I’m just about to turn 41 and I had several experiences with long-distance relationships before I got married. Heck, I got hitched before online dating became a common thing; I totally missed the boat on that. I feel like online dating would’ve made my life much easier because I’m an introvert who sucked at talking face-to-face with anyone I had a crush on. But I could chat online all night and seduce practically anyone with my charm and wits. I had serious game as long as I was behind a computer screen, haha! And I was pretty handsome in my youth, so I never disappointed when people met me in person.

In 2001, I was 17 and long-distance dating my best friend’s 3rd-cousin. She lived about 3 states away. We got to know each other through AOL Instant Messenger after my friend asked me to chat with her one night. We’d be chatting all night, keeping each other company with only typed words. I only met her twice in person. The second time, she decided that the long distance relationship was too hard to maintain. She was about to graduate and go off to college anyway. I still had another year of high school before I was free.

A few years later, when I was 20, I had joined the US Air Force and was stationed in Japan for my first assignment. I found myself dating a local Filipino girl. She was 27, and the most advanced tech she owned was a flip phone. Planning dates was awful because I didn’t even own a mobile phone, so I had to hang out near my landline phone at home and wait for her to call when she was ready for me to pick her up. She would soak in the tub for 3+ hours each night before our dates, so I spent most of my evenings just sitting at home, waiting for her call. She didn’t own a car, so I had to go pick her up.

In 2005, I got deployed to Africa for 4 months. I basically told my girlfriend that I would be unreachable while I was there, but if the opportunity arose, I’d try to contact her. I wrote her a few letters while I was gone, and even sent a few brief emails to her phone. She had some email service that would forward messages to her flip phone, but only if it was less than 20 characters. She didn’t own a computer. I got to call her only once, but we were limited to a 5-minute call, and someone was always listening to the conversation, to make sure I didn’t discuss classified information.

I came home from Africa and my girlfriend was so excited to see me again, she planned to spend the night at my place. But after a very passionate “reunion” that night, she suddenly got very quiet. She wouldn’t look at me and refused to talk. After coaxing her for a bit, she finally opened up and accused me of cheating on her while I was gone! When I asked where she got that idea, she said the sex was so good, I must have been practicing with other girls! I tried to explain that it was just the pent up emotions from being abstinent for so long, but she wouldn’t hear it. She had thoroughly convinced herself and she dumped me that night.

I went home on vacation to visit family shortly after that and wound up meeting the girl who would eventually become my wife. She was the college roommate of an ex-girlfriend of mine whom I was still close friends with. My soon-to-be wife and I spent a few days of my vacation hanging out, then I went back to Japan and we stayed in touch over AOL Instant Messenger. We chatted almost every day and got to know each other really well.

When I got sent to Oklahoma for my next assignment, less than a year later, I was only a few states away from my eventual wife, and she asked if I would be willing to try a long-distance relationship with her. I had finally received my first-ever mobile phone (a flip-phone) and I made an effort to call her at least once a week. Outside of that, we stayed in touch via email or through AOL Instant Messenger. About once a year, when I had saved up some vacation days, I would drive the 7+ hours out to her home and I would spend a week or two staying with her before returning to my military base.

A year later, she graduated college and wanted to move in with me, but I got deployed to Iraq a week before she was supposed to move in. So I mailed her a house key and told her to make herself comfortable and I would be back in 4 months. While I was deployed, we chatted almost daily through Gchat, Google’s attempt at an instant messenger program embedded in Gmail.

I eventually came home and we lived together for about 9 months before I got a new assignment to South Korea. I was going to be stationed there for 1 year before being reassigned to Germany. I couldn’t bring my girlfriend along, so she went back to her home state for the year. I promised we’d meet up in Germany a year later.

A half year later, I went home on vacation and proposed to my then-girlfriend. She said yes, but also dropped a bombshell: she didn’t know how to keep a steady job if she was just going to be following me around the world, moving every few years at the whim of the military. So she asked if I was okay with her joining the military as well. She had learned a lot about military life and how excellent the benefits and pay were, and she wanted to try it for herself.

So I took her to a military recruiter, got her signed up, then I went back to South Korea for the second half of my year-long assignment.

But I told her, if she joined as a single woman, she would get a random assignment somewhere in the world and I might never see her again. So I suggested that we just get the legal paperwork for marriage out of the way so she’s legally tied to me, then we can plan a big wedding some other time when we’re living closer to home. If we’re legally married, then the military would keep us assigned together.

So we looked into the legal process for her home state and found out I didn’t have to be physically present to get married, and we were allowed to sign the marriage license in advance of the ceremony. So she mailed a marriage license to me, I signed it with a legal notary as witness, then I mailed it back to her and she signed it as well.

Then she asked a friend of hers who was an ordained minister to perform a brief ceremony to legally wed us. My wife invited her military recruiter as a witness and they performed the wedding ceremony from her bedroom. I joined the ceremony over Skype, from my dormitory room in South Korea.

During that time, I only lost connection once. Webcams were not very reliable in those days (around 2009), so it was a miracle I only dropped the call once during the ceremony.

After the ceremony, her recruiter borrowed the wedding license to update her status as married before she officially joined the US military. 5 days later, my wife left for military basic training and it was almost a half a year later that I got to see her again. I couldn’t reach her while she was in training. I got assigned to Germany and my wife followed me there about 3 months later.

And that was pretty much the end of my struggles with old-fashioned long-distance dating. In 2009, I got my first-ever smartphone while in Germany (an iPhone 3S) and staying in touch with people became a lot easier from that point on.

Oh yeah, and I had the worst time staying in touch with my family while I was in the military. My mother would always mail me calling cards (back when long-distance phone calls were expensive as hell). She expected ME to reach out to HER, though. I gave her my email address, but she almost never emailed me. She thought it was MY responsibility as her son to call her.

Suffice to say, I didn’t have much contact with my family in the 20 years I spent in the military. Long-distance phone calls were expensive and difficult to figure out when I was stationed outside the US, and I was always a bad conversationalist on the phone. If I couldn’t see who I was talking to, my brain would wander and I’d lose track of the conversation. I learned at 37 years old that I have a bad case of ADHD, which explained my struggles with staying in touch with people who weren’t physically nearby.

My wife and I moved in with my dad when I retired from the military a few years ago, but my mother had divorced him and moved across the country by then, so I still struggle to stay in touch with her. I’m trying to text her more often, but she’s extremely old-fashioned and expects me to call her instead of messaging. She’s 100% a boomer (born in the '40s) and is completely tech-illiterate. It’s very frustrating. She doesn’t really believe in ADHD and thinks it’s just an excuse to be lazy, so she regularly plays the victim when I don’t contact her enough. Which just makes me dread calling her.

So I guess I’m still struggling to communicate in an old-fashioned way with my mother, even to this day. But I’m pretty good at staying in touch with other friends and family via more modern communications.