Long Relationships

Jenera wrote something last week on her blog that I felt the need to write about. She said:

“In my couple years of blogging I have managed to meet some great people. I have made friends and though I have not met any of them in person, I feel close enough to them to call them friends.

Some make fun of those of us who have online friends. I think they are jealous. One friend is states away and one is countries away. Yet I know that if I ever had the opportunity to meet up with them in real life, it’d be like we were friends forever.”

People who haven’t made friends online just plain don’t understand the depth of connection you can have with someone who isn’t right there next to you. But, as I mention to Jenera, as someone who has social anxiety, online connections have been wonderful to me.

Many people argue that we’re only becoming friends with words on a screen, but just like we are more than our bodies, the words are more than words. The words convey meanings. Put together in certain ways, words mean certain things. But beyond that, the words also carry feelings.

That’s called empathy.

Have you ever read an email and thought, “I wonder what’s wrong with him/her? S/he sounds sad.” If words were just words, you wouldn’t possibly be able to derive that sort of conclusion unless the person had written “I am sad” or something similar.

I would be lost without my online friends, and I wouldn’t be here today if not for my husband (who I instantly connected to ‘just’ through words online). In fact, the people I know online have supported me ten times more than the friends I had growing up.

So if anyone ever tries to tell you that you can’t have that kind of connection online? You can tell them that you know at least one very happily married couple who met online.

I have invited Mr. Steven Verrier here today as part of his virtual book tour with Tough Love, Tender Heart to talk about his book as well as about life in an international marriage. I hope you’ll join me in welcoming him to Long Relationships.

During the course of our usually happy twenty-two-year international marriage, my Japanese wife, Motoko, and I have had to play the immigration game several times. I’ve lived and worked in Japan more than once, and during much of our marriage my wife has lived with me in the United States and Canada.

Fortunately, we’ve never had much difficulty getting our immigration applications approved, and the process has never taken us more than a few months. Being able to apply as a citizen of Japan, Canada, or the United States certainly works to one’s advantage. There are much longer waiting periods for people from many other countries when it comes to applying to live with a spouse in the US or various other more-developed countries.

Some applicants from less-developed or “more-suspicious” nations have to wait for years—with their best efforts and intentions sometimes coming to naught—and sometimes the long separation and wait can effectively put an end to a relationship. Immigration officials do have legitimate concerns when it comes to screening applicants, but there are times it’s hard not to characterize delays and decisions as unjust.

In my novel, TOUGH LOVE, TENDER HEART, American Don Fisher and Colombian Ana Velasquez are victims of a US immigration bureaucracy gone awry. The couple meet in Venezuela and, following a bumpy start to their relationship, plan to marry and live together in the United States—that is, until they learn US Immigration, in the aftermath of 9/11, has entirely different ideas.

TOUGH LOVE, TENDER HEART is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and other sources. For more information about TOUGH LOVE, TENDER HEART or about Steven Verrier, visit stevenverrier.com, and drop the author a line telling him what you think about the book!

I have invited Mr. Steven Verrier here today as part of his virtual book tour with Tough Love, Tender Heart to talk about his book as well as about life in an international marriage. I hope you’ll join me in welcoming him to Long Relationships.

My Japanese wife and I live in a two-story house in a typical, often dull, subdivision on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas. When we met twenty-two years ago I was living in a tiny apartment without central heating in her northern Japanese hometown of Niigata. Winters there were deathly, and I could often see my breath hanging in the air as I got dressed in the morning. And I wasn’t much of a housekeeper. Dishes were normally piled high in the sink, and trash was usually waiting to be carried outside.

That’s where my future wife stepped in. Few North Americans were living in her part of Japan in the mid-eighties, and I was one of the first she had occasion to meet. Things went smoothly when we started dating, but you can imagine what went through her mind the first time she stepped into my apartment. She must have thought Americans were the slovenliest people walking the earth. She kept on dating me, but I’m not certain she didn’t do so out of mercy. In any case she and her mother helped with my laundry, and Motoko, my future wife, tried to make sure I was dressed and fed properly. She seemed determined to do her best to whip me into husband material.

We married in 1987, and for the most part Motoko has remained patient with me despite discovering over the years that Americans aren’t quite the slobs she might have thought after first visiting that apartment of mine. Cultural matters have never played negatively into our relationship, as she’s always been as comfortable surrounded by Americans as I was while living among Japanese. We’ve raised our children to be fluently bilingual and bicultural, and you can read about our experiences in RAISING A CHILD TO BE BILINGUAL AND BICULTURAL (see http://hiraganatimes.youbuy.jp).

