Valentine's Day is next week, but so is Winter Carnival, which means it's far more likely that, when Feb. 14 rolls around, any given member of the student body will be face-chugging an alum than snuggling up to a romantic comedy with a special someone. Thus, the truth unfolds, as I've always suspected: Dartmouth really does hate relationships.
But as it is the week before Valentine's Day, and I'm much fonder of conversation hearts than Keystone, I figured I'd get my "relationship" column out of the way right now.
The long distance relationship, or LDR, is rough no matter how you slice it -- I know, I'm in one. I also know that LDRs come in all different forms. There's the bogus "long distance," as in, he goes to UVM, and you go to Dartmouth; the garden-variety hometown hunnies separated by four or five states; and the third kind, the kind you hear about and say, 'At least I'm not that crazy yet.'
It's the transatlantic, cross-cultural stuff of romance novels that amounts to sky-high phone bills, frequent jet-lagged trips, numerous trips to kayak.com and harebrained dreams of expatriatriation. I'm just that crazy now.
But this is Valentine's Day. That means I should probably stop the self-effacing quips and focus on the good things in life. One of those is the incredibly functional, wonderful long distance relationship between one of my BFFAEAEs and her Maryland-based boyfriend.
Stacie Payne '09 has been rocking the LDR for a little over two and a half years, and, in my view, that's no small feat at Dartmouth. She described some of the problems with maintaining an LDR at Dartmouth.
"You feel like you're always waiting for the next time you see your boyfriend. You're always jumping from break to break," Stacie said.
Compunded with the inconsistency of Dartmouth terms to begin with, I know just the feeling of disconnection Stacie describes. Or maybe it's just all those flights from Dublin to Philadelphia, Boston to Heathrow and combinations thereof.
"Another bad thing," Stacie added, "and maybe something we need to be better about -- is that we don't have those long three or four hour conversations about nothing ... You don't realize it, but it's just as important to set aside time and just say we're going to talk about nothing tonight, like you would when you're together."
I nod, thinking of the number of conversations I've had recently that sound like scripted bits of a family dinner conversation in some TV movie.
But I don't want to be a Debbie Downer. There must be something good about LDRs, right?
"One great thing is knowing that it's going to get better from here -- at least at some point it won't be long distance," Stacie said.
This kind of sounds like bottom of the barrel positive reasoning, but Stacie soon moved to more concrete upsides that brought back the proverbial intestinal butterflies that made me consider dating someone 3,000 miles away in the first place.
"Whenever I've been upset or something goes wrong, he used to make drawings in [Microsoft] Paint and label them with 'me' and 'him' and we'd be holding hands," Stacie said. "Whenever we're in fights or having hard times, he'd write lists of reasons why he missed me." Stacie continued.
I'm starting to feel a little jealous, but I remind myself that dating a geology major means that, though I might not get Paint projects sent to me, sometimes I do get rock diagrams. The post office will never shut down as long as people continue to have LDRs."The best part is getting letters and packages." Stacie said.
I ask her what's she's planning for Ryan for Valentine's Day.
"Definitely a hand-written note. I haven't sent one of those in a while, and I want to get back into that," she said. "And I'm going to have to go with baked sugar cookies, because they're his favorite."
She says she wants to make them heart-shaped, but I remind her that the last time she tried to do that, they looked more like butts. Maybe that's just a dose of my Dartmouth relationship-phobia showing through.
