In my second relationship, I was head over heels for my adult boyfriend who lived in America and I was determined to make the dreaded “long distance relationship” work. Oh how wrong I was, and how nice it was at the start.
At the time I had recently broken up with my first boyfriend Kai, in a puff of playground drama. I was also starting to get interested in my long time friend David who was also American (but we met in Cambodia of all places.) and so really didn’t give much thought to this guy called Dylan who liked to play the guitar.
One thing lead to another and soon we were messaging each other every night on msn. Anyone remember msn? Every cool kid was using it. Dylan wasn’t a kid though. He told me he was 30 and a lawyer working on Wall Street. I couldn’t care less because at that moment I was obsessed with neurobiology, David’s major. Ok, so you’re going to ask what a 30 year old man is doing talking to a 18 year old girl he met on the internet, right? Well I have quite a thing for the right sort of older man.
Dylan became very important to me. I was always more mature than my friends in school, and the fact he was so far away meant I could tell him everything. In the same way he would tell me about his work and days when he was stressed. I don’t know when it started to happen but our innocent conversations started to turn in slight flirting. Then we started exchanging pictures. Nothing rude mind you! Just head shots mostly.
I also started getting into media, joining a media group in my town and doing video blogs. We would video message and I would practice my “radio” voice to him. We eventually started ending out conversations with kisses and hugs. I started looking forward to my evenings when we would be able to talk together. I don’t even remember when I stopped dreaming of my friend David the neurologist.
And yet there were a ton of red flags waving. Sirens blaring out how stupid this all was.
1) He’s probably not who he says he is (come on, a successful lawyer??)
2) I’m not exactly who I said I was (the age thing)
3) He lived in America. What possible future could there have been?
But one thing lead to another and that summer I found myself waiting in the arrivals part of JFK airport an hour and a half after landing, thinking I’ve come all the way to America and he’s not even real. I was seriously upset.
Then, there he is. He’s wearing a pink shirt. Oh God. Why do guys always wear pink to impress? He’s got a matching pink tie and he’s wearing glasses which is weird because he never mentioned needing glasses. Still, pretty yummy.
We share this awkward hug and a kiss on the cheek and make our way to Brooklyn where he lives in this weird silence, punctuated only by several attempts at small talk. I’m wearing rainbow knee highs and look cute and youthful. This was a terrible mistake. But then when we finally made it back to his place, he kissed me properly for the first time and… well you guys know what happens to me when a guy kisses me properly!