Long-Distance, Longer Commitment: Why This One’s Built to Last.

8,000 miles, one hot accent, and zero doubts.

How I made peace with my weird-as-fuck relationship is layered. I’ve only had three real relationships in my adult life.

The first was in my early 20s, a “for-a-few-years” guy, not a forever one. When I ended it, let’s just say he did not take it well.

The second relationship was with my ex-husband, to whom I was married for 15 years. We made a family and shared many significant experiences, and we also realized that while we were content and comfortable together, we were not truly happy.

It took courage for us each to realize and voice that we deserved and wanted more. We didn’t just want that for ourselves. We wanted to model it for our three boys.

Now, my third and current partner of 10 years? This is the relationship that’s sticking.

That said, he lives in Australia, and I live in California. Which makes things … interesting.

It’s not so much that I’ve ever felt the need to defend our very long-distance relationship. It’s just that even at the start, I began the relationship from a very different mindset than I’d ever had before.

For starters, I threw a few truths of my life to the wind: My constant need for detailed plans. My strong desire to be fully prepared for every worst-case scenario. And my very conservative approach to any and all decisions.

Once, during a conversation very early on in my relationship with my partner, he said, “There is no way we can make this work.”

“Look,” I replied, “we don’t need to have all the answers. We can just see where this thing goes.”

That was nearly a decade ago. Yet over the ensuing years, I’ve probably had to do more explaining aspects of our relationship to myself than to anyone else.

Many of the explanations I’ve arrived at required years to bubble up, surface, confront, and deal with.

There were (and still are) aspects of our relationship that are harder with the distance–the nature of ex-partner dynamics, the time-zone challenge, the day-to-day things we just miss out on.

I do tend to wonder if the distance helped form what is now an unbreakable bond because it cemented everything we share in common: Our early complexities finding solid love in our mid-40s. Our dealing with our respective emotional and relationship triggers and patterns. Our balancing of super-stressful careers. Our kid obligations and, at times, our messy extended family stuff.

As I’ve taken stock of these things and become more observant of relationships around me, especially among my closest friends, I’ve noticed many often unseen dynamics at play.

I see women in their 50s becoming more vocal about what they want out of their lives. In relationships, we’re increasingly less tolerant of the bullshit and way more assertive in asking for and creating the life we want.

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Real Girls Reality Check: The Beautiful, Brutal Truth About 50-Something Love Lives (Spoiler: Shit Gets Weird)

The strangest contradiction I see happening around me is that for some women, what you see is not what you get. I’ve had many friends with seemingly pretty idyllic marriages; their kids were grown and flown, and they had retired. Social media painted a pretty picture of their lives.

Then BAM! They announced they were getting a divorce after 20+ year marriages.

In other cases, friends who’d eagerly waited for life at 50 and had architected a huge portion of their adult years to get to that magical point suddenly found themselves or their spouses facing serious or even terminal illnesses.

That unexpected reality threw every plan, every hope, and even their own financial security into complete turmoil.

There are the extremes, as well. One of my amazing girlfriends, then in her late 50s, had finally started leaning into a big new chapter of her life.

Her career was in a great place. She was newly engaged after 10-plus years with a man who’d been through hell and back with cancer before beating it.

They were finally ready to build a life together.

Then, while walking home after a fun Friday night out less than a mile from home, they were both hit by a car and killed.

Just like that.

My friend died on impact, and her fiance died several days later. Neither ever knew the other’s fate.

I still see her picture pop up on my phone in old photos. She had an incredibly bright and infectious smile. I feel gutted. In so many ways, she was only just getting started.

Here’s the thing I’m working hard to say more often now that I’m in my 50s, especially when fear or doubt lurks (and yes, those things still lurk): There’s no perfect time to start or to do.

We can plan, postpone, and perfect. But life just doesn’t give a shit. It just keeps moving. When I think about my friend, I remind myself that now is the right (and only) time to take the leap.

To do the thing. To take the risk.

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When the Life You Planned Isn’t the One You’re Living

There’s a strange shift that happens when you start navigating relationships in midlife. When I divorced in my mid-40s, it meant letting go, not just of the relationship but of the life and future I thought I was going to have.

The grief I experienced wasn’t only about what ended. It was also about releasing the version of my life and my family that I’d imagined.

That’s a loss you don’t see coming.

Then came dating. Online dating? Hard pass. I clung to the rom-com fantasy that I’d lock eyes with someone in a coffee line and just know, instant connection, no swiping required.

Movie-scene perfect.

Some of us go from partner to caregiver, standing shoulder to shoulder with the person we love as they battle terminal illness. I’ve got friends walking that brutal road right now.

It’s brutal. It’s terrifying. It’s heartbreaking. It’s final. And it’s forcing them to confront what “forever” really means.

Others are waking up and feeling a huge sense of urgency to act. They’re saying, “Fuck it, I want to explore the version of myself I buried for decades.”

The thread through all of this is that love at this stage isn’t about shoulds.

It’s about choices: Big ones. Scary ones. Fast ones. Ones we can control. (And ones we can’t fully.)

We don’t have the luxury of time to wait, to contemplate, and to be OK living in the middle being only mildly content.

Don’t get me wrong: Doing nothing is also a choice. But it’s a choice that won’t buy you extra time. There’s just no time to patiently wait for the perfect moment or the perfect outcome.

