dating a widower in LDR

Long Distance Relationships


Long Distance Relationships

“We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, here and now without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.”

Jose Orgeta y Gasset

That was the quote that Rob came across in his Franklin day planner that tipped the scales and began our journey to where we are today. There is irony in the fact that someone as random as I am have organization to thank for my soon to be husband. I have been reading emails and IM transcripts from the earliest days of my relationship with Rob. I tend to do this when it has been a long while since we have been together and another visit is nearing.

When one considers the physical distance between us the actual amount of face time we have had is remarkable. By the time he arrives here in early June to help us pack and move to Canada, we will have spent about 24 days together. In not quite 6 months. Better, I think, than some couples who live on opposite ends of the same city.

Between us we have sent nearly 800 emails and spent literally days on the phone and IMing if the hours were calculated. There really isn’t any point during the day when we can’t reach each other. One of the things that experts recommend for long distance relationships to be successful is communication, so in light of all this I would call us uber-successful.

The early days emails are interesting in retrospect. There are the odd moments when our interest in each other is clearly not “just friends”, and I wonder now how that was overlooked, or if it was really. In our conversations of late we have admitted to each other that the attraction was early and mutual, and I wonder how that can be because each of us was still clearly not ready, consciously anyway, to love someone other than our late spouses.

I did an Internet search last night to find the predictors for long distance relationship success. The first was communication, and letter writing was the chief factor in romances prevailing whether it was email or the snail variety. Talking on the phone was just not enough. I can understand why. Writing frees a person from constraints, and it is a deliberate medium in which you can take the time to phrase and frame your thoughts. The phone is fraught with the same problems of speaking in person and worse, robs the speakers of the visual cues that verbal communication ironically relies on.

Establishing ground rules for the relationship early and sticking to them was another predictor for a relationship’s longevity. I don’t recall if Rob and I did this in so many words. When our needs were not being met, we simply told each other what was wrong. Which I suppose is the one rule we did have and still do, and that is we tell each other when something is wrong, or we ask when we don’t understand where the other is coming from. This though, I think, goes back to communication.

Another factor for success is the amount of face time a couple schedules. After spending about 10 days together over my spring break in March, we both realized that there was no way we could get to June without seeing each other. We had barely survived the two and a half weeks between our first face to face meeting in Idaho Falls and Arkansas. So, a new plan was hammered out with regularly scheduled visits. It hasn’t made the time apart easier, but it has given us something to look forward to and eased the longing to be together a tiny bit. One of the things the articles didn’t address, but I will, is that how much face time a couple needs is going to vary and has to be talked about and adequately addressed. Rob and I in a word…..suck…..at the physical separation part of this long distance thing. Some of it can be attributed to widowhood, but I think also it is just our personalities. We need to be able to physically connect and show our affection, need, and love for each other. I was no different with Will, and I would guess it was the same for Rob with Shelley.

Deciding how long the distance will be a factor in the relationship and who will be the one to relocate was cited as well as a predictor for success. I am moving to Canada in June. And this is no small thing at my age and given my circumstances. It means selling a house, resigning from my teaching position, pulling up stakes in Iowa and emigrating to another country. And I am doing this with a four year old in tow. However, it made the most sense when looked at from a practical standpoint. I will be able to teach eventually in Canada but it is not as easy for Rob to find work here in my neck of the Midwest. He has the better job. But honestly, and all practical matters aside, I was okay with going to him. He feels like home to me, and wherever he is that is where I am supposed to be.

Another important point in maintaining a distance relationship is keeping things “spicy”, and they suggest everything and the kitchen sink really. To be blunt I don’t see the appeal of phone sex, and webcams are beyond nasty in any context I can imagine. Erotic emails on the other hand, while not a substitute, make for good foreplay. Whereas Rob is adamant that some of these emails of ours need to be purged from the “record” so to speak, I will not be deleting them anytime soon. I have nothing of Will. No record of his thoughts, pure or otherwise, and so I can’t bring myself to destroy anything that Rob has written to me and probably never will. I guess only time will tell whose version of our early days will be the one of record.

