College wouldn't be college without long distance relationships - LDRs, if you will. You meet, you spend all of your time together and you fall head over heels. Then one of you graduates, moves away for the summer or goes to Peru to find themselves. But it's OK! We can make it work! It's only on a different continent after all. A few tearful goodbyes and oaths of loyalty later and you find yourself in an LDR. It's a sticky situation, driven entirely by a promise of some future potential so great that you're willing to spend months on end waiting, hoping and finding new ways to say "I love you" through emoticons.
For most girls, LDRs require some adjustment. At first, the complete lack of physical intimacy makes even the most chaste among us linger a little too long by the soccer fields at practice time. Then, like Berber tribesmen roaming the Sahara, surviving on goat intestines when meat is scarce, we adapt. We replace sex with yoga, pottery painting or a number of other things we could never convince our men to do.
For every drawback to LDRs, there's an equal and opposite advantage. Sure, if your boyfriend is gone, there's no one to fix your computer when it's making that humming noise or to assemble your new IKEA nightstand. But on the plus side, you no longer have to get dressed up to go out, or to go anywhere for that matter. And although you may no longer get to go out on dates, you do get to sit at home and watch "Sex and the City" for hours on end without being judged. Carrie Bradshaw, sweatpants and Ben and Jerry's: the three hallmarks of an LDR girl.
Communication is by far the hardest aspect of LDRs, mostly due to the horrible inadequacies of Skype, the Internet calling service. Don't be fooled by it's hip, Euro-trendy name and its cheeky slogan - "Skype: The whole world can talk for free!" Correction: By "whole world," they mean everyone but you and your boyfriend. And by "free," they mean that the cost is your sweat, tears and last shreds of sanity.
The likelihood that you will actually be able to concurrently see each other, hear each other and not have the entire thing sound like a garbled message from outer space is almost zero, as Skype has the temperament of a manic-depressive pregnant woman on steroids. My boyfriend and I have thus far only managed to have one successful Skype call with video, and this only after we both installed the older beta video version, set and reset the video and audio settings, started and restarted our computers, closed any other programs and hung up and called each other back 487 times. At least 80 percent of our conversation time is devoted to getting Skype to work, or trying to figure out why Skype is no longer working when it was just working or asking each other why in God's name you would tell me to restart it because that's obviously the first thing I thought of.
When you do get at least the voice part working, there's a significant delay, giving you a good 30 seconds between when you tell a joke and when you find out whether or not it was funny. Furthermore, an eerie robotic effect distorts the ends of half of the sentences, making most conversations sound like this:
"So, I miss you and I loeurghngdrangbrrg."
"What?"
"I just wanted to say that I lovrrnmmgrarrnb."
"What?"
"Forget it, let's just switch to Gchat."
Then, of course, there's the one time in a million when the technology gods relent. There are no error messages, both your video screens light up, you hear each other and see each other smile and you remember why it's worth it. Now, if you could only get it to do the same thing the next time.
Olga Khazan in a senior in the School of Public Affairs and a social commentary columnist for The Eagle.
