Nael and I live in different states. We always have, throughout the whole course of our relationship. When we met, I lived in southern Maine and he lived in Massachusetts. It was a fairly long drive, but not horribly inconvenient for weekend visits etc. After a month or two, he moved back to his original home state in the midwest, and two months later, I relocated for school. We’re currently both living in the Midwest, but about five hours apart. We manage to scrape a couple of weekends a month together, but we have yet to spend more than three or four consecutive days in the same state. It’s been six months.
It is the nature of long distance relationships that they are hard. Some people make them work at distances I couldn’t imagine dealing with (see also: Elleiras), but even dealing with what I have is becoming more challenging on a daily basis. To that end, WoW has been… incredible. It’s been meeting place, communication tool, lifeline. When I wrote before about our differing goals in the game, the conversations that came out of that blog post improved our communication on every subject. We didn’t meet in Azeroth, but we’ve learned to be a couple there.
Even our in-game goals have grown more in sync since we server hopped to Horde side and Kel’thuzad. Where he used to do more battlegrounds and I did more heroics, now we’re both doing a mix of pvp and pve. We’re both altoholics who are passing out the heirlooms like candy to our little locks, priests, and shammies. We’ve even used the opportunity to run as tank and healer to get to know each other in different ways. Yeah, it sounds a little overdramatic, but it’s true.
Sometimes, though I have to wonder, is there too much WoW in the relationship? When we started, we were both already pretty devoted gamers, but since WoW became my excuse to sit in front of Skype, I’ve let my other interests slide. I don’t play hardly any console games anymore. I’ve pretty much abandoned any non-WoW related writing projects. And I know Nael misses tabletop RPGs. He still buys tons of books, but he hasn’t played in months.
We play WoW, we talk WoW, we read the same blogs and laugh at the same inside jokes. Even when we’re physically together, we spend a large amount of time talking about WoW. It’s not at all uncommon for names like Gnomeaggedon, Tamarind, Larísa or Gevlon to find their way into our ordinary conversations. Recently we got together with Aurdon and Adreanna for dinner and spent the whole time talking about guilds. It’s like I forget sometimes during the week that I’m dating Joe the Human instead of Corridon the Blood Elf (or Naelian the Night Elf), and that we’re more closely affiliated with a real life political party and church than with the Horde and the Light. The key to just about everything is balance, and in this case, I feel the scale tipping.
I don’t want to sound like I have fundamental doubts about my relationship. I don’t. I’m just beginning to have doubts about the role that WoW plays in that relationship; that if we use WoW exclusively as our means of contact when we’re apart, our relationship will somehow become about WoW, instead of about all the other things that matter. That we’ve used it for so long as a tool to cope with the difficulties of distance that it’s become a crutch we can’t do without.
But what else would we fill that space with? At this point, it’s not possible to be together more than we are… I’m in law school, he’s in nursing school, we both have a lot going on, and the distance is pretty much insurmountable for the time being. We’ve tried skyping through other games (he likes NHL and NFL games, I like JRPGs like Shin Megami Tensei or Final Fantasy) but we wind up just talking about a game the other isn’t even playing, in a genre the other isn’t super keen on, which just gets boring. I’m thinking perhaps it might be a good idea for us to try another MMO together (I hear WAR is doing unlimited trial accounts) or play a console game concurrently (ooh Dragon Age?) so that we have some shared experience to fill our days apart, but we don’t transform our real selves irretrievably into Myrhani and Corridon.
But really no matter how we pass the time in between, I guess I’m just lonely and sad, and looking forward to a time when I can see his face every day, instead of his avatar.
{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
"It’s not at all uncommon for names like Gnomeaggedon, Tamarind, Larísa or Gevlon to find their way into our ordinary conversations." Rhii – soon after we met in college, I introduced my wife to table-top role-playing games.
It's been nearly 20 years since then, and almost 10 years since we've actually had a local gaming group to play with… and we *still* make references to the games we used to play, and (thanks to things like OOTS) even games we *didn't* play! It gets some odd looks, especially from our oldest, who knows that "open ended down" means something went really wrong, but who has no idea *why* it means that
Yes, be concerned about expanding your relationship in other areas as well; but don't downplay the shared experience and enjoyment that you're managing to eke out right now. Hopefully, things will work out for both of you such that years from now, even after WoW and other games are long gone, you'll still be able to share the memories you're making now.
LOL, I'm glad we're not quite so weird then! I really do love an inside story or joke that survives for years after its original context is gone. I hope we can get a few of those!
