The International Relationship (Getting Personal)

Over Semana Santa (Holy Week), I had a brief reunion with my boyfriend, a sailor in the Navy, after seven months of separation. His ship came to southern England, and I had a week off work so I booked a cheap RyanAir flight and met him for what I thought would be a story-book romantic getaway. Although we did have a great time together, it wasn’t really the novelistic reunion I had fantasized about. It was complicated finding each other, emotional, busy, and way too short. I felt like no sooner had we said hello than we were saying goodbye again. Thus is the nature of the International Relationship.

According to my experiences, the term “long-distance relationship” doesn’t quite express the challenges implicit in trying to make a relationship work overseas. Long-distance relationships evoke an idea of “he lives in New York and she lives in Philadelphia; they take the train to see each other on weekends, but the trip sure is exhausting and don’t they spend a fortune on phone calls!” An international relationship (especially one in which one of the parties is unreachable by phone because his current residence floats in an undisclosed location in the middle of the ocean) brings more challenges.

Not only must you contend with the distance and the expensive phone calls, but the cultural barriers that separate you. While I am beginning to think in Spanish and get accustomed to eating lunch at 3 pm, my boyfriend is trying to bargain with Arab merchants in Dubai and find a way to pass the time between ports. We are both having experiences of a lifetime (for better or worse), and I can anticipate problems when we are together again and try to share our experiences with one another. I will never be able to understand his journey, nor he mine, yet mine is a journey I cherish and which has helped form me as a person. How can you love someone and not wish to share such a thing with him?

For two people as young as my boyfriend and I (22), an international relationship seems to be a step that many deem too serious. One of his ship-mates called me “Mrs. D” when he met me, and judging from his stories it seems that anyone who remains faithful to his partner during his time at sea is considered virtually married to her. Why did we choose to stay together in spite of a barrier no less vast than oceans and continents? Naïve love? Habit? Idealism? Fear? Probably all of these, among other emotions that are more difficult to express. Only time will tell if we made the right choice and it was worth it to hang on.

The scariest part isn’t the goodbye, however, but the reunion. When we are together again, will things be like “the good old days”? Will we be head-over-heels like the kids we still really are? Or will the physical oceans and continents become metaphorical ones? As Kundera warns me (it’s okay to laugh at what a cliché I’ve become, so go ahead), “metaphors are not to be trifled with.” I don’t doubt that it will be challenging to express to one another all we’ve learned and experienced being in separate countries, but in the story-telling perhaps we will see a new side of each other: a curious, open-minded side that has only begun to crave the seat of an airplane or the salt air of the ocean from the deck of a ship. Perhaps this distance has given us time to grow, to explore and know ourselves in that way that all young people in the twenty-first century must go through like a rite of passage. Speaking for myself, I have most of all learned how much there still remains in the world to see and know, and how much the felicity of your journey depends on the company you keep. So in the end, the metaphorical vastness of our international relationship could very well open the door to a new journey together. After all, as Kundera said “A single metaphor can give birth to love.” ;)