It sucks.

The ugly truth of any long-distance relationship is, it sucks. Much as your young heart may try to romanticize all the effort and the sacrifice involved, at the end of the day you’re still miserable. Eventually, you start to feel a bit like the widow who lives out her days celibate, still in love with her dead husband.

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Elizabeth and I poured every meager cent we earned into long-distance phone calls and plane fares, but, more often then not, I found myself romantically committed to a voice on a telephone (true, that voice belonged to a girl with an adorable smile and huge, luscious tits, but knowing that only added to my frustration).

With all our combined income, we were still only able to afford to see each other for one weekend each month. You’d think these occasional visits would be filled with non-stop passion and amorous euphoria, but that’s never how they turned out. Sure, there was “the good stuff”—the sex, the cuddling, pillow talk, romantic adventure—but each weekend tryst was always underscored by a certain degree of disappointment; of never being quite as perfect as what we’d built up in our minds over the preceding weeks.

And then there were the fights. Like clockwork, each of these supposed-to-be-blissful cross-country weekend visits inevitably included one huge, awful argument between Elizabeth and I, carried out with the same pent-up passion as our lovemaking.

I guess relationships need a certain degree of conflict to survive, just as they need tenderness and affection. It’s an essential part of the recipe. But, while normal couples got the privilege of balancing these emotional necessities with a more mild day-to-day commitment, our long-distance relationship meant we had to pack everything into a tiny, potent capsule; more like a relationship suppository, taken once a month.

Some side effects may include: Depression, jealousy, confusion, loneliness, doubt, and frequent masturbation.

It also didn’t help that there were so many goddamn gorgeous girls running around my coed dorm in their pajamas, their perky, 19-year-old breasts bouncing braless beneath those too-tight tee shirts.