...But it's works.

When I was around fourteen years old I had two "long distance" relationships, both starting from consecutive summers and ending a few months later. The first was an absolute disaster, the second was really nothing more than a glorified friendship, neither with anything really physical and I felt nothing when we broke up.

Since those relationships I have assumed that long distance doesn't work. Everywhere I look I'm being told, by the media, that long distance relationships don't work, that they can never work. But as Mark and I near our six month anniversary with no indication of any trouble in the relationship, I'm starting to conclude that I was wrong.

Still Mark is one-of-a-kind. The more I look at other men the more I see it. He has, after all, blown every event that we've ever shared out of the water (in a good way): the summer of time spent in both the UK and in Malta was the best I have ever had, probably by far; the September visit over here was loads of fun too, though it boasted no particular occasion; my birthday was spent being doted upon and generally having loads of fun; and Christmas was full of festivity, even going up to London to meet his relatives was glorious and I was nervous beforehand. Where ever we end up going, what ever we do, he always brings a good time with him.

All this seems like a great relationship, but the real stuff comes when we're not doing anything in particular. It's a sad thing when a relationship is built on adventure, because by its very nature, adventure is transient. If that's all you have then it's not going to make those years, let alone decades. But I'm obviously not saying that your relationship should have no adventure, of course it should, you just need to be able to do the other stuff too. At the end of a long day you should be able to sit and do nothing, watch a dvd, prepare a meal, and just enjoy each other without hassle, and Mark and I seem to fall into that effortlessly. Most of the time I'd even say that we have that alone, not many adventures come up when you live this far apart, but we spend a huge portion of our days together despite that.

Each day we come home longing for time together, to talk, play computer games together (at the moment it's Worms Reloaded) and just generally chill out. I know that hard times will come, but when you find being together like this so effortless and natural, the hard times seem like they'll be little challenge.

Perhaps it helps that we have shared goal, a light at the end of the tunnel if you will. Come our one year anniversary it won't be that far as Malta, or even the other "long distance" relationships I've had.

I guess it also probably helps that when we entered into this relationship we knew that it'd be a year at least until we'd be living anywhere near each other for any length of time. But as the months add up, I'm stunned to see how fast the days have flown by. A year isn't that long, but when we started out it seemed like a mountain of time.

The world tells me it shouldn't... but it works.