Thanks for listening to my call of the day podcast. You can hear my live radio program Monday through Friday from two to five PM Eastern time on serious XM triumph 11.

Chad and mom welcome to the program. Hello, how are you doing today? Good, excellent. How about yourself? I'm doing well. Good. What's up?

So we were listening to your program and we were just listening to different calls and how you're addressing situations and the topic of long distance dating came up.

And so I recently met someone long distance and we have been just talking and to know each other. We haven't seen each other in person.

We've just been talking and on the phone and through text message. And my mom gave me her take and I was like, OK, I tend to be a little bit more optimistic about the topic, but there is things I'm apprehensive about in the sense of you don't get to know him and you know how does it work all those things.

I want to call to get your perspective about long distance, baiting and if there is a way to be successful at it. No.

And I'll tell you why, but I'm going to do it reading a short email that was sent to me here at the program that I read on the air yesterday and I just.

The minute you said that I just started going through the papers on my desk, I knew I didn't throw it out. So I'm going to read this to you of a woman who did this, OK.

Yes, I'm listening to your doctor, Laura.

50 years ago, my girl scout pen, pal and I started writing when we were both 14 the next year, I've been stayed at her house for five weeks in her European country when she was 16. She spent the summer here.

We had a very close pen pal relationship sending photos, clippings, fabric samples of our sewing projects, maps, telling about our experiences as we grew older and started having family. She visited here a few times with her husband.

But we sometimes only wrote once a year and then once every few years we started writing more regularly by email now about eight years ago when we were both 56.

My point is that although we had a true long lasting pen pal relationship, or you with your conversations and texting.

And always felt a fondness for each other at a distance, we did not share a face to face relationship.

It was when I actually spent a year in her country over the course of the past six years that we actually got to know each other as adults and not just pen pals.

I've been happy to discover what a nice person she really is. Even so, we both experienced a kind of surprising shock, adjusting ourselves knowing each other in reality.

Knowing each other in person is 100% different than the most almost cardboard cut out images we had of each other during all those years of correspondence.

Meanwhile, we still correspond and that's nice. But our real friends are the ones we actually do things with where we live.

My point is she writes romantic pen pals, aka long distance relationships have almost no substance, no foundation, and a tremendous amount of fantasy.

As you said, sir, with your hope stuff and optimism stuff.

No, no, no. I have had some of those too. In fact, a long distance romantic relationship, romance highly charged fantasy. You have lots of free time for fantasizing because you're not busy doing any real things together, or sorting out any type of disagreements, or even learning how to cooperate.

When you actually experience the person face to face, or better or worse, they are simply not the person you had to invent in their absence.

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