I can actually relate to your post a little bit.
but when you finally can stop worrying about the distance, I'm sure the other things will be there.
I met my bf in a guild in WoW a little over 2 years ago. We started the relationship, but we had a 7 hour train journey between us. Also, our main interest was and still is WoW. When we're out and about we talk WoW, at home, and so on. We live together now so I guess we have life problems, TV, music, movies to distract us both from the game once in a while, but I hear where you're coming from and in my opinion, if it really bothers you, let him know what's on your mind
Though I'm sure even now, you talk to each other about how your day was outside of WoW
We definitely do, thanks Jaedia!
A couple years back, I taught my wife to play WoW, she was someone who hated these types of games. So I made her a promise, that I wouldn't level without her… and since that time I broke the promise once, to level my hunter to 80, while I was waiting for her to have time again. Since then, I have leveled a total of 3 level 80's, and am still waiting for her to allow me to level my druid up. My point however, is that for a few months, 3-4 or so, we had a great out of game and in game experience.
If all the time you can get together is in game, then enjoy it. You might also think of getting a webcam for each of you, and use the in-game voice chat as well. As for other games to play, Lord of the Rings, I always hear high-praise about. However there is no PvP, so I dont know if you would like that. Alternatively, yes, Warhammer is a really cool game to play, just remember that while a lot of it is similar to WoW, the achievements and titles, came from WAR, not WoW. Another really cool game to check out, is Runes of Magic. It's a free2play game, and has 3 of the things I wish WoW had; Player Housing, Alignment System, and Dual-Class characters – like my Rogue/Priest. A fourth game to check out is Aion, it's new and allows flying combat.
We're currently using Skype, which we tried after the in game voice chat failed spectacularly to work.
But yeah, I think the dependence on Wow for communication actually grew out of needing skype for the free phone calls. If I am trapped in front of the computer, I might as well be playing WoW right?
I can recommend LOTRO actually, played it for a couple of weeks and it's quite well designed, a little quiet, but good.
And stick with Skype, have tried ingame voice and you can barely understand the other people :<
I did a trial period with LOTRO and quite liked it, we may look into subscribing soon.
thanks for the recommendation
I don't have much by way of advice to offer – the longest "long-distance" relationship I ever attempted was Oxford – London (that's an hour and a half away) and that fell apart, although admittedly for reasons outside the distance. However, a few thoughts.
I think couples will always gravitate towards a focus on the things they have in common – the restaurant they ate in last night, or the film they just watched, or the game they're playing. The problem is that since you're apart, and don't have much sequential time together, the only consistent shared thing you have *at the moment* is Azeroth. I genuinely don't believe that's per se a bad thing. I think if you were living together, or in the same state, and all you talked about was WoW you *might* conceivably have a problem but I imagine if circumstances allowed you to just be together without pressure or without time constraints, you'd probably find other shared experiences naturally filling up some of the WoW space.
Obviously I don't know how your relationship works and I wouldn't presume … but, from the little I've read, it seems extremely unlikely to me that you relationship is "about" WoW, or even heading in that direction. I think WoW is a way for you to "be" together when you're apart, and that, perhaps, that's something you can value? I think just because it does what it does well – creating a shared sense of place and progression – that doesn't necessarily make it a crutch.
But I do understand it must be lonely to be so reliant on a virtual space when you crave a real one. Hopefully that will not take too long to achieve. And, who knows, perhaps in years to come you'll be terrifying your grandchildren with stories of about how you and Grandpa Joe took out Arthas, the Lich King of Azeroth while you were courting
Thanks Tamarind.
Heh, hope it doesn't creep you out that somewhere a Holy Pally and her Prot boyfriend are laughing IRL at something silly you said online.
I can appreciate your feelings. Ultimately though, if you guys can go away on holiday or whatever together and be happy without playing WoW for a couple of weeks then I think it's a golden relationship. Regardless, just enjoy what you have. Sounds like a pretty good thing to me!
Thanks
Like I said, it's not something that bothers me too much day to day, it's just that when I get lonely it gets the better of me.
You do want to have more then just WoW to talk about in a relationship though. I unfortunately don't have any person to do a 1:1 comparison with your story. I introduced my wife to the game shortly after we were married. She got hooked and we still play together but she's mentioned several times she is more interested in the "other half" of the game. The part that consists of collecting pets, grinding reputations, and gaining titles that can be soloed. I mainly raid. While my brothers were still playing that's all we would talk about. Now that they've retired I find I still bring up the latest WoW news but those conversations are pretty short lived. I fortunately am related to them and have known them all my life so have a bit more to talk about besides WoW though but the conversation still often leads back to games or other tech related fun stuff.