Like my wife and me, the main characters in my novel, TOUGH LOVE, TENDER HEART, face challenges other than cultural ones in trying to establish a viable, enduring international relationship. My next post will address a specific challenge imposed on American Don Fisher and Colombian Ana Velasquez in TOUGH LOVE, TENDER HEART.

TOUGH LOVE, TENDER HEART is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and other sources. For more information about TOUGH LOVE, TENDER HEART or about Steven Verrier, visit stevenverrier.com, and drop the author a line telling him what you think about the book!

Today I received my first ‘year in summary’ Christmas letter.

You know the type. “Oh, my gosh. Has another year really gone by so fast? Apparently it has. Let me tell you all the things I’ve been doing.”

As much as I would like to make fun of the YIS letter, insult it a bit, maybe threaten it with a pie in the face, I have to admit I don’t mind them too much.

The letter that came today came all the way from a dear friend in Canada whom I haven’t had contact with since not long after Christmas 2007. It’s great to read about how she’s getting on, what’s new in her life, etc, because we only have postal mail contact and she lives on the other side of the world.

However, there are those letters that never fail to piss me off. I bet you know them too.

There is the snooty variety. Just picture me pointing my nose up in the air and speaking in a disdainful tone. “Well, now we had to sell off the third car in late February, we’re really proud of meeting the credit crunch face on.” Right.

There is the pointless drivel variety. “We got a puppy and we named him Max. He’s a XXXX breed crossed with a XXXX breed but we really think he looks like he has a bit of XXXX breed in him even though his… And then in February…”

There is also one of my personal favourites, TMI addict variety. I won’t go into the specifics of that one, but they usually involve kids, body functions and ‘yay!’ learning new things.

Even with all the horrible varieties, I’m still halfway temped to type up my own ‘Days of Our Lives 2008’ just because it’s easy to type up one thing and print off multiple copies. I’m not actually sending out cards this Christmas, but still.

Do you do the ‘YIS’ typed Christmas letter?

I have a dear friend who lives in Canada and has been friends with me and my husband since the beginning of our relationship. She’s been there with us through the highs and lows of our relationship as well as our (the three of us) relationships with other people. It’s no big surprise she’s special to me and Mr. JM.

But, living in Canada and with us living in Australia, it’s not always easy to catch up. With time zone differences, work and social commitments, etc, it’s not always easy to talk to each other.

But it’s always worth it.

Though I’ve been back for nearly a week, today is the first day we finally got to catch up about what’s been going on in our lives. I don’t have a lot of close female friends here, so having someone to gasbag with about this and that is always nice. It’s always especially nice to talk to Hawke because of the shared history.

I can talk to her about anything and she never gets sick of anything. I go on tangents about sex, men, children, relationships and whatever else, and she’s always right there with me about it all.

She’s an awesome person and I love knowing that she’s always right there for me online, even though she can’t be right there for me in person. (Someday I’ll get her on a plane over here…)

Do you have a bestie? Take time on your blog to talk about your friend(s) and leave a link in the comments here.

Today we have a special guest post from my friend Jenera. She’ll be writing for Long Relationships this week.

Every so often you’ll see a blog post, an article, or something on TV about how no one writes letters anymore. It is all email, text messaging, chatting, and other forms of technological communication. It’s true, I’d much rather email a person than talk to them.

I remember having pen pals while in high school that I exchanged hundreds of letters with. We had to moved to Oregon when I was in 9th grade and I kept in touch with several friends from back in San Diego via written letter for quite awhile.

The most memorable letter exchange for me was with my husband though. In the beginning we met online, exchanged emails, then moved to phone calls. The night I was supposed to meet up with him he was arrested and that ended our budding relationship. Or so I thought.

It’s quite a long story about him being arrested, going (back) to prison, and how I ended up writing letters to him. But for a few months, the almost daily letters back and forth were our only communication.

After the first “What the hell?!” type letters of trying to figure out the whole situation, there were nice, sweet, romantic letters that was the basis of our courtship. Thrown in were a few indignant (on my part), rude (again, my part) letters due to some things still going on in his life. But also some heart sharing, eye opening, soul baring letters that laid everything out on the table. Trust me, when a guy in sitting in prison, he has a lot of time.

My intention was to almost scare him off, to let him see how crazy I was, how hurt I had been, and how much I demanded of a person who wanted to be in my life. His intention was to get to know me, show me he cared in spite of never meeting me.

