Julie Buxbaum is our next Valenduckie cupid.  She the debut author of the amazing new women’s fiction book, The Opposite of Love (read Sybil’s review here; love the cover, by the way).  Julie shares her experience with love and how to keep it alive…

Apparently the assignment this week at The Good, The Bad, and Unread is to write about something romantic, since after all it is Valentine’s Day, and love is in the air. But I’ve never been one for following rules, and to be honest, though I do love a good love story, I’m not feeling all that revved up for the big V-day this year.

See, my husband (to whom I’ve only been married to for about five months) is currently living six thousand miles away, in a country for which I need a passport to enter. When I go to sleep at night, he is just waking up. And when I wake up, he is already looking at the clock, pondering what he is going to eat for dinner.

When we originally contemplated this arrangement, there seemed something romantic about the whole thing—absence after all does make the heart grow fonder–but it hasn’t quite played out that way. Sadly, there is nothing romantic about time zones and jet lag and ichat; having your marriage play out over long cell phone conversations, as you try to block out your minute overages. The cliché is true though, I do find myself pining for him in a way I didn’t when he was just in the next room, but it doesn’t feel good, this pining.

Instead, it hurts. More than I care to admit.

Now that I think about it, maybe I am confusing things here. Who said romance has to feel good? Look at all the star-crossed lovers of literature, who also pined and whined; And they suffered through without any of the benefits of modern technology, not even the wonders of Skype. Think about how things would have turned out had Juliet been able to Blackberry Romeo. Two words, really, was all she needed to turn tragedy into comedy: Not Dead.

Better yet, my husband and I are not even slightly star-crossed, just geographically challenged. So thank you The Good, The Bad, The Unread, for forcing me to contemplate romance this week, and for showing me just how ungrateful I’ve become. There is romance in my life, heaps of it, and there is a pile too, in London, only six thousand miles away. This Valentine’s Day, when I am alone in the airport, heading back home to my empty apartment from a business trip, I’m going to stop and think about how lucky I am to have someone who I love so much that I pine for him on a minute to minute basis, even while I wait barefoot on a long security line.

So my plan is this: On Thursday, I will buy a red heart shaped cookie from a Starbucks in the Toronto airport, and eat it without irony. Immediately afterwards, I will call my husband from my cell phone, not giving a second thought to rollover minutes and other such practicalities. I will tell him that I miss him, that I’ve been pining for him, and that I wish he were here. And then I will say, “I love you,” three words that are romantic no matter what time zone you are in.

Julie Buxbaum

How about you readers?  Have any stories of the struggle your love took to get where it is, or to just keep it alive?