I would do anything to make her smile, yet I also felt empowered by her love to be a better, stronger version of myself.

I felt safe and equal in her arms — or having her in mine — and happy to flow with the ebbing balance of our relationship evolving through different countries and circumstances as we moved separately around the world and through our lives.

There were questions and complications to our relationship, but I felt more invested and more rewarded than ever before. Everything I’d heard about what a partner should be, about how to make a longterm relationship work, I felt with her and would do for her and wanted with her.

If she had asked me for forever, I would have said yes.

A week after she unexpectedly dumped me, I took a solo trip to Morocco (which I’d booked to go on with her, and instead it was a mix of homecoming, assertions of my independence, and disaster).

A month later, I moved across the world to SE Asia with my RY group and took a solo side trip back to Hong Kong (where I’d first learned of Remote Year in 2015).

I trained for and ran my first half-marathon. I emailed my therapist frequently. I took wellness workshops and created life plans and made an inspiration board. I distracted myself with crushes and a handful of hookups. I went to every possible RY activity. I made my parents visit for Christmas.

I started recording a podcast. I cowrote a book.

I overwhelmed myself and my schedule so that I was (theoretically) too busy to obsess over the breakup or feel depressed (it didn’t work, but I tried).

This reflection is inevitably about the beginning and end of the relationship, as those are the identifiable landmarks, the peak and valley of the story to share with others.

But it’s the middle — the months and moments we shared together — that I longed for and look back on.

The meetups in foreign countries, rushing into each other’s arms after weeks apart. The mundane hours spent working side by side, attentions separate but bodies together. The mornings I woke up and she was the first thing I saw. The messages sent with missives of longing and affection, inside jokes, bad day rants and encouragement. The images that froze us for a moment in time: laughing, kissing, seducing, posing, playing.

The middle is what matters most to me.
The middle is when we were us.
The middle is what I miss.

I still don’t fully understand how that very real, true feeling and belief could exist about someone and something that wouldn’t last.

It is hard to hope for that feeling again, knowing that it is still as at risk of ending as anything else in life.

How I can have that experience — sharing something so special with someone else, feeling mutual love and adoration and affection, having so many conversations about our feelings and our futures — yet still have someone voluntarily walk away from our relationship, from me?

Was it the distance? Was it work? Was it someone else? Was it me?

Something triggered the end, abruptly, and she moved on.

Meanwhile, I was left with five months of bittersweet, beautiful memories and five months of missing her, us, and who she made me.

The lessons of the relationship are still finding their way to the surface. But this is one facet of what I’ve learned:

I have consciously said “yes” to as many things and people as possible in my adult life, and I’ve had incredible experiences because of it.

I have consciously said “no” to putting up walls and shutting down my curiosity and empathy, and I’ve learned and loved so much because of it.

But this relationship, and others, have shown me that life is not meant to be lived at either end of a spectrum — the middle is, somewhat surprisingly, a better goal.

I do not need or want walls or high barriers, but I do need a fence (though mine won’t be a white picket one).

I want to be open to anyone and everyone — but with the caveat that they are only invited in as far as they ask to go and as far as they welcome me in to their world, their feelings, their future.

I don’t regret a moment I spent with her, loving her, or even mourning her — it was a tremendously significant part of my Remote Year and my life.

I am still sad that it was a love story that ended not with happily ever after but instead with a lot of learning.

But I’m grateful for every blissfully happy moment we shared, for the insights it gave me into myself and our culture at home & abroad, and for the incredible love and support I felt during our relationship and in the aftermath of it ending from friends new and old.

So perhaps it is most appropriate, then, that my RY love story spanned seven countries and three continents, that it was a powerful and poignant rollercoaster of highs and lows, and that it was both finite and unfinished.

Katherine is a digital nomad, working remotely while she travels the world — on the road since June 2014. She was a member of Remote Year 2 Battuta, living around the world with 75 other digital nomads from February 2016 to January 2017.

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