Mars’ Love

Posted by admin on Jan 20, 2009 in Issues & Ideas | 0 comments

Dear Mars’ Love,

So, my Significant Other (who’s also my BFF!) is flying off into the sunset without me and I have to finish this semester alone. Do you have some tips for dealing with a long-distance relationship?

– Lonely in Langley

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Dearly Discarded,

The best way to have a long-distance relationship is to end it now. Today, if at all possible. Unless you’re planning on flying into each other’s arms come April, your relationship is totally doomed. Even if you are, the outlook is bleak.

Face it: despite your best intentions, and despite what the chain letters promised you, the inescapable fact is that there are several months between you and your beloved, and in that time your hearts will grow cold. The sappy, misguided moron who said “separation makes the heart grow fonder” was radically mistaken: separation is but a sleep and a forgetting. People are fickle. Mozart even wrote an opera about it. So go and have fun! Your ex-BFF should – and probably will – do the same.

Of course, there may be ways of succeeding at the expense of your self-respect, innate goodness and immortal soul. There are plenty of cold-hearted relationships, marriages and whatnot. After all, stack enough expectation, conditional love, needy rhetoric – heft enough imperatives, empty promises, absenteeist kisses, veiled threats and whatever other weapons of emotional blackmail are in your sinister arsenal – and you can get anyone so attached to go through hell for you.

And maybe you can even hit it off with the stranger your ex-BFF will be when you are reunited.

But honestly: is it worth it? Your heart says “yes,” but it is lying, and won’t say “yes” tomorrow. Besides, you’re in the highest concentration of nubile young members of your religious and socioeconomic group that you’ll ever be in, so save both your hearts and find someone else.

– Apollo

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Dearest Left Behind,

With true love, all things are possible. Anyone who has seen The Princess Bride knows that. If you haven’t, watching it is your first step.

This may be the perfect time for you to test if yours is the true love of Wesley and Buttercup or the ill-fated infatuation of a schoolyard crush. If it is the latter – and you know it – get out now, for this is no easy trial. If you believe you’ve found true love, and are determined to withstand the torturous flames to retain it, do everything you can to keep your love alive.

Communicate with your BFF as often as possible. Thanks to the wonders of technology – of telephones, email and Skype – the luxury of frequent communication is at your disposal. Talk about exciting, difficult and trivial things – everything to stay connected and not grow apart. Send little gifts back and forth, the tokens of your travels, whether across the great seas or the Lower Mainland, to help fill the void. And if at all possible, paying a surprise visit to your BFF, possibly over reading break, is the best present you could give.

Once you’ve withstood the ravenous flames, the quivering quicksand and the R.O.U.S.’s, you will be joyously reunited and your true love will burn even stronger.

If, after all that, you find your love was not true after all, at least you’ll know for sure. And better to find that out now than, as so many poor souls do, after years of broken hearts, broken marriages and broken homes.

If your love is true and you endure the trials, then next time your BFF rides off into the sunset, it will be on a valiant steed with you, living happily ever after.

– Aphrodite

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