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Slow motion long distance relationships
I live the sort of life that sees me traveling with some regularity. I attend conventions, festivals, burns, meetings, and all sorts of other events that happen on some repeating schedule. Some of them are hundreds or thousands of miles from home. I also move to a new city every 3-5 years. My introduction to a lot of those events coincide with my time in those cities, but moving away doesn't mean never coming back. I currently live in Boston, where I plan to mostly stay for at least a few years, but have solid plans to visit Georgia 3-5 times a year, Tennessee 2-3 times a year, Vermont once a year, Florida 1-2 times a year, Ohio once a year, and a few other slightly less predictable travel plans.
This traveling schedule, coupled with my atypical approach to relationships (from friends to lovers to partners), leads to a phenomenon that I've had a bit of trouble with. The trouble, to put it more specifically, is with expectations. As a society, and in specific subsets of our society, there are common relationship paradigms that get discussed and debated and whose virtues and caveats are extolled at length. The information shared in these ways provides good guidelines for communication and expectations in those sorts of relationships. If you have a "typical" monogamous couple relationship, and you make certain assumptions, they are more likely than not to be accurate. If you have a "typical" friends-with-benefits relationship, ditto. The same goes for "typical" monogamous or polyamorous long distance relationships. Yes, every relationship is unique, but most of them come very close to some common niche, and it is those shared traits that allow us to have concise discourse on the subject about many similar relationships.
This social baseline is, unfortunately, unavailable for one particular type of relationship that I have managed to encounter on multiple occasions. Specifically, I'm going to call this the slow-motion long-distance relationship. These are relationships with only infrequent physical proximity that develop along a somewhat typical timeline when you measure time in number of dates, but a very very slow timeline if you measure time in weeks or years. Slow enough that whole other relationships can happen between dates. For the sake of illustration, let's consider a hypothetical girl Sue, with whom I am going to describe one possible variation of this relationship, each part of which is based on real life, just not all with the same real girl.
I meet Sue on a week-long visit to Ohio, 600 miles away from where I live. She's single, I'm poly and tell her about my girlfriend. We get along and chat. We add each other on Facebook and Google+. Neither of us feels a strong urge to continue directly communicating online after we part ways. We hear from each other perhaps three times in the next year when a social network status update sparks some mutual interest. I visit Ohio again a year later for another week. I see Sue again. She's still single. We pick up where we left off, and it becomes more romantic and more physical. We have sex. This is, technically, around our fourth date (perhaps two "dates" per week of visit), despite knowing each other for a year. After I return home we chat more often, perhaps twice a month, occasionally at length about ourselves or our plans next time we see each other.
Some time before my third trip to Ohio, two years after we met, she meets a boy and they fall in love. They are monogamous. I visit again, and we are Just Friends. I meet the boy, we get along, some socialization is had. I return home. She and I continue chatting online, more often but less aimed at our next meeting and more about our lives. A year into their relationship (a relatively healthy length by modern American 20-something standards), they fall out of love and break up. We continue chatting. I visit Ohio again, three years after meeting her, we have our fifth date. We are physical again, and become a lot more romantically involved. There is talk of Love, the future, relocation, visiting, etc.
That is a very real sort of relationship for me. We didn't have two short flings with a long separation in between. We had one slowly developing relationship over the course of five or six long dates. The entirety, from acquaintances to Friends With Benefits to Just Friends to potential partners, over the course of four or more years, is a single relationship to me. The fact that she was monogamous with someone else for an entire year between two of our dates does not phase me, but it is a very strong wrinkle that makes this sort of relationship stand apart from others I might compare it to. Some girls with whom I have some degree of intimacy have been married and monogamous in the middle of our relationship. Some have been angry at me for months or years, but we reconciled, and on the per-date timeline we were only "broken up" for what amounts to a single date.
If we had sex (or dinner, or dates, or kinky play, or ...) the last few times we met, and you haven't told me otherwise, I am going to expect-as-in-prediction (not expect-as-in-obligation) it to happen again. I am going to talk to you like someone I'm in that sort of relationship with. If you are offended by my mere mention of the matter, I'm going to be confused. If your social or relationship status has changed in a way that my bringing up our relationship (which may be ongoing or done) is a problem, and you haven't told me that, I'm going to be unhappy and confused. That confusion, and one of us having a misguided approach to the situation, is predicated on there being almost no societal background, conventional or otherwise, for this sort of relationship. Thus, I am publishing this writing. I hope to illustrate my feelings on the matter, and I hope to spark discussion among my friends and acquaintances that might better guide me in these situations in the future.
