Meet Stella: A sassy Asian-American who is slowly learning about the Beijing dating scene Meet Scarlett: An American 20-something who finds the Beijing dating scene to be fun and carefree Live their lives for a change …
Just the other month, I took some much needed time off for a brief pollution-free hiatus back home. This trip was a golden opportunity to see a past love interest, who we’ll call Mr. Almost Right. After spending a blissful week canoodling with Mr. Almost Right, we decided, in a high state of infatuation and woozy-mindedness, to commit to a Long Distance Relationship. In a high-tech world like ours, with webcams, Skype and cell phones, how hard can it really be to stay in touch and make a LDR work? I soon found my answer: Trying to sustain a relationship with a series of e-mails and phone conversations has proven to be incredibly difficult. The Skype quality is on average middling, but ever since Taiwan broke the Internet, it is aggravatingly poor. Most conversations start with the following:
[Crackling, and both fumbling to find microphones]
Mr. Almost Right: Hello?
Me: Hey! How are you?
Mr. Almost Right: Um, okay. Wait, I can’t hear you, hold on …
Me: Okay, sure, but I have to get to sleep soon anyway …
Mr. Almost Right: Uh, I think it’s better now. So, baby, what are you wearing?
This brings us to another necessary truth of LDRs: Phone sex must keep the spark alive in lieu of real intimacy. But how many people are actually good at phone sex? After agonizing over how to lose my phone sex virginity while sounding like an experienced phone sex seductress, I took the plunge a few weeks ago with Mr. Almost Right. Awkwardness ensued with long pauses and fake heavy breathing. My squeeze shared fantasies that surely (or hopefully) sounded better in his head: “So we get back to your apartment and I would close the door and then you would put your purse down and we would take our shoes off and probably most of our clothes off too because we want to have sex, and then we would actually have sex, really good sex, on your bed I guess … yeah.” And most tragically, we suffered a Skype connection failure before a certain crucial moment.
Novice phone sex aside, I have shared moments with Mr. Almost Right that are genuine and far more fulfilling than any conversation I’ve had at Nanjie recently. The value of such moments are partly degraded, though, when I realize I must look the fool for sitting in my apartment every Saturday afternoon, chained to my laptop with headphones, staring at my computer screen while trying to whisper sweet nothings across an ocean and faulty Internet lines. The trouble with LDRs is that it’s sometimes difficult to believe those Skype conversations are worth missing out on that fling who might take you to dinner at the Courtyard followed by drinks at Centro, all complemented by real conversation and touch.
However tempting that fling may sometimes seem, I am still reminded of Marvin and Tammy’s wise adage: Ain’t no Mountain High Enough … even if that mountain is the Pacific Ocean, a 16-hour time difference, excruciating sexual withdrawal and inevitably, countless phone sex blunders to come. Yes, pun intended.