I doubt many people know that my husband and I dated long distance literally until about three months before our wedding.
I lived in Central Texas. He lived in Nashville, TN. Our “dating” days (which if you ask me when they began, I wouldn’t be able to tell you) existed in the form of phone calls, late night AIM chat-sessions, and occasional trips between Texas and Tennessee. I scoured his tour schedule for shows within about a six-hour driving radius of where I was.
However, its the long-distance nature of how our relationship started that I credit with why we are both so cool about either of us “going on the road for work” for an extended period of time. It’s just as normal (if not more normal!) as being under the same roof!
Recently, we found ourselves very much in old roles. I’m in Texas working with my parents through tax season, and thus I am in my old bedroom. And I found myself chatting with my husband on the phone as he drove tour bus. We BOTH commented how it brought back memories.
See, I used to stay up all night long with him on the phone while he drove bus through the night. He has his CDL and is a co-driver on long trips. However, for a period of time, he was the only driver for the artist he worked for. So, he’d drive all night, get to the town they would be doing a show. He’d sleep a few hours. Get up to set up his gear and soundcheck. Eat a little. Grab some more sleep. Get up to do the show. Tear down, load up and head to the next town. To help keep him awake, I’d stay on the phone with him for hours on end.
I don’t know, now, how either of us did it. How he would run on such little sleep, and how I’d stay up all night, get a couple hours of sleep, then go to work. Naps were a friend, I suppose. However, sleep just didn’t seem to matter as much.
I got to see so much of the United States through the phone! Some nights we’d have nothing to talk about other than what he was seeing in front of him on the road. Road construction. Landmarks. He’d have me check the weather ahead if he saw lightening in the distance. I got him lost in Chicago once, trying to be his navigator (because this was before everyone had a GPS). We got good at handling dropped calls when he’d go through a patch of highway that had no cell service.
It was in those long late night hours, when he was chasing headlights and I was laying in the dark in a room lit only by a computer monitor or cell phone screen, that we went from being just good buddies to discovering there was something deeper there.
Today, he has a GPS and doesn’t need me to navigate, but I like to follow along using Google maps. Sometimes I still look ahead for a Pilot or Flying J for him. I’ll still check the weather once in awhile. But mostly, we could be in the truck together. Sitting at times in silence, just enjoying knowing that we’re each on the other end of the line.
Through those years of phone calls and IM chats, we’ve developed an awesome level of communication. We can read each others moods in a word much of the time. We’ve come a long way, but its on that solid base that we build our life. Going back to that role — me in my old bedroom at my parents’ house, again in a dark room lit by a computer monitor, and him chasing headlights taking his turn behind the wheel — reminds us of where we started, and it just seems to make us more solid.
I think all too often, married couples forget what its like to be “new.” They forget what its like to be in that “dating” roll again. Late night chats by phone? Those were dates for me and my husband back in the day. It was neat to go back to that style of dating. I wouldn’t ever want to go back to it full-time! But it made me smile, and it once again made me appreciate us and the life we have.