Back in the day when marriages were a matter to be arranged rather than something born of preference and personal choice, distance and courting by mail weren’t viewed so suspiciously. One of the mp3’s that Rob sent me over the course of our communications was Prairie Wedding by Mark Knopfler. The lyrics aptly fit our situation. Rob used a verse of that song in the following post on the YWBB in response to someone’s query as to whether or not two people could fall in love over the Internet:

I am saddened that our society has made us so bitter and jaded that we look for subterfuge and ulterior motives everywhere. I’m not saying we shouldn’t use our heads and know what we are doing…..but I, for one, appreciate that there can still be magic.

The start of my relationship with my fiancee was kind of described by the beautiful song “Prairie Wedding” by Mark Knopfler, which starts like this:

We Only Knew Each Other By Letter

I Went To Meet Her Off The Train

When The Smoke Had Cleared And The Dust Was Still

She Was Standing There And Speaking My Name

I Guarantee She Looked Like An Angel

I Couldn’t Think Of What I Should Say

But When Adam Saw Eve In The Garden

I Believe He Felt The Selfsame Way

I guess I’m just a hopeless romantic.

I guess I am too and every day I count myself one of the luckiest people on the planet to have been found by this amazing and remarkable man with whom I am going to spend the rest of my life.

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Selling the House


a nice starter home

Image by girl_onthe_les via Flickr

I came home this afternoon to a “For Sale” sign in the yard. I had actually been a bit worried about my reaction. This was the house that Will and I wanted to make a home out of. Have another baby in. Live the future we had planned. None of those things ever came to pass. It is still just a house. There is no baby and never will be. Ironically we’d never had even the slightest chance at a future from the day we first met because he was already dying.

 

There was a message waiting on the machine already from the realtor who had found the buyer for our last house asking could he bring clients by later and could I call him to confirm. I decided to take that as a good omen.

 

I would love for this house to be sold in a matter of weeks. It has held me prisoner long enough. It was meant to be someone else’s home and future, I think, and I have just been “keeping it warm” for them. But I am realistic enough to know that finding a buyer in the current market could take a while and, regardless, we are leaving for our new home in Canada with Rob mid-June.

 

All this packing and realtor stuff has brought back memories of selling the last house and all that was going on at the time. The house we were living in was mine. I had bought it the summer before I met Will. I loved that house. I loved the area which was the original part of the suburb we live in. The neighborhood had been flooded out in 1993 and the house on my lot torn down and replaced with the tiny starter home I ended up buying. It was just a couple of blocks from the old shopping district. I could walk to the farmer’s market on Thursday evenings and over to the post office. There was a walking path not too far off that I did my daily running on. I had an old-fashioned front porch where I would sit on the steps and listen to the trees whisper to the skies on windy evenings in the summer.

 

When Will moved in, we put in a brick patio in the back and grilled out with friends on the weekends. Actually, we grilled all the time as soon as the weather was warm. He loved to grill. The epitome of the male stereo-type if you want to know.

 

We decided to sell and find a bigger place when our daughter was about 9 months old. Will was already quite sick but we were still choosing to believe the doctors who told him that it was stress and depression. I am not sure I ever really believed that but I know that by the time we had begun the process to sell the house, I didn’t believe it at all.

 

The house sold the weekend of July 4th. It had only taken about 4 weeks. By the end of that week, he had been placed on leave because of two accidents he had with his cube van. Ultimately they would fire him, but at the time I was so angry with him for keeping his troubles at work from me. I still sometimes wonder what he was thinking then but I doubt he had any clear comprehension of what was happening by that point as he was just weeks away from the point of no return physically and mentally.

 

The day we moved I had to forge his signature on some of the documents because he couldn’t really write anymore. It was obvious to anyone who talked with him, looked at him even, that he was very ill. Moving day was a blur of people and an overwhelming desire to throw my baby into my car and drive as fast and as far away as I could get.

 

I had loved this house the first time I had gone through but from the moment we were moved in all I wanted was to leave. I didn’t hang pictures on the wall. I stacked unopened totes and boxes in the basement that are still sitting there today. I just knew somehow that this was not permanent.

