Sub in the Valley, and I have stopped pretending the drive is nothing
Posted as the_long_merge
- Looking for
- someone on this side of the hill, or someone honest about that
- Experience
- Nine years, two dynamics, one of them ended in traffic.
- Around
- the Valley, Los Angeles
I added it up once, which was a mistake. Over five months I spent something close to sixty hours in a car driving to see someone on the far side of the county, and maybe eleven hours actually in a room with her. When I say the distance ended it, I mean the arithmetic did.
Forty one, the Valley, submissive, nine years in. I work in post production sound, which is long days in a dark room and a schedule I do not control until about four days out.
So I am doing the unromantic thing and leading with geography. I would rather have somebody twenty minutes from me who I see every week than someone remarkable I see twice a month with a ninety minute crawl on either end of it. That is not a comment on anyone's worth. It is a comment on the freeway at six o'clock and what it does to a person.
What I want inside that: something ongoing, with standing rules, a check in that happens whether or not we can meet, and correction that is spoken rather than physical. I am good at consistency. I am poor at intensity that arrives in bursts and then vanishes.
Please do not write to me saying the distance is nothing. Three people have said that to me and all three were quietly furious about it by week six, and I would rather have the conversation now, badly, than have it later in a parking lot at eleven at night.