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This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe

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Her Grace
02/04/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
I'm pretty sympathetic to her story. I met my girlfriend online at the tender age of 15 (she was almost-14 then), and fell for her over the next four years. We started 'dating' (which really meant agreeing to not see anyone else) in May of 2004; numerous phone calls and countless IMs later in June 2006 we finally met for the first time in person. She's from Australia, I'm from the east coast US. It was a huge risk for me: I wasn't just visiting, but actually moving to Melbourne to go to school for a year and a half, so if I didn't work out, it was going to be awkward.

You just have to know yourself, and trust the other person. We'll have been together for five years in May this year, and have spent the past year apart (she has to finish school--she lagged due to a disability). She's here right now and it's still wonderful.
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msAnthrope
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
stories like this just remind me how lucky i really am. i met the love of my life, my current partner, when he was my next-door neighbor.
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Sayachan
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
Like others have noted, it's not the distance that makes this unnerving, it's the fact that she lied about a business trip to come see him. Why not just suggest the possibility, or pursue something romantic before the trip? Traveling that far and spending that much money on something with known possibility is actually brave and romantic, I think.
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AnnoyingFemaleLeadVoiceover
02/03/09

@Sayachan: Right. She basically pulled the high school equivalent of just happening to bump into your crush near his locker.
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The Queen of No
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
I find myself more often than not building a house of cards with new guys I get involved with. I make myself more unavailable than I am and keep things on a need-to-know basis where I'm not forthcoming about anything. I can't help it, I'm so secretive and I compartmentalize so much of my life. In short, I am extremely terrified to let in someone completely and I don't know how to let myself believe that a guy that I actually would want to be in love with would accept me fully. I know the best advice would be to "be alone and learn to be happy with yourself" but the loneliness is palpable and I love connecting with someone intimately.

BUT, I could never do any of what this woman did. That is putting way too much faith on something so... small. I feel for her.
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rocknrollunicorn
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
I once paid $200 or so to push a flight back a day last-minute so I could have one more night with this English guy who was leaving for Australia soon. We'd only hooked up a few times before that. It was mostly about sex, though.

However, I can kind of see myself doing this. As someone who mostly doesn't date, when I do find someone I like and sense any potential, I tend to become... slightly off. Just a little. It's really helpful in life.
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Uncommon Whore
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
Ugh. Totally different, and yet somehow completely paralleling something I have been going through.

But if you don't go out on a limb and try then you will never know if it will work, right? Right?
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chritter is a nocturnal feminist mancatfish
02/02/09

@Uncommon Whore: Right!

I come down more on the "brave" side of this, rather than the "desperate," although there's certainly a blend of both. But hell, it sounds trite, but can't know if you don't try. Better to limit one's regrets to acts of commission, not omission.
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lip_my_stocking
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
Although what she did was a little crazy, think if the awesome experience she had. My grandmother ran away with a man to Russia, and although she was leaving her husband and kind of ditched her kids for a while, I find it incredibly exciting that she did such a drastic thing to leave her dull life.
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zombie.nancy is a godess of fierce
02/02/09

@lip_my_stocking: I agree. For better or worse, it's one hell of a story. It reminds me of the whole that quote about living each day as if it were your last.
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tscheese
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
I met a guy from the Internets once. It required a ride on Amtrak into the next state over. He was a friend of a real-life friend and they'd been close for years, and I'd talked to him on the Internets but never in person.

There was a dorky festival thing I wanted to go to, and as it happened we could both make it there. It was fun. We made out. We hit it off really well. We're still together. The end.

I did not, however, spend $3000 to go to ANOTHER FREAKING COUNTRY.
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shewar
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
Yeah, I relate too. Though I've not dropped 3k at once in pursuit of love, the number of drinks and cab rides I've paid for while dating in the past year could very well come close to the amount.

I say this, currently waiting for the phone to ring, hoping for a call from the lovely date that I went on last week. I swear up and down that no matter how much they seem to like you upon meeting, it means absolutely nothing.

SIGH
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restless
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
Whoa, that is bad. Everyone feels lonely at times, esp. in the Capital of Lonely Heartsvile, NYC, but blowing that kind of cash under such a flimsy pretext as a few lousy e-mails is embarrassingly bad. Sh*t, I have family that I love to see when I travel, and I still wait until every other year or so.

Where were her friends to give her some good advice? Or shake her by the shoulders in tough love?

What happened to he quick and relatively cheap fix of online dating? I take it has become (and rightly so) passe.
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ItchykooParker
02/02/09

@restless: No harm done, I say. She got a trip to China, and she found out the potential of the relationship. No biggie, in the end. It's not like she murdered someone to get the money to go or anything.
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Mediokra
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
Modern Love is usually full of crazies. The woman in this week's essay actually seemed a little more grounded. I'm not exactly defending her rather desperate trip halfway across the world, but I do very much know what it is like to be swept up in those first jittery, ridiculous feelings of desire for somebody, and I know that most of my friends (and yes, me too) have "conveniently" ended up in the same location as their crush in order to start a conversation. Yes, it's stalker-y. But she did it, like so many of us probably have (although hopefully it was more like a "chance meeting" in a coffeeshop rather than a $3,000 plane ticket), and they met, and it played out in a rather un-romantic-comedy-like way, but now she knows.
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Sophie needs to study...damn
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
And this is why, when I email a guy, building him up in my mind, I wait for HIM to buy the plane ticket. That's how I visited Miami in Nov. If someone's going to be crazy, let it be him.
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TurtleWexlerKickedMe
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
Honestly? I admire this woman. Very few people make "big gestures" like this when it comes to romance. I did something sort of similar-ish (met someone in London, fell totally head over heels for him and spent 10 days together, then flew home and tried to keep the relationship up, and made the decision to fly back to London for a long weekend to see if we could make a go of it. Turns out we couldn't, but I don't regret taking the trip.).

If the outcome had been different, it would have been a lovely story that we'd all be smiling about. So I say kudos to this woman, and I hope more people make big gestures, honestly.
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ItchykooParker
02/02/09

@BadenBaden: I agree. I think it's better to regret what you did (unless you did something truly horrible; taking a chance on potential love isn't that), than to regret what you didn't do. Good for her.
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mysterygirl
02/02/09

@BadenBaden: I agree. I've offered the grand gesture, too, and I totally don't regret doing so, even if it didn't have a pretty little ending. I don't know what the point is of being alive if you aren't willing to take big chances for potentially big rewards.

(That's not to say that I would go all the way to China for someone whose romantic interest had not been confirmed-- I think that's excessive-- but I like the spirit behind it.)
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howdybeep (runs with monkey wrenches)
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
I have a friend in Australia. We've chatted for years. I've never met him; chickened out of meeting him when he was in SoCal a couple of years ago. There's nothing romantic about it, but he his my friend.

Sometimes, when I'm lonely or stressed out and feeling out of sorts, I imagine doing this, just so we can hang out and laugh and be stupid. The husband would probably object, though.
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zombie.nancy is a godess of fierce
02/02/09

@howdybeep (runs with monkey wrenches): I had a similar scenario & met my internet BFF for the first time last week.

yeah.... lets just say I prefer interacting with him over the phone or email. That way I dont have to bear witness to his abysmal table manners & hygiene.
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LaComtesse
02/02/09

In reply to This Week's "Modern Love" Will Make You Cringe
I find this less horrible and sad than the more common scenario of spending years and years with someone you don't love, does not fulfill you and who is not interested in you either. Sure this woman's move wasn't exactly prudent and it kind of smacked of impetuous desperation, but, all said and done, she got a trip to China out of it.
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