 

Selling feels right though I can’t deny that it is stirring up memories of times past. Feelings of being overwhelmed, helpless, lost, cheated, trapped. Not good times. But, they are just memories.

Soul Mates


Kindred Spirits

Image via Wikipedia

A soul mate is a once in a lifetime thing and when this lifetime is through the departing soul crosses to the other side where it waits patiently to be reunited with its mate because it is incomplete without its match. Like a pair of socks.

The patient part alone is more than enough proof that this theory is not true. I can’t remember a time when Will waited patiently for anything. Much as he loved me, he never let me forget that I kept him waiting in the beginning.

Our match was, in some respects, purely an emotional and physical one; we had very little in common in terms of interests in the very beginning, but I knew the moment I  saw him that we would be together at some point. It began as a friendship, and when he decided this was no longer enough, he waited me out an entire summer while I dated other people and got over my fear of the emotional intimacy he represented. It’s impossible to say how we would have held up over time, but had I not met him, I would be never married today.

The topic of soul mates comes up from time to time on the YWBB. One of the first times I put forth an opinion about it in my early posting days, I came down on the negative side. At least this is according to Rob, who is currently cleaning out his collection of favorite posts. He ran across my original reply over the weekend and brought it up when we were on messenger the other night night waiting for my daughter to fall asleep.

I have thought more about the soul mates issue since as I have run across other posts that mention or discuss it. I am still not inclined to believe in it myself. I think that what is meant, when someone refers to their significant other as a soul mate, is more in line with the idea behind kindred spirits. In fact Rob made reference to this term once in our early correspondence. According to the dictionary it means “of similar nature or character”. I do think that sometimes you just connect with some people in a way that defies logic, and that some people are destined to be a part of your life. I don’t think it is a once in a lifetime thing though, and I think that this can apply to non-romantic relationships as well.  For  example, I knew my daughter before she was born, and she has actually told me that she chose me to be her mommy, not once but twice.

Rob and I are kindred spirits. I sensed it a bit in the beginning when I would read his posts. It was a feeling that compelled me to reply to a post of his in the General Forum one night. I offered to be his “evil twin”. I needed to meet him. Learn about him. Know him. I have experienced this before, with Will of course, but also with friends I have made over the years.

I have no great guru-like theory myself about this type of connecting, but I’ve read, or maybe heard, the following one somewhere, and it makes sense to me. This theory is based on the assumption that reincarnation is a fact and that we will live our way through multiple lives on this plane before moving on to the next. It proposes that we go through eternity with a set group of kindred spirits, or soul mates if you prefer, with whom we are always connected. Our relationships change from one lifetime to the next. Husband/wife. Parent/child. Siblings. Friends. There is the inevitable ebb and flow which naturally takes on different dimensions when the vast breadth of time is considered, but the connections are always evident to us.

What’s funny to me is that the people most likely to be spouting the soul mates line are those least likely to be introspective enough about relationships to require likeness of mind in a prospective mate to justify the label in the first place. It is purely a physical thing with them. It is love at first sight with a heavy emphasis on sight. The sharing of ideas and values is less important than the establishment of mutual chemistry. In my opinion that is not what is meant by soul mates, as they explain it, and is certainly not kindred spirits as I know it. A poster on the board wrote something to the effect that she didn’t believe that two people could, or would, reveal their innermost thoughts via email or on the phone. I suppose that is true for some. For me it would be impossible to keep myself to myself and from someone with whom I felt I already knew. I trusted Rob with my first blog entries before we even began to correspond in earnest. My blog was raw and rambling and much of what I wrote could have been easily misinterpreted, but I knew I could trust him and he has more than shown that my trust is well-placed.

When I read about looking for another soul mate, I am puzzled. Kindred spirits seek each other out and with the help of destiny, cross time and space to be reunited. There are 1500 miles and an international border between Rob and I. There was a 10 year age gap between myself and Will. Rob and his late wife, Shelley, were born 2300 miles apart, but in each case it was meant to be; we all found each other. It is not a matter of finding however so much as being found which for the most part means simply being open to the possibility.