The ship is due to reach port in two weeks’ time. A fortnight into the voyage from Brazil back to Canada, Walter knows he is just over the halfway point until he gets to set foot on land again. And waiting for him at the port will be a letter from her. A snippet of her life that he has missed this past month. He will read and savour every word. Two weeks to go…
It has been three months since Susan last saw Walter. Being with somebody who works in the Merchant Navy is not for the faint of heart. She goes about her days filling them with friends and family and work, but in the quieter moments she drifts across the sea to where he is. She has started going to bed half an hour earlier each night so that she can write the intimacies of her day down in a letter to meet him once he gets back to Canada.
“There is a certain ache that occurs from not being able to share your life with the person you want to which transcends any form of communication”
Flash forward 33 years. It is a bright Sunday morning, the kind that makes the lawn look a nostalgic shade of green after a long winter and warms the house from the outside. I am sitting in a living room in Dalbeattie, South-West Scotland, Susan and Walter occupying the seats opposite and adjacent to me. For over 20 years of their relationship Walter has worked away for months at a time. They laugh as they recall the fact that when they had just started dating, Walter had to go away for six months on a ship going from Canada to Brazil. Susan admitted that this was not for the faint of heart, yet her brother had been in the merchant navy: “I knew what I was signing up for” she admits.
Today, slow communication is unfathomable. We have little understanding of everyday life without the resource of instant contact with loved ones. When the words ‘long-distance’ are uttered, a black cloud seems to suddenly loom over a relationship. I am often met with questions of: “how do you cope?”, or statements of “Oh I could never do that!”.
Despite the fact that an independent survey revealed that 65% of couples felt their relationship was made stronger by long-distance, Google deep dives are full of the doom and gloom, the pitfalls and the signs it’s not going to work. With the mobile phone, shouldn’t it now be easier than ever?
I have been with my boyfriend, Ben, for four years now, the latter two years we have been long-distance. Because of social media and mobile phones, we can be in contact all hours of the day. He phones me in the morning on his way to work, and on his way home. We facetime before bed, and can text to share pictures and anecdotes throughout our day. If I have a question, an idea, or a plan, I get an answer within a few minutes from him. We are still ingrained into each other’s daily lives.
Making the most of time spent together
Susan had to wait for her monthly phone call, not knowing when it would come. She recounts the time that he phoned her while she was at work, remarkably on a shift that her boss wasn’t there: “We spoke for over an hour! But my manager understood that this would be the only hour we got for the month.”
Out of interest, I added up all the amount of time I spent on the phone to Ben (bearing in mind that we see each other most weekends) over the last month. The total came to over 24 hours. A 2,300% increase one hour a month. I haven’t grown up with the patience of waiting to hear from people. But has this brought its own issues? Do we lack the longing that comes from not being able to speak to each other? Or even the ability to wait to hear from each other? If I don’t hear from Ben, my mind immediately jumps to worst-case scenarios – is he lying in a ditch, or has he suddenly decided he hates me and wants to break up?
I was looking through some Edwardian post cards my Auntie shared with me and found one written from between sisters stating:
Reading an ‘I’m still alive’ postcard almost 100 years after it was written makes me nostalgic for a time that I never lived through. Where communication was savoured, and important enough to preserve.
Susan and Walter’s relationship, while often separated by the ocean was built on common ground. However, some relationships cross borders and cultures. When I first met Freddie Stevens, I found it astonishing to hear this very typically English man break out into fluent German, with an Liverpudlian twang. He and his wife Claudia live in Munich, Germany and have been married for 37 years. The met in London when Claudia was doing a term abroad and they ended up working on the same floor at Siemens, a German technology company.
They joke about the stolen glances they shared at work. But Claudia was heading home to Germany soon – how would it ever work? Before going back, she spent five months in Paris. They arranged for a weekly phone call which was very expensive at the time but also wrote letters. Claudia revealed: “We wrote letters which were often outdated by the time they arrived but were still nice to have as one could reread them several times.” By the time she was heading home to Germany, Freddie had decided to move out to Munich to be with her.
When asked if given the opportunity would they choose to have access to today’s communication methods, the answer was a stark “no”. Claudia reminisced that: “We could both live our lives independently and were free to enjoy our respective time without having to keep up all the time. When we were together we had lots to talk about. Today, if someone is not online or not contactable one gets worried. Back then we had more peace of mind.”
Susan and Walter similarly feel that wouldn’t want to incorporate modern technology into the early stages of their relationship given the opportunity. For them, the foundation of their relationship was built out of the extra effort that the distance made them put in. The longing and excitement of waiting to talk to each other, knowing that it would be worth the wait when they could be together again.
Relationships are borne out of the circumstances they are in. Long distance relationships have not changed. There is a certain ache that occurs from not being able to share your life with the person you want to which transcends any form of communication. It takes a level of commitment that must conquer the right now in a hope for one day. It builds strength within the relationship because it builds strength within you as a person. There is a definite romance in being able to survive this with slow communication, however, I don’t think I will be resorting to communicating through letters with Ben any time soon.
