Oh, No, Let's Go--Let's Go Crazy!

College Connections: Taking the long-distance relationship leap
Published in the Thursday, September 7, 2006 Edition of "The Heights"
By Jake Bertanza

Luckily, it was a Sunday, so that hour phone call took but a sliver of the minutes allotted to my family by the good folks at Verizon. Countless times, my friends have ridiculed and reprimanded me for phone phobia, so reading the timer thoroughly surprised me. What inspired this change? What caused this epic metamorphosis in my development?

The short answer: It was my girlfriend on the line, I hadn't seen her in almost a week, and would not see her again until I deboarded a plane landing in Denver 19 and a half days from then. I was, and am, in a long-distance relationship.

Beware, readers: this is no ordinary long-distance relationship. This isn't high school sweethearts or college graduates trying to sustain their feelings through a drastic change in scenery. This relationship was never supposed to happen. This is a summer fling gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Allow me to explain and defend my word choice. I am what many call a "hopeless romantic." In fact, in my careful courting of this young woman, I casually mentioned this at least 655 times. She was not quite sold on the idea of turning our "vague friendship from our semester abroad during which I consistently (and unabashedly) confessed my love for her, though she was dating someone else at the time" into "a Facebook relationship."

While she brooded over what it would mean to pitch headlong into an exclusive, common-knowledge relationship for a few months (only to inevitably realize an end to that relationship when the long arm of eventuality caught up with us), it was an easy choice for me. I wanted to date her.

As a hopeless romantic, I see the potential for a relationship and lose all powers of cognition and semblance of rationale. So rather than understanding her side and considering the consequences, these following "last words" escaped from my mouth:

"Well, I say we just go crazy, dive right in, and hope it doesn't hurt too bad in the end."

Well, things didn't happen according to this plan, and as I stood in the doorway of my Beacon Street office and watched her stride off toward her eventual airport destination, I found myself in a place last visited many years ago: dialing the area code to talk to my girlfriend. Here I was, voluntarily taking a three-and-a-half-week hiatus from a relationship only two months old for the promise of a nine-day vacation that took me from her hometown of Denver to her schooltown of Atlanta.

My friends think I am crazy. I couldn't be happier. Sure, it hurts sometimes - most times - to be that far away from the person you care about, but a hopeless romantic finds solace in the struggle. Is my judgment so clouded that I don't see the challenging circumstances? Of course not.

But in times like these, experience teaches me not to attempt to forecast where this is going, but instead ponder what has brought about this state of affairs.

Why are we (or, why am I) always placing ourselves (myself) in ridiculous situations for love? Well, when faced with an onslaught of television shows and films depicting impossible, logic-defying, circumstance-conquering love every single day, perhaps we start to think that impossible, logic-defying, circumstance-conquering love can and should occur every single day. So why not us?

Believe me, I'm not complaining. I am falling right into step. Rather than rebelling against my media-driven, hyper-accelerated concept of what falling in love means, I can instead find comfort in what Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson did one summer in 1959. Because although we didn't "make out under the docks," and although we may have initially dismissed this as a "summer fling [that] don't mean a thing," in the end, we could end up "together like ramma-lamma-lamma, ka-dinga-da-dinga-dong." And that is all the hope I need.