Lezama's Article Inappropriate

Opening this morning's Crimson, I was surprised that Lorraine Lezama found my love life so interesting that she felt the need to misrepresent and ridicule it in print. Ms. Lezama has never met me, but she nonetheless feels qualified to lecture not simply about long-distance relationships in general, but about mine in particular, which I found inappropriate and just plain tacky. If she had bothered to ask me, she would have learned that I agree that "mad passion" deals poorly with issues of everyday life, which is why the famous lovers she mentions--such as Romeo and Juliet--came to such a bad end.

But a love grounded in friendship and honesty, not romantic images and idealizations, survives and grows through these disputes. Mike and I have been together for six years not because we harbor any illusions about each other (including Lezama's: my mother first called him "wonky-looking," not "Byronic," when I showed her a picture in tenth grade, and I myself have too much meat on my bones to look "poetically consumptive") but because we know and respect one another as we truly are.

Not too many long-distance relationships survive, because this kind of bond is hard to maintain across distance. Phone calls and e-mail, without the nuances of facial expressions or tone of voice, can easily lead to misunderstandings that are easy to cope with in person but take time--and money--when you're far away. Just to reassure Lezama, Mike and I got along quite well, thank you, when he was here last spring. And I'd take any humdrum dispute from those four months over a two-hour, ten-dollar phone call in which we succeed in sorting out some issue that never would have been a problem if we'd understood each other in the first place. People always have to talk out what's going on between them, and the two of us always do: but when we're in the same place, at least we don't have to play AT&T for it.

Mike and I don't seem to have the time for all the falling in and out of bed that Andie MacDowell and Hugh Grant did in Four Weddings and a Funeral,a movie that I didn't like much precisely because there was no other basis for their relationship (and because MacDowell can't act her way out of a paper bag). Our sleepless nights when we were together last year were spent in other ways, but I was always glad to be there at 2 a.m. when we both slaved away on papers due at noon, when he would wave his arms in the air and proclaim "I'm doomed!"--and we'd both laugh, and be able to give each other support to make it through. This is a real relationship. I didn't need Lezama to tell me condescendingly, "So think about it, Rebecca." I think about it every day, and have for six years: every day when I write, call, or think about how that other person is feeling and what he is doing and all the ticky little details that make up my life and his.

So think about it, Lorraine. So think about it, Harvard Crimson. Rebecca M. Boggs '95