WoW is a great foundation for a good relationship but it eventually needs to move past that. WoW won't be here forever. I am still friends with past guild mates from the MC days. Most don't even play WoW anymore but I still chat with them on line and team up for some other multi player games on Steam. One I've even visited and had lunch with as I flew through Denver airport. I'm still good friends with them because we share many interests beyond just WoW. If thats all we had in common then I highly doubt our friendship could have continued after they left.
Try and branch out to other online games perhaps. It would be a good jumping off point to hopefully deepen the relationship.
If nothing else, posting this has made me feel better because WoW -isn't- the only common interest we have, it's just the only one that it's easy to share from a distance.
Oh my gosh. I've found someone in such a similar situation, and I thought my fiance and I were unique. We also played WoW together to the point that it dominated our communication and interaction. Without getting into unnecessary detail, we also became very intimately involved during the time we were physically together, and we also took advantage of intimate phone calls when we were apart. While a fascination or obsession with such behavior is of course more mentally damaging than WoW, it is limited and once we're done, we talk a lot about other things. We constantly talk on the phone or text. We each understand what's going on in each other's lives very well, including friends, work, school, etc. So we work around the need for physical contact while not letting it get the best of us. I recently quit the game, and found a lot of other things to take up my time, and while I did return in order to be able to log in and talk to her and our friends, it hardly dominates my free time like it used to. If you don't currently have cell phone plans which allow you to talk or text for extended periods, I'd highly recommend it. It may be more expensive than $15 per month, but it's going to help you immensely to separate your relationship and your game. Again, the key thing is to talk talk talk talk talk. If the relationship is really working, you will get past the "Well, I have nothing to talk about" phase and move on to the "How was your day?" phase. It's a lot better, and actually opens up a lot more meaningful conversation than you'd think. I hope I separate myself from fellow commenters in that this situation can work out very well. My fiance and I plan on moving in together this summer, after I transfer to a school closer to home. We are looking at getting married in the fall.
That sounds very reassuring.
We're also looking at ways to close the physical distance a little bit. Probably we won't be able to get to the same state right away, but currently he's on the side of his state farthest from the border with mine. Hopefully he can transfer to a school in the same system that's close to the border of where I live. If it was only an hour between us, I really think that this problem would mostly disappear.
I met my ex boyfriend in WoW and never again would I seriously date someone I met in game. The first months are the "honey moon" phase, then after that, it boils back down to the game.
Good luck to you guys though, I hope you make it for the long haul.
I'm sorry it went so badly for you disillusioned. I didn't meet my current boyfriend in the game though, we met through a friend when we were living closer together. It's only circumstances that have gotten us as far apart as we are currently.
Here via wow.com, and…yeah I would second that recommendation to get some common interests outside of WoW. ASAP. I don't want to frighten you or anything but I was in a nearly identical situation (both avid gamers, in an LDR where we met outside of WoW, did almost everything in the game together, let my non-WoW writing slide as well as my console gaming). My relationship ended up going down in flames, to put it in the best possible way. "Fiasco" doesn't begin to describe what happened with me and this dude. WoW didn't destroy our relationship, but it did put a considerable strain on it and I think way too many people like to downplay the impact it can have on relationships out of an admittedly understandable kneejerk defense of our hobby.
I see posts like this and I feel like the Ghost of Christmas Future. Sometimes Cassandra. It's been my experience that WoW in particular has a way of bringing out the worst in people, sometimes, and has a way of revealing weak points in a relationship. The most important piece of advice I can tell you is to listen to your instincts. If you feel hinky about something, speak up. Which leads to the other crucial piece of advice, which is to communicate, communicate, communicate. Don't be accusatory, use "I" statements, etc.
The biggest, worst problem with WoW becoming the focal point of a relationship, and an LDR in particular, is that if one or both parties has a tendency to dislike confrontation, a penchant for procrastination or is bad at communicating, the game offers a very tempting escape mechanism to avoid having to deal with problems. It becomes exceptionally easy to avoid having to talk about a problem when raid invites are going out in five minutes, or so-and-so wants to run this heroic, etc. Before you know it, it's blown up. This happened over, and over, and over again with me and my ex, doubly so because he was raid leader of our guild at the time. When I eventually got tired of his behavior and dumped him, I left the guild (and the server), and the subsequent drama ended up tearing it apart.