This traveling schedule, coupled with my atypical approach to relationships (from friends to lovers to partners), leads to a phenomenon that I've had a bit of trouble with. The trouble, to put it more specifically, is with expectations. As a society, and in specific subsets of our society, there are common relationship paradigms that get discussed and debated and whose virtues and caveats are extolled at length. The information shared in these ways provides good guidelines for communication and expectations in those sorts of relationships. If you have a "typical" monogamous couple relationship, and you make certain assumptions, they are more likely than not to be accurate. If you have a "typical" friends-with-benefits relationship, ditto. The same goes for "typical" monogamous or polyamorous long distance relationships. Yes, every relationship is unique, but most of them come very close to some common niche, and it is those shared traits that allow us to have concise discourse on the subject about many similar relationships.
This social baseline is, unfortunately, unavailable for one particular type of relationship that I have managed to encounter on multiple occasions. Specifically, I'm going to call this the slow-motion long-distance relationship. These are relationships with only infrequent physical proximity that develop along a somewhat typical timeline when you measure time in number of dates, but a very very slow timeline if you measure time in weeks or years. Slow enough that whole other relationships can happen between dates. For the sake of illustration, let's consider a hypothetical girl Sue, with whom I am going to describe one possible variation of this relationship, each part of which is based on real life, just not all with the same real girl.
I meet Sue on a week-long visit to Ohio, 600 miles away from where I live. She's single, I'm poly and tell her about my girlfriend. We get along and chat. We add each other on Facebook and Google+. Neither of us feels a strong urge to continue directly communicating online after we part ways. We hear from each other perhaps three times in the next year when a social network status update sparks some mutual interest. I visit Ohio again a year later for another week. I see Sue again. She's still single. We pick up where we left off, and it becomes more romantic and more physical. We have sex. This is, technically, around our fourth date (perhaps two "dates" per week of visit), despite knowing each other for a year. After I return home we chat more often, perhaps twice a month, occasionally at length about ourselves or our plans next time we see each other.
Some time before my third trip to Ohio, two years after we met, she meets a boy and they fall in love. They are monogamous. I visit again, and we are Just Friends. I meet the boy, we get along, some socialization is had. I return home. She and I continue chatting online, more often but less aimed at our next meeting and more about our lives. A year into their relationship (a relatively healthy length by modern American 20-something standards), they fall out of love and break up. We continue chatting. I visit Ohio again, three years after meeting her, we have our fifth date. We are physical again, and become a lot more romantically involved. There is talk of Love, the future, relocation, visiting, etc.
That is a very real sort of relationship for me. We didn't have two short flings with a long separation in between. We had one slowly developing relationship over the course of five or six long dates. The entirety, from acquaintances to Friends With Benefits to Just Friends to potential partners, over the course of four or more years, is a single relationship to me. The fact that she was monogamous with someone else for an entire year between two of our dates does not phase me, but it is a very strong wrinkle that makes this sort of relationship stand apart from others I might compare it to. Some girls with whom I have some degree of intimacy have been married and monogamous in the middle of our relationship. Some have been angry at me for months or years, but we reconciled, and on the per-date timeline we were only "broken up" for what amounts to a single date.
If we had sex (or dinner, or dates, or kinky play, or ...) the last few times we met, and you haven't told me otherwise, I am going to expect-as-in-prediction (not expect-as-in-obligation) it to happen again. I am going to talk to you like someone I'm in that sort of relationship with. If you are offended by my mere mention of the matter, I'm going to be confused. If your social or relationship status has changed in a way that my bringing up our relationship (which may be ongoing or done) is a problem, and you haven't told me that, I'm going to be unhappy and confused. That confusion, and one of us having a misguided approach to the situation, is predicated on there being almost no societal background, conventional or otherwise, for this sort of relationship. Thus, I am publishing this writing. I hope to illustrate my feelings on the matter, and I hope to spark discussion among my friends and acquaintances that might better guide me in these situations in the future.