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Just Promise to Miss Me: A Third Kind of Long Distance Relationship
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Just Promise to Miss Me: A Third Kind of Long Distance Relationship

“Do you promise to miss me?” I ask him.

“Already do,” he replies.

We’re eating dinner on my second to last day in Texas. I’ll be catching a flight back home to Ohio the following night. Well, if you can call it home.

Not sure if it’ll seem that way without him there.

But his answer takes me off guard, makes me smile. Used to casting myself in the role of the “clingy one,” I had been assuming I was the only one who was dreading being apart.

So Many Firsts

There have been a lot of “firsts” lately. I’ve never lived in two states at once. Never joined a frequent flyer program. Because it never made sense to until now.

At least it’s an easy flight from Dallas to Cleveland. And back. And there and back. (My life right now.)

Direct. No layovers. You spend about two hours in the air. If you’re smart about timing, it’s about as cheap as a Greyhound bus ticket.

True, I’m never as self-conscious about the few extra pounds I’m carrying as I am when I’m sitting in coach. But you do what you have to.

Being squeezed into an airline seat makes me need you more than ever. To love me. To hold me. To tell me through the way that you touch me that my body is beautiful — if inconveniently sized given the circumstances.

Another First: A Third Kind of Long Distance Relationship

We’ll make it. I know it.

I’ve done long distance relationships before. In the past, I’ve done two different kinds:

  • Ones that start out long distance and always will be.
  • Ones that start out long distance and are moving towards one or both of us moving and closing that distance.

Life has given us a third: A relationship that was close but is long distance temporarily until the old house gets sold. It feels more like the kind where you’re planning on closing that distance, where you expect the separation to eventually come to an end. Except it lacks the uncertainty of not knowing if the long distance connection will pan out when it’s every day.

Because we know where this leads already. We just have to do without it for a bit.

Somehow.

Just promise to miss me. And I’ll know I can do this.

*

My new book is out!

Dealing with Difficult Metamours, the first book devoted solely to metamour relationships, full of strategies to help you get along better with your partners’ other partner(s).

Featured Image: CC BY – Yoon Kang