Love

[Rayadragon]

Having gone through the whole long distance relationship thing, I can't help but be worried when I hear something like this. The short version is that we dated for quite a while before I left for graduate school. He wound up going to graduate school in a different state. We had some problems, which got worse, and he wound up cheating on me and breaking up with me for her, though it took him until I told him I figured out he was cheating (granted, I figured this out when he was breaking up with me) to admit it (not quite a year after we broke up, yes I kept talking to him). I also have dated someone over the internet. We're still good friends, but the relationship was incredibly rocky. Long intro but just want to say that I'm a bit jaded about the whole long-distance/internet dating thing.

I have to second what DarkDragon said: it's hard to give advice when I don't know you and don't know exactly what sort of a situation you're in right now.

One comment that you said that worried me a bit, was when you stated you weren't sure if she'd move from Ohio to Wisconson for you. I always have to ask if the opposite holds true. Would you be willing to move to Ohio for her? I know that the context was in reply to Tigress's post, so I'm sure the phasing is influenced by that. The reason this worries me is that 1)my evil ex would not have been willing to do so, but expect me to drop everything for him, and 2) in my internet relationship there just wasn't a way, perhaps for several years, that either of us would be in a position to move. It's hard to keep a relationship like that going if the distance can't be crossed for a while.

I'm not saying it can't be done, it just didn't work for me. I have several friends in medical school who are married to another doctor (or other grad student pairs), and often times it seems that they have to do their residencies in different states. It's hard on them, but they make it work. But it does take a lot of work, and even more trust.

A last bit of advice. If you're having troubles now, try to find a time to sit down and discuss them, and their possible solutions. Do it sooner rather than later. The smallest things can fester, and then everything starts getting blown out of proportion. I think a lot of the final dificulties with my evil ex could have been avoided if we had both been more honest with the problems we were having in the relationship. It was a lot of little things that just kept building and building on each other. I don't think it would've changed the final outcome, but I do think it would've been better for the both of us to have it end with something other than resentment.
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