Like I said, I don't want to frighten you. WoW can be a wonderful way to spend time together. But it's PERFECTLY OKAY to have doubts about a relationship. That's HEALTHY. But if you have them, you should talk to your SO before things get out of hand. Try to suss out where these feelings are coming from, and find out what you can both do to alleviate them. I wish you both the best of luck, and I hope things turn out considerably better for you than they did for my ex and I.
LOL, I wish wow.com would tell me when they link me. I have been linked twice now, and neither time have I known until the comments exploded.
I hope you are not the Ghost of Christmas Future, and reassuringly, I think you're not. Mostly because as I said to Aurdon, we do have other common interests, just ones that are much more difficult to tap into from a distance than WoW is. But another good thing is that neither of us can stand to be upset long so if someone has a problem, they invariably bring it up – usually within minutes. Sometimes that leads to miscommunication, but so far nothing that can't be sorted out.
Rhii, I feel for you. Back when I started playing WoW, I did so because of my then-GF. We had met on Ragnarok Online, gotten to know each other, then found out we lived about 3 hours away from each other. This was the shortest-distance relationship I had ever been in, at this point.
Unfortunately for me, WoW destroyed the relationship–but not because of the game itself. It simply provided the impetus and the means for her to get out, and in a (somewhat) subtle manner–I didn’t know how wrong things were until she broke up with me, and I had thought at the time that it was because of WoW–it wasn’t.
I guess what I’m saying ultimately is, communication is the key. You guys -do- live far apart, and you’re both busy. (My sister’s been in law school, I know how hard it can be! And some friends who are playing WoW.) If you have concerns about the relationship, WoW-related or not, communication is the only thing that will cure them.
As for the WoW-playing, well, as long as it’s a strong connection, why tamper with it? I wouldn’t say that it should necessarily be a smaller part of your relationship. Arrange times to Skype with him outside of WoW; find things to talk about that don’t involve the game, but I wouldn’t worry that WoW is your main conduit of contact–having that shared connection is very important.
Thanks for the encouragement Kousoku. I'm sorry things didn't work out better for you in the long run though!
I met my bf through CoH/V, and we were long-distance for the first six months. Even now that he lives with me, we still game extensively together (yes, primarily WoW, but we also try out free trials when available…LotRO, DDO, etc, and console games like Fable II and currently Dragon Age). Yes, we game a lot. And a lot of our conversation revolves around the games, and we can lose sight of the real world if we're not careful. We've gotten overly involved in the game to the detriment of our relationship before, and when we were long-distance it was even more difficult.
It takes a lot of work on both parts, and a sincere desire to make things work, which it appears you have
When we get too involved in the gamelife, we try to step back. We've stepped away from WoW for the most part currently, only attending the raids that we feel obligated to (I'm a MT, and he's one of the main healers from our guild, and we don't want to disappoint the friends we've made there)…but sometimes it is good to step away and try something else.
You sound very much like what I'm talking about. We definitely have other interests than WoW, but it seems like sometimes they get consumed by the fact that WoW is by far the most convenient of our commonalities. I'm more worried about WoW encroaching on what we already have, not that there was never anything else there to begin with.
My wife and I went to high school together. We never dated in high school, we waited until we went to different colleges, in different states.before dating.
…this was a long time ago, so long ago, we used the university computers and the unix/linux "talk" command to chat without running up a phone bill.
We dated for all of college, and have been married for 12 years now. She doesn't play WoW, I do. I don't scrapbook, she does.
What do we have in common? People.
We get together with people, we raise our kids within the neighborhood of people, we volunteer at the kids' school together (we both have education backgrounds). That is what we have in common, we're both very social, and like making (and keeping) new friends (and raising good kids, that's another shared interest).
Until you live near each other, you will either vent about things bothering you, or revisit shared experiences. Living as far apart as you do, the shared experiences are … limited. As helpful and supportive as friends are, you don't want to be a chronic venter, either. I'd go with the "positive" shared experiences, as a better thing to overdo.
Haha, thanks Globin.
We're definitely using WoW to create those shared experiences… and I think I got over my fear of it eating our relationship. I guess I must've since we started a guild together this week! You're right that common ground is kind of the fuel that keeps things running, and right now WoW is our best place to find that common ground. Someday I hope that'll change and let us branch out more, but until then, we'll be that couple who runs a guild together, I guess.