News

'Absence makes the heart grow fungus," Stephen Page of the Barenaked Ladies once sang. The singer, who was arrested on drug possession charges this week, allegedly after a dispute with his long-distance girlfriend, should have heeded his own advice.

I know how he feels. Not about the drugs, but the relationship part.

For the past 10 years, I have spent more time in long-distance relationships than out of them. That means I've spent more time away from the person I've been involved with than with them. It's slightly perverse if you think about it. But like the good girl who always goes for the cad, I swear it's not by design.

Conscious or not, there is clearly a pattern here. And patterns, as my former therapist liked to say, must be examined without judgment.

Why am I continually attracted to people who are as physically available to me as rickshaw ride in Mumbai? Why do I always seem to choose people who are about to move away - or why, when that isn't the case, do I choose to move away from them?

Like so many things, long-distance relationships seem more complicated than they actually are. The fact is, when you choose to live far away from your partner, either for work, family, friends or any other obligation, you are prioritizing those things over your relationship.

I have no problem with this. People who tell you work is less important than relationships are people who hate their jobs. Like the super-mom tabloid editrix Bonnie Fuller, I figure I can sleep when I'm dead. Work is life and if you don't love yours, you should find a new way to spend your time.

Sadly, nurturing your loved ones doesn't pay the rent (and if it did, women would be running the world - but that's a whole other column).

I have spent the past decade since university concentrating wholeheartedly on my career and I don't regret a second of it. People like to say your work accomplishments won't comfort you on your deathbed, but I disagree. I plan to rage against the dying of the light with my iBook open on my lap.

Naturally this sort of thinking leads a person to move countries at a moment's notice if work should require it, and I've done my fair share of that. I've also done my fair share of refusing to budge from the place where I am - holing myself up in my home office while my partner goes off to take a job elsewhere.

I'm stubborn and I know it. But I'm also quite frugal. Which is why, after 10 on-and-off years of long-distance romance, I'm finally now thinking of giving it up for good (the distance, not the romance). My reason? Rocketing fuel prices.

I simply can't afford to be a relationship jet setter any more. And I am not alone. The Washington Post recently reported that many of the estimated 3.5 million U.S. citizens in long-distance relationships are feeling the squeeze as well.

"To cope with the rising cost of long-distance dating," the paper reported, "some couples are cutting back on trips to see their partners or booking flights only at off-peak times. ... And then there are those who are consulting their purse strings as often as their heartstrings to decide whether the benefits outweigh the costs."

While the idea of cutting down quality time with one's partner for economic reasons might seem risky at best and coldly pragmatic at worst, the statistics tell another story.

According to Greg Guldner, director of the Center for the Study of Long Distance Relationships (I kid you not), distance does not have a negative effect on the outcome of a relationship. "Despite what many people believe, LDRs [long-distance relationships] do not break up at any greater rate than more traditional, geographically close couples. Multiple studies comparing geographically close couples find the same rates of breaking up over time."

The centre's website also reveals some surprising statistics about people in LDRs. For instance, they call each other only once every 2.7 days on average. Even more surprising: they still send letters by snail mail - on average, three missives a month.

Of course, there are benefits to being in an LDR - freedom to work hard, time to see your friends, eating crackers in bed - but at the end of the day, a relationship is hard to maintain without actually ... relating.

While Guldner insists that there is no correlation between frequency of visits and the strength of a geographically challenged relationship, I disagree. Facebook is not face time and phone sex is not real sex.

The only way forward for most long-distance couples is eventual compromise. In time, someone has to make a move. And now that the surcharges on my relationship are like paying a second mortgage, the time seems right.

I will pack my bag and scrape the fungus from my heart.