To sympathise with someone whose long-distance (initiated-online) relationship has just ended, it takes someone who has experienced the same thing.
I've seen the reaction of others for myself - trying their hardest but failing to understand how losing someone who lives an ocean away is more painful than splitting with a partner who lives on the next street.
It is more painful because people in long-distance relationships eventually exhaust themselves in the name of the beloved. Conventionally, it is sufficient to say: this is what I am, and I hope it's acceptable to you. If not, we can cut our losses without too much trauma.
When the beloved is thousands of miles away, however, everything is acceptable and everything is permissible. I always warned Bluefish not to expect a god, but just a man. Not an infallible, but someone who has to go to work, and has suffered with depression, and struggles to complete basic tasks. Without such frequent warnings, I feared that Bluefish's most cherished wishes would come to be projected upon me, and of course I should fail to live up to them.
The difference is, then: when in a conventional relationship, it is normal to demonstrate your best qualities in order to become more desirable. When in a long-distance relationship, these qualities have to be suppressed, and their suppression leads to exhaustion due to the mental exertion required to keep them in check.
The energies which sustain the two types of relationship differ, too. Conventionally, we exist in the moment, like Buddhists. I feel love, and so I express it. I feel sadness, until your eyes solve the misery. You can't sleep until my voice delivers rest. We exist, here and now, and nothing is more important than the present.
Long-distance, however, only the future is of any consequence. Just three more months, darling. What I live for is the moment we are brought together; you exiled from your hot, dusty land and flung into this cold, impersonal one. The present is insignificant, because you are not physically in my present, with your appearance of an angel, and so I turn my back on the present, and hibernate until such time as you arrive. Only another month now. Keep holding on for me, for us, against the odds.
Yes, only someone who's experienced those dynamics can truly sympathise when someone else's long-distance relationship ends. It's the difference between an uncertain future and no future at all; the difference between a subliminal flicker of beauty across the eyeball and no beauty at all.
I know the sickness, and the misery, and the lack of closure, and the sense that it's all been for nothing anyway. Like everything, though - even love itself - I know those feelings don't last forever, and once you've begun to make a recovery, then you can hoard the memories and sentiments that are inviolable, and speak to you of a truth which no-one else can share.
An unbreakable truth? Surely, then, there is nowhere else to go, and you might as well give up on men - both local and online - forever, because the most pious symbols of love have already been written and arranged? Not so.
Human beings are creatures of the present. Ask them for their best 100 songs or books of all time, and close to the top you'll inevitably find music and literature released within the last few months, because the zeitgeist is so overwhelming. This bias towards the very recent is understandable, but if it can be overcome, then the future is not so bleak, and we can face it with the lessons of the past - most of them positive - as ballast for the unknown, exciting future.