So many of us feel a new, growing sense of inner restlessness. We need to move. To decide. To live in the “now,” not in the “maybe one day.”

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I Was Clueless in My 20s; Partnership Hits Different Now

I had no idea what love should look like in my 20s. Maybe I had a slightly more evolved view in my 30s.

But even back then, love didn’t feel simple. I saw it as something that could be both beautiful and painful. Sometimes it felt impatient or disconnected, and I didn’t always know where I fit inside it.

I loved my kids, and our family, with everything I had, but inside my relationship, I often felt alone. I couldn’t fully define what love was back then, but I was starting to understand what it wasn’t. And I knew I didn’t want my boys to grow up believing that distant, strained, or quietly unhappy was as good as it gets.

My ex felt it too. Maybe not in the same way, but he did. The cracks were there, unspoken, but visible. The weight of the silence. The way we both stopped reaching across it. And kids notice that stuff. They always do.

We both wanted better for them, I think. Something alive. Chosen. Real. And for me, that meant showing them that walking away isn’t weakness. Sometimes it’s the bravest damn thing you can do. Staying in something that no longer brings joy or connection? That’s not love. That’s survival. And I’d done enough of that.

I also had a picture in my head of what love should look like, stitched together from childhood, movies, other people’s stories. I chased that version for years. But eventually, I had to let it go and build something true. On my terms.

In meeting my person and forging what has become a true partnership across two continents, I’ve learned something that would have shocked my old self: There is simply no rule book.

Love takes risks. It requires courage, strength, and perseverance. And it might also require a dose of crazy.

Love does not have to follow anyone else’s rule book.

My grandma always said, “Love is where you find it” then she’d wink and add, “In the bedroom, the kitchen, or hell, even on the dining room table.” Let’s just say she and my grandpa didn’t let a little thing like aging slow down their extracurriculars. Total legends.

Turns out, mine came with an 8,000-mile commute and not a single regret.

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Smart Tricks and Steamy Truths (Kids, skip this part!)

Real Girl talk: when you’re not with someone all the time, sexy time fun time takes creativity and a few questionable camera angles.

Between cute emoji drop-ins, marathon FaceTime calls, Zoom date nights, and reading the same books to stay connected, we’ve also mastered the fine art of NSFW exchanges.

My photography skills are mediocre at best, but let’s just say my man has a well-curated gallery of panty pics snapped in a variety of settings: cars, closets, the occasional locked public bathroom. (You’re welcome, babe.)

But there’s way more to building a relationship beyond the erotic. There’s the everyday of building a family.

Here’s a smoother, more natural version that keeps your warmth and personality:

We’ve had the rare and amazing privilege of getting all seven of our kids (plus one fabulous spouse) together in person, in overlapping chunks. My boys once spent four straight weeks in Australia, and my youngest and I have done even longer stints going back and forth. We’re lucky to see my man’s oldest daughter and her wife often in Colorado, though I always wish it were more.

But all of our back and forth culminated in one epic, two-week trip to Italy in 2019. It was the first (and only) time they’d all been together in one place, and it was glorious.

Yes, it proved challenging at times. Some of our kids got sick, and some personalities emerged that created unnecessary drama.

But those events were overshadowed by so much fun: late-night swims at our villa, dance parties, pizza-eating contests, soccer in the dark, movies, and family dinners.

The reality of having to move 10 people around was challenging. It required two cars and way more lead time than I’m used to. But in the middle of all this, my man and I found a few slices of time, just the two of us, to connect and really celebrate the life we’d built.

One of the most memorable of those moments happened in the midst of dinner cleanup one night. The kids were amped and getting loud. My man poured each of us a glass of wine, and we hid in the bedroom. The little ones (who were 9 at the time) knocked on our door, and we instructed the big kids to handle the situation.

The entire trip, and getting all the kids physically together, was such a pivotal experience.

It proved that what we had built together wasn’t a crazy dream. We learned that our focus on connecting the kids over all those channels had actually worked.

More than that, it cemented us all as a family…a big, messy, unconventional, and chaotic one…but a family all the same.

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Midlife Romance Without Filters and A Damn Good Data Plan

I used to believe love meant constant presence, proximity, daily check-ins, synced calendars, shared ZIP codes.

I thought real love had to look like morning coffee together and falling asleep in the same bed every night. Anything less felt like distance, and distance, I assumed, meant disconnection.

Now, I know that love looks more like presence without pressure. Like a good-morning text that lands before sunrise in California and a goodnight call from tomorrow in Melbourne.

Love is an “I miss you” that actually means something. It’s not performative.

It’s phone calls in grocery-store parking lots, Zoom dinners during which one of us is eating breakfast, reading the same book a hemisphere apart, and sharing the best lines out loud.

It’s forwarding memes, syncing playlists, and texting NSFW messages that land at just the right moment.

It’s trust that doesn’t need surveillance.

It’s knowing he’s got my back, even when he’s literally a world apart.

It’s not about being physically near all the time. It’s about being emotionally all in, all the time.

Real love isn’t measured in hours spent together.

It’s measured in how you show up, even from across the globe.

Spill It, Sister.

Which relationship rulebook did you burn at midlife and which one are you still secretly rewriting?

Tell me one thing you wish someone had told you about love after 50; comment here, DM or email at realgirlsguide55@gmail.com. Your story may end up in my book!

We’ve earned every wrinkle. Might as well make more laugh lines together.
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