Back in my day, there were no email, no instant messaging, no web-cam, and no mobile phones, no SMS, and no cheap long-distance calling cards. Going into a long distance relationship was just asking for a difficult, expensive and sometimes very painful experience, no matter how much in love you thought you were at the time.
With a lot of time and space separating you, your mind can go into overdrive with guilt, suspicion, and worry. The lusting for each other can become a lusting for someone else closer and available. A relationship is enough work without the added distance and absence from each other’s lives. Small issues can become magnified and trivial matters can lead to the biggest arguments.
And pretty soon, calling each other starts to feel like work and obligation, and it leads to resentment.
Now that there is email, instant messaging, web-cam, mobile phones, SMS and cheap long-distance calling cards, is it any easier? Although I feel that modern technology may prolong the relationship, ultimately I don’t think it is any easier than it was before when there weren’t so many ways to communicate.
Nothing beats physical presence, and being able to read each other’s faces and body language clearly. Sex aside, I like to be able to touch and hold my girlfriend without having to wait for weeks and months, and even years. For this reason alone, I won’t ever consider going into a long-distance relationship no matter how much I like the girl.
I may have lost out on the greatest loves of my life because of this, but I may have also spared myself the agony of an LDR. Is it better to have loved and lost, than to not have loved at all? Hmm, easy for you to say if you haven’t experienced hurt before. Or you know, if you are a masochist.
A while back I wrote that most times when you are talking with a woman, and she’s venting, you should just shut up and listen.
A corollary of that rule is that you never ever agree with her about how bad her man is, even if she sounds pissed off and frustrated when talking about him. You can nod your head and acknowledge what she’s saying but you don’t agree with what she’s saying. See the difference?
You don’t want to agree with her and add your two cents because she will end up defending her man to you, even as you are agreeing with her complains about him. Why? Because when a third party shows her the imperfections of her man, her pride is wounded and she now feels that she’s the one being attacked for choosing the wrong guy. No one likes admitting to making a bad choice, and no girl likes being shown that her judgement is somehow impaired.
Don’t believe me? Try it sometime and within 5 minutes, she’d be saying, “Oh he’s not that bad really“, or “He’s good to me most of the time“, or … and I love this the best, “you don’t understand our relationship”. Arghghghgh fuuuuuuck.
So if you want to retain your sanity, and not get into an argument over something that doesn’t even really concern you, because you are only making her feel better about herself and him, because you are only letting her vent her anger on you so that she goes back to him all happy and jolly, because you don’t want to be the sponge of her frustrations without the side-benefit of the sex that he happily gets without knowing the shit that he puts you through, what do you do?!
My happy group went and saw Britney Spear’s concert at Burswood Dome last night. And it was fantastic!
Check out our happy faces.
The setup was very impressive including this gigantic 360° screen that went up and down whenever Britney leaves the stage for costume changes, and which lighted up with graphics, videos and words. The only sucky thing was that it didn’t show what Britney was doing on stage for the benefit of those who sat or stood a little further away like my group.
The sound system was awesome – it was loud but not ear-shattering with the bass lines suitably thumping during her set which consisted of all of her higher tempo songs except for one track.
These were the best pictures of Britney that we got – I think they were taken by Sel.
About an hour and a half into the show, it came to an end. The big circular screen exploded with sparklers …
and then there was an explosion of confetti with Britney in the middle of the stage (you can sorta make out her silouhette here) …
and finally, the screen comes down to close off the show.
I wrote in the previous post that if there wasn’t any emotional maintenance involved in my past relationships, then they might have lasted longer due to the person that I am. Which prompted this question: does that mean I’m perfectly ok with sharing my lover?
Let me explain the idea. Right or wrong, at this point in time I can’t see myself putting up with the idiosyncrasies of a relationship. My physical needs haven’t quite trumped my need for an emotionally carefree existence just yet. So if my girlfriend is not exclusive to me, that means the emotional maintenance part is shared with another person, which means it’s less for me to handle. And I thought, that’s a reasonable trade.
I’m not the jealous type. I also don’t believe there’s anything wrong with having multiple partners as long as everyone involved knows the full picture, and everyone is accorded mutual respect. I feel that the arrangement can be beneficial to the person who shares their lover, and also to the lover who has multiple partners.
The one who shares has an easier time whether it’s physically or emotionally, while the person who has multiple partners can choose different people to fulfill different roles in their lives.
So yeah, I am ok with sharing my lover. But that is me. I don’t think my train of thought is shared by many. People generally still expect monogamy, or at least serial monogamy. And that loving and wanting more than one person at a time is not right. Though I think that what I’ve described is better than the lying, the cheating and ultimately the betrayal that comes with all kinds of affairs.
Monogamy – good for you if it’s easy for you and if you have it but why must that be the only right kind of relationship?
Tham asked me the other day what’s the longest that I have been in a relationship for, and I said, “2 months”. To which he said, “So you’ve had a string of fuck buddies then.” Hah, if only!
I’ve now been single for 5 years, going into my 6th. Before that, for about 10 years I would have a different girlfriend every 2 years with the shortest relationship lasting just 4 weeks. I have a theory about why it was like that.
I think back then, 2 years was the longest time that I can go without sex so it was only natural that I would get into a relationship every 2 years. But once I get into a relationship, the emotional maintenance starts to get to me and before long I’d figured that it wasn’t worth it.
I think that if there wasn’t any emotional maintenance involved, I would have probably stayed in these relationships longer. The physical side of things requires less effort and less thinking. So yeah, if my girlfriends were fuck buddies instead, my longest time spent in a relationship would have probably been longer than 2 months.
But if they were fuck buddies, that would mean that they weren’t girlfriends. I may not care about the emotional maintenance but it doesn’t mean that I don’t like having an emotional connection with someone. I still think that sex is better when you have an emotional connection.
All these years, I’ve been coping well emotionally because I’ve got my friends and family, and my dogs. Physically, there’s porn and masturbation and paying for it 3 times so far. But sex with someone else that I cared about? I miss having that on a regular basis.
And yet I lose interest in someone new very quickly these days, over the smallest of reasons – it’s probably a defense mechanism and my warped idea of not bothering with relationships or trying to get into one because of how I feel about the work that goes into maintaining one. I’m doomed, aren’t I?
Been playing DJ Hero for the past few days and it’s super fun. It took me about an hour to go through the tutorial and to get the hang of it. After a few more hours of playing, I’m now comfortably playing the medium level. There’s still hard and expert to conquer.
Aside from the gameplay, the graphics are pretty to look at though you’d be mostly concentrating on the scrolling music highway. And the music will definitely get a party started – the mashups of the different genres of songs including house, trance, R&B and Hip Hop are really cool and there are over 90 songs included with the game, and more to become available for download at a price.
Check out this insane clip of hard-level gameplay.
