Forging a solid connection via the ether
Tools of business, tools of love
Does this courtship sound familiar to you?
"We used Instant Messenger a lot. But sometimes you just want to get away from your computer, so then we'd text. But fighting while you text is so tedious you may as well just get back on IM."
This description is from Sarah Proulx, who maintained a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend for two years before they moved in together in New Hampshire.
Their relationship reflects one of the big changes that millennials have brought to dating: Long-distance relationships are becoming more mainstream as young people increasingly rejigger what it means to step out into adult life. (Millennials are the generation born between the late 1970s to early '90s.)
The trend starts before college, when young people become tied to technology, communicating with people all over the world, and making friends with people they've never met .
Then college comes, and travel. Junior year abroad used to be the time to travel. But now many students travel during summer for internships.
After that, traveling for a job seems normal.
And millennials are experimenters. They use their 20s to try out a bunch of different jobs and cities. It used to be you could tell where people lived by their area codes. Now cellphone area codes only tell you where they started.
Additionally, millennials are acutely aware of problems Generation X encountered from putting off having children. Baby-boomer mothers told Gen-X daughters: " Focus on your career. You can have kids later."
Now we have a whole industry of women penning their ordeals of trying to get pregnant. And it's pretty clear that IVF is not reliable enough to plan on waiting till age 40 to have kids.
So the typical Gen Y graduate plans on marrying around age 30. Which means that while he or she is gallivanting from job to job and city to city, there is also a parallel hunt for a stable partner.
Enter the long-distance romance.
When it comes to meshing two careers and one relationship across state lines, there are some best practices to follow:
1. Have a plan for being together eventually, but be flexible.
Ben Morris, founder of Boston Pedicab, spent a semester of school in San Diego, where he met his girlfriend, Carolyn Soohoo. Two months after meeting her, he came back to Northeastern to finish college. They agreed to maintain a long-distance relationship while Morris finished school and then he'd move to San Diego.
Knowing they had a plan to be together made them committed to long daily phone calls. "It's not like you can kill an hour together watching TV," says Soohoo. "In order to be together we had to be talking."
But before he got to San Diego, he founded his business and Soohoo came to Boston instead. It was a big move for Soohoo, but she points out that learning to live together was not that hard because she and Morris knew each other very well. "Because of the distance, we were forced to talk about things that would come up a lot later in other relationships."
2. Get comfortable with deep conversation that flows electronically. The ubiquitous BlackBerrry is evidence that technology has allowed people to blur the lines between work life and personal life. And the better you can use technology, the more you can blur the lines. For example, Twitter -- technology to update people about what you're doing all the time -- makes IM look like low-maintenance communication. And if you're good with a wiki, collaboration with people you can't see doesn't seem that hard.
Much of the technology that makes the workplace telecommuter-friendly to young people makes a telecommuting relationship possible as well. And, perhaps the most surprising thing is that these relationships seem to work .
Proulx says that a lot of communication with her partner took place within the 160-character limit of text messages. "When you only see the person once a month, you figure out how to write a whole novel's worth of information in 160 characters."
3. Be honest with yourself about the future. Elina Furman is the author of the new book "Kiss and Run: The Single, Picky, and Indecisive Girl's Guide to Overcoming Her Fear of Commitment." Not surprisingly, she has experience with long-distance relationships.
Hers lasted five years, but never really went anywhere. "I thought it was the best thing in the world. But I was much less committed than I realized. The long distance allowed me to gloss over issues and keep a safe distance without ever having to commit."
Not that all dead-end relationships are bad. Furman says that having a boyfriend who was generally out of the picture probably helped her career: "I had the security of the relationship without the responsibilities of a relationship, and that freed me up to concentrate on my career."
But as she got closer to 30, she got more interested in the idea of settling down. Hindsight prompts her to recommend that you ask yourself: "Are you making a plan for living in the same zip code, or are you just coasting?"
Either is fine, but the key to success -- in both the long-distance relationship as well as the careers it accommodates -- is to know what you are aiming for so that you can ask yourself if you're getting it.
Penelope Trunk writes the Brazen Careerist blog at blog.penelopetrunk.com 