Long Distance Dating
30 May 2007
“Heavy-boned boy meets ex ice-cream scooper.” Sound like a teen love story?
As it happens, it’s a budding romance between two thirty-somethings who are getting to know each other using instant messaging.
He was a heavy-boned teen that summer when she scooped ice cream forty-five minutes from his hometown - but they never met! Fast-forward twenty years: a mutual friend introduced them via email.
Now the literal distance between them is waaay more than a short car ride; he lives in Paris and she lives in Chile. Good thing they’re both freelance writers and into exchanging lots of words.
But can you make a long-distance courtship work, especially if you’ve never met in person? Ice cream girl says you can. She corresponded with heavy-boned boy for five months before finally meeting him.
During that time they built a friendship around a meeting of the minds, not the flesh. And what they found is that because an intellectual amity had come first, when they did finally meet, they had a history of shared stories on which to build the next stage of their relationship.
And what of that next stage? Our happy couple spent a face-to-face weekend for the first time at the wedding of the friend who introduced them after which, he hotfooted it back to Paris for work and she headed the opposite direction on assignment.
The challenge says she is to “keep it real,” since absence can make the heart grow fonder by stirring one’s imagination into overdrive such that he begins to seem ideal.
No doubt about it, it is easy to project positive attributes onto a long-distant love since they’re not around to call into question with their physical behavior the traits that (you) have imagined about them.
With this in mind, ice-cream girl and heavy-boned boy have committed to rendezvous again in person; they want to test the reality of being together in real time versus the fantasy of what they’ve created in cyber time.
They’ve agreed they have something worth testing – the firm foundation of a slowly built friendship, one that has already withstood the frustration of distance and thus the frustration of instant (physical) gratification.
Their story reminds me that dating via instant messaging connects those at a distance directly, even as the pace of a relationship developed this way recalls a bygone era when love blossomed slowly as a consequence of the sweetness of longing.
May 30th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
May 31st, 2007 at 9:34 am