The big question

Should you sacrifice work for love? Career Builder via CNN.com article.

I found this article on CNN from Careerbuilder.com. I immediately thought this might pertain to me, given my long (long long) distance relationship that I currently find myself in. I replaced “work” with “Peace Corps service” and it spoke to me.

Sorta.

The article talks about choosing love over career and vise versa. Can a person live with only one? The wizards at Careerbuilder (who were probably not taking into account those of us around the world that take long-distance relationships to the max and live in different countries in different continents) have decided that though a successful career is great in its own way, it doesn’t necessarily take the place of a fulfilling, romantic relationship. Ah, Careerbuilder via CNN, you are so wise. Now, where the hell were you nine months ago when the long-distance part of a long-distance relationship didn’t really hit me?

My time in South Africa has been…turbulent/interesting/different/pure suckiness (can you guess which one?) and being in a long-distance relationship has been one factor that has made it such. Sure, I can be grateful that I’m not stuck wondering if my future love of my life is one of these drunk dudes with missing teeth and questionable hygiene who tell me they love me and call me “lahoa” (white person) or “baby.” Unenthusiastic yay. Would they have ever had a chance anyway?

But I can wonder if leaving something that might still be something worthwhile way back when things were just starting to get….worthwhile….was really the right decision for me. I know I accepted my invitation and got on that plane to South Africa knowing that it wasn’t going to be easy, but somewhere in the back of my head I told myself that it’d be worth it somehow. And has it been? Ah, good question.

The day we got together, I had already applied to Peace Corps and had already made the decision that I’d go whether the Peace Corps called and said they had a placement for me in a month or a year. I was going to do it. I’m, uh, determined (or stupidly stubborn) that way. I think I told myself that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal to go. Hey, I told myself, we were friends before; we’ll just be friends again while I’m in Africa and if things are supposed to work out, they will. Ha. Look at me, Mum, I’m optimistic!

Yeah, that lasted about one month until my boyfriend told me he didn’t want to break up when I left. Now, things were going to get complicated. Nearly a year later, when I finally did get my invitation, accepted and moved all the way to South Africa, we were still together and we were doing well.

Then things got really complicated. The “great cell phone reception” that I’d heard about turned out only to work in the one spot in my room that the spiders, dirt, and other ghastly things called home. Our conversations consisted a lot of “Can you hear me? Babe! Can you hear me?” with me doing the “trying to get reception dance” around my room moving my ear this way and that, shifting a little in my bed, standing on my desk, etc. When we’d finally get tired of trying to understand what “Ghreia hreai giera” meant, we said bye and hung up with more questions to ponder. Did he say he wanted to break up? I’d think the next day while I was sitting at work. Through every form of technology we would clear up what was misconstrued on the phone, or what that instant message “really meant” and then somehow find some time to get a quick update on the current happenings of our lives.

It was exhausting. Oh, and did I mention the 7-hour time difference? Or the fact that he works 50-hour workweeks and I can barely manage to squeeze 8-10 hours of being at work a WEEK before I want to find a very high cliff and hurl myself off it?

So then when I went home, my father asked me over lunch one day why he never hears us talking to each other. “It seems like you guys don’t connect,” I remember him saying. As furious as I was with that comment (“We do so connect! Take it back!” screamed my 12-year-old self), I realized that it was true. We worked so hard over the previous eight months trying to communicate that all we really needed to do to be happy with each other now was hold each other’s hands. It was that easy, no dance required.

But was that productive? At a time in my life when I want to start figuring things out, I’m not figuring anything out. I’ve already made my decision about my Peace Corps experience a while back and now I am just biding my time till it’s over. How could I rationalize keeping the rest of my life at a standstill for it anymore? The article brought up a good thing for me to ponder:

"On a scale of one to 10, how much will this particular job matter in 10 years?" and "On a scale of one to 10, how much will this relationship matter to me in 10 years?"

Even though I do hope that something positive career wise can come from my time with Peace Corps, I’d like to hope that in the long-run it isn’t my defining factor. But my relationship? Now that’s a different story.

As in-tune to my current situation as this article felt to me, its tips from the “experts” (there are people who are experts on this?) to keep the flame going were completely ridiculous and irrelevant. Have a coffee break with your partner? Ha, yeah right. We couldn’t even have a virtual coffee break because our times for coffee are nearly completely opposite. However, this is how something like that would go:

Me: Love, you get on Skype at noon and I’ll get on at 7 p.m. You drink coffee, and I’ll drink coffee, decaf of course, and we’ll talk about drinking coffee if the reception hangs on long enough and if a spider doesn’t bite me or my fridge doesn’t shock me for coming too close, or if I don’t accidentally pour coffee on my computer.

Him: Babe, are you still there? Can you hear me?

Me: AHHHHH….damn fridge

Gee. How romantic. With this good advice, you could almost be Cosmopolitan. Or Oprah.

Or how about having a “work-free zone”? Ha! Be in the Peace Corps when people are calling you “lahoa” from your front porch and then tell me about “work-free zones.” Your work-free zone I call a $1,000 plane ticket home for two weeks…annually because saving the world does not pay well. Is that what you had in mind, Careerbuilder?

Ok, so they weren’t writing for Peace Corps volunteers, I get it. But it does make me think about things. Leaving again to come back to South Africa, back to this, back to the dance and to “Can you hear me,” back to a place where I possibly have already gotten everything out of it that I could now seems counterproductive.

So…maybe it’s time for a new plan.