Taking the Distance Out of a Long Distance Relationship

When the one you love lives far away, you want to hold them but you can't. You want to look into their eye's, caress their face and kiss their lips; but you find yourself waking up and spooning with your own pillow in the morning. In the past, long distance lovers communicated "slowly" by mail and loved their dear one's photograph until the corners of the picture curled up. However, not many of these relationships withstood the test of time.

With advances in technology, many long distance relationships are being formed over the internet. There is a certain social taboo associated with internet relationships. Yet some people who are well suited for each other, may have no other way to connect except through the internet. We will take a closer look at the possibility of meeting your soul-mate at a common interest site vrs. some cheesy dating site; by using technology and your imagination to stay connected in creative ways.

Today, it will be exactly one year ago that I met my on-line partner in real life. We both signed up at a website for healthy eating, within 3 days of each other. We hung out in different forums and finally bumped into each other a full year later, on a thread where we posted about our childhood memories. We had so much in common that it felt like we had grown up together. After almost a month of close sharing and supporting each other, we decided to meet in person. I was more than a little nervous, because I've had one internet relationship in the past that ended in disaster. But my heart was drawn to him and as the relationship began to bud, his beautiful heart began to unfold to me.

Now, we see each other every few month's. During these visits, we create such beautiful memories that we re-live them together during our month's of separation. One of the first things we did, was create love letter boxes to save our notes, letters, cards and memento's. We both enjoy learning about the Native American culture and we have spent many hours together on the phone reading books, watching documentaries, movies and reading various online articles. When we were together this past January, we visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and spent hours walking through the Native American exhibits. We read several books on Native American spirituality and we are both drawn together to live our lives as one with nature and all living things. This June we will be attending our first Pow-Wow together.

Since we both love nature, we take our camera's and voice recorder's many weekends and go our separate way's into our own neck of the woods. All the while keeping ourselves open to our spiritual connection. I live near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and he lives near the Rocky Mountains on the Western plains of Colorado. He come's home and share's with me the beauty of the Rocky's and the plains. We share our pictures, our stories, our recordings. We record the birds singing, or we sing to each other a song birthed from our hearts. Sometime we record our thoughts as we go along our journey, so that the other person gets to share in what we were thinking and seeing and feeling at that moment. Every month we study an animal and a plant together. We find learning new things together to be alot of fun and another great way to connect to each other and nature.

Since we cannot make love during our separation with our bodies, we use our minds and technology to the fullest extent. I'll leave it at that, and let you use your imagination. Our long distance will come to an end this year. We may miss the time's we spent playing online games together but that can be remedied quickly with a table top game of Yahtzee!