This is why.

I love my boyfriend. He is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. He’s generous, charming, caring, funny and very loving. He’s successful (also in annoying me) and he has a great list of things he wants to achieve before he turns 40, 50, 60, 70 and so on. (I will refer to him as A.)
The only problem is the distance between us. Right now A’s lying next to me, trying to recover from a flu (this also reminds me of last year, when he got so sick, he couldn’t move for days). A got here about a week and half ago.
With a delay of 20 minutes A arrived well at the Vienna Austrian Airport, the longest 20 mins of my life.
But what seemed like only 20 minutes were actually 6 hours of flight from Newark, New Jersey to Hamburg, Germany (+ 2 hour layover) and another hour and a half from Hamburg to Vienna, Austria. That’s where I live – also part one of our problem.
A doesn’t travel for a living, he doesn’t come to Vienna every other month or so, no, he lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (PA) and he also works there. So this is part two of our problem.

We met on February 27th, 2009 in Maryland. Back then I lived in Virginia (VA), I was living in VA since October 2007 on a J1 visa and I already knew that on August 6th that summer, I’d be going back home to Vienna for good. When I met A that night, I told him all of that, he still asked me for my number.
We’ve been dating ever since.

So VA and PA are not that far apart. But getting from VA to PA was a rather mysterious journey (every single time…). Altogether it’s about a 4 hour drive by car (or any other kind of transportation except hitchhiking, I imagine that might take a bit longer – granted I have not tried it myself, so I don’t know).
At the beginning these 4 hours seemed like a trip that would never end but we got used to it and then we started enjoying it. Not the having to say goodbye every Sunday-afternoon/night deal but the saying hello love every Friday afternoon, on all holidays and every other occasion we could possibly think of.
When the big d-day came around last year it not only broke mine and A’s heart but it also scared the living shit – excuse me – out of me. I didn’t know what to do and I have grown extremely fond of my new boyfriend.

Having to leave him for the first time was one of the most difficult things I had to do, the only thing worse than that was leaving him for the second and third time and him leaving me for the first and soon-to-be second time. You don’t get used to the goodbyes at the airport, you will never and you will always feel like you just lost a big part of yourself and as soon as you left the airport, you already start counting down months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

So this is why I started a blog about all the things we had and yet have to face because of our long distance relationship, to share the good and the bad times and to help me through this until it’s only a relationship.

-J