Lessons from a long distance relationship

So the guy from the cruise…we’ll call him PBC (Peanut Butter Cup).  I honestly thought that PBC and I were just going to be a vacation fling, but I heard from him the very next day after the cruise.  We would chat every day on gtalk and on the phone too.  A couple of weeks after the cruise he asked me if I would come visit him for Memorial Day in 5 weeks.  I told him I’d look at airfare and if it wasn’t too expensive I’d visit.  Every day he asked if I had bought my ticket yet.  Finally, the fare went down and I booked it.  We made plans for my long weekend there.  His niece was graduating from high school, so I was going to meet his whole family at a graduation party.  YIKES!  We were going to go to my favorite restaurant from when I had visited his city years ago.  The trip didn’t go exactly as I thought it would, but when I left we still had plans that he would come to NYC for 4^th of July in just a month and I felt confident that we were moving forward together.  Well, PBC did still come to New York, but that trip went even less how I expected it to.  The short version is that PBC is not ready for any kind of relationship, much less a long distance one.  But, me being the positive person that I am, tried to find the good in the experience.  Here are the lessons that I learned:

1.        Look outside the physical.  There was this one guy on the cruise who at first I was kind of smitten with.  He was so cute and seemed to be everything I wanted.  But he was BORING.  I found PBC attractive in a non-traditional way, but what really hooked me was his wacky sense of humor and his twisted intelligence.

2.       I can’t be afraid to say what I’m feeling.  On my visit to PBC we had a lack of communication that caused some confusion…He wasn't communicating and I was confused.  But I finally spoke up and asked him what was going on.  In the past, I never would have said anything and I would have left upset and angry and more confused.

3.       I need to be more open to strangers (in a safe way).  One of the things that amazed me about PBC was how he would just start talking to people.  We would go out to a bar and he would just start having conversations with strangers.  I never would do that.  Maybe it's the cultural difference between NYC and the South.  I vowed to try to talk to people I didn’t know more.

4.       When a guy says “it’s not you, it’s me” HE’S TELLING THE TRUTH!   He was dealing with some issues at the time and I’m glad that I can recognize that he just wasn’t ready or capable of a relationship instead of thinking that there was anything I could have done differently.  There wasn’t.

So thank you PBC…you made my cruise an incredible experience.  I learned a lot from my time with you and I’ll always have fond memories of Miami Beach.