Every day I rushed home at lunch to check the mail for a letter from him. I think I would get about 3-5 letters a week. I still have them all tucked into the journal I was using at that time. It felt so old fashioned to start out a relationship this way, even if I had no idea it would end the way it did.

The letters ended shortly after he was released from prison a few short months later only to be replaced by daily phone calls. We continued our courtship this way until a few more months later he came to see me.

The rest they say is history.

My point is that I think the letters that flew back and forth are a reason that we grew together the way we did. There is something about a letter that is mailed hundreds of miles away that allows you to open your soul. Maybe because you don’t have to be in front of that person while pouring your heart out. Maybe because you have time to react and respond rationally. Maybe it takes us back to a time when relationships were founded on the old ways of courtship.

I learned a lot about myself and about my husband during those months that we shared letters together. I will always treasure those letters where my love first grew for him. I know he still has all my letters, even the mean ones, and I know he’ll save them for a long time. Those letters are a huge part of our history together and what makes us the couple that we are today.

Share a letter with your special someone, even a small note, and you’ll see what it does to your heart.

Yesterday I had a ‘need to get out of the house’ day which involved me wandering around various parts of town and doing a lot of window shopping/pointless meandering. At a certain part of town, there is a craft shop that I always see the sign for and never go in – despite being a bit of a crafty person.

I decided it was long past time I go in there and I did so.

It turns out that the owner of the shop likes to talk. A lot. After introducing myself and him picking me out as an American – Aussies treat ‘name that accent’ like a game, almost – he asked me what brought me over to this fine continent. I told him my Aussie bloke and he immediately said, “You met on the internet, didn’t you?”

Now this guy was a ‘good ol’ Aussie bloke’ with a few years on him. The fact that he jumped right to an internet meet-up is something I take as a sign of the times.

Though it is still regarded with a bit of resistance from a lot of areas, online romances are becoming a lot more popular. And it’s no wonder why. With more people looking to ‘expand their possibilities’, the internet is the natural place to look.

Now, I’ve written about online romance before, but I couldn’t help but touch on it again after this guy’s reaction. Now, I asked you before about your personal experiences with online romance. Today I’d like to throw out a bit broader spectrum.

How many people do you know have had romances online? Of those, how many are currently in an online romance? How many have met the other person? How many have/are in an international romance? What countries?

Tell me your online romance stories.

My husband and I are both creative writers and both write a combination of poetry and novels. (I lean towards novels and he leans towards poetry.) We both joined an online forum for creative writing and noticed each other but didn’t talk much.

One night, we were both online and knew someone else from the site who introduced us to each other (via instant messenger). I guess you could say it was love at first chat session because we talked one way or another for almost every day for a year after we met.

I kept the relationship rather quiet because I didn’t have a supportive family when it came to internet relationships. My parents didn’t (and probably still don’t) know how to turn on a computer, much less use the internet. Because of that, they bought into every internet horror story they ever heard on the news despite the fact I a.) wasn’t twelve years old and b.) wasn’t meeting random people from MySpace in bars.

Eventually my brother calmed her down and explained to her that the internet was how a lot of people met and, taking the right precautions, it could be perfectly safe. And he’s right. More and more people are meeting online and starting relationships from there.

So I thought I would put up a poll (because I love polls even more than lists) to find out what the readers here have done and feel when it comes to online relationships. Feel free to add on your story and/or thoughts in the comments section!

PS. Tomorrow is Reader Appreciation Day! Be sure to stop by again and see what you have to do to get your chance to win not one, but TWO awesome prizes!

As Valentines Day draws closer, I can’t help but think of the couples who must spend the lovely day apart. Some are separated by a few hours and some are separated by whole countries.

Some get separated for a few days and some for a few months.
Be it the Army or work, there are a lot of things that can mean time away from each other for couples.

Time separated can be a breath of fresh air sometimes, but separations that happen often and/or for long lengths of time can put a lot of stress on a couple.

Last year my husband and I put in my spousal visa and we didn’t know if I would be forced to leave the country while the application was being processed (due to timing) or if I would be able to stay while things were being sorted out.

The prospect of being separated for an unknown amount of time scared me so much and sent me into tears many nights.

Thankfully, I got to stay in the country and everything worked out. Unfortunately, things don’t work so well for other couples.

Always remember that there are things you can do to stay close to your partner even when s/he is not physically with you:

1. Email!
2. Postal letters
3. Phone calls (and phone sex)
4. If the above things aren’t possible, for every day your loved one is away, write a love letter. That way, when s/he comes home, s/he has a whole pile of love letters to read.