I went to Mendoza, Argentina the weekend before last.

After two days of wine tasting, olive oil testing, liquor and chocolate trying, wandering, and frolicking, my friends and I loaded ourselves onto the 10:30 bus back to Santiago. Once comfortable in my front row window seat (by far the best seat on the bus for overnight trips), I leaned my head back to watch the people outside. Families were hugging one another, laughing, giving last kisses and hugs, singing their farewells with that odd combination of joy and sorrow.

There was a young couple lingering in the back of the crowd. They weren’t really speaking or going through the nonsense of hugging or kissing anyone else. They simply stood in each other’s arms, watching the chaos around them. Occasionally, he would hug her more tightly and they´d turn to look at each other. They trade weak smiles and she’d lean into him, eyes closed, breathing in deeply.

I recognized this kind of goodbye. It’s one with which I´m well acquainted. It’s the slow, quietly emotional, el-dee-are goodbye.

LDR. Long distance relationship.

There’s no pretty way to say it. There’s no romance in it. There’s nothing at all pleasing about that string of words.

But that’s fitting, since there’s very little pleasure in a relationship based solely on letters on a screen, a voice on a line, and some pixels organized in some fashion to create an image of your loved one’s face.

It’s funny how the idea of a long distance relationship, when you don’t define it in that term, becomes something else. The idea of a person thinking about you from a million miles away. The idea of letters filled with words of longing, of hours spent giggling on the phone, talking the night away. The idea that you love someone solely for their mind, their ideas, and the communication between the two of you. Absence making the heart grow fonder and whatnot.

And sure, that’s part of the LDR deal. Communication, as in any good relationship, will grow and blossom. In a bad one, it’ll become repetitive and begin to foster resentment.

I should know. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life in long distance relationships.

I swore after my last one that I’d never do it again. After five-or-six years spent pining after someone who wasn’t even right for me, the idea of entering into another relationship — well, any relationship, but especially long distance — was a really terrifying thought. I had wanted to just hang out with friends, maybe try the whole dating thing to see how that went before leaving everything and jetting off to Chile. That was the plan.

I let a friend read my super secret blog once. He didn’t comment on the boys, the secrets, the sex, the lust, or the love. The only thing he asked me was, ¨”Why do you always leave when you find someone?”

It’s not intentional. Things just work out like that. I plan to leave, I fall in love.

When I met Jeremy, I didn’t fall for him instantly. I thought he was so charming, and so nice, but I didn’t see it going very far. I couldn’t tell you why — I just didn’t.

But then he grew on me. Like a wart, as I always tell him. So when the time was approaching for me to leave, I was torn between breaking it off and making it work. I had advice flowing from every person I knew, and none of it was very consistent. Even if I wanted to make a decision based on what everyone around me thought, it wouldn´t have been possible — it was divided right down the middle.

So I finally said to myself, “If it ain’t broke, don’t break it. If it breaks en transit, it breaks en transit. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”

And thus far, it hasn’t. It´s not something I like, and it’s not easy, and after this, I really am never doing it again.

Here’s what I’ve learned about LDRs. They´re not easy in any scenario, but they’re doable.

• You can’t get into them unless there’s a pre-defined stop time. That was the difference between this one and that other one. I’m home on December 24th. I have to move to Seattle shortly after. There is a foreseeable place and time that we can stop calling ourselves a long distance couple.

• You’ve got to have a certain amount of pre-defined independence. With my last guy, we went crazy if we went more than a day without talking. We were on the phone at least three or four times a day, and we were chatting online the rest of the time. Our relationship was the central part of our lives, so I was never really experienced anything outside of that.Things are different now. Yes, I chat with Jeremy quite often via GoogleChat. But we only Skype once a week, and if I travel we rarely talk. It’s difficult because, yes, I want to know what he’s doing. I want to laugh with him, joke with him, whatever — but my experience here is simply more important at the moment. It’s really important to have priorities — and long distance love shouldn’t be priority number one.

• When you talk, don’t fall into the “You have no idea how much I miss you!!!” trap. Talking about real life things and ideas and what’s happening day to day sometimes seems trivial compared to the heartache you feel, but when you finally DO get to see each other again, there’s almost nothing to talk about. It’s easy to build a long distance relationship on the heart grows fonder scenario, but it´s infinitely less likely to last once you get back to real life. I’m chalking that transition back into real life as the second reason my last relationship failed.

Back in Argentina, everyone had filed onto the bus. The couple I’d been watching held their foreheads together, saying words I wouldn’t be able to understand were I right next to them. Finally, after a short kiss and a hug, she stepped onto the bus with her Chilean Passport in hand. His eyes followed her as she found her seat in the back of the bus. His eyes were begging her to turn around and get off the bus.

As we pulled away, he gave a short wave, but didn’t stop watching the bus until we’d pulled out of the station.

I tried to may no mind to the fact that “Right Here Waiting For You” was playing on the bus’s awful radio. Instead, I just hoped that they could make everything work.

And here are some pictures from Mendoza. I know that’s what a lot of you really want.