Keeping your LDR secret

[Andy]

Haha, I think some of Tanja's family & friends were worried I was gonna turn out to be a rapist and a murderer too!

[folclor]

lol, that's my dad's immediate response if I say I have an online friend or if I go to hang out in a part of town he's not okay with. ^^; "He's going to kidnap you, rape you, and murder you!" ...And yet he gives out our address to people he barely knows. =/ Oh well, at least parents can come around. ^^

[MadMolly]

My close friends/family know, but I don't usually tell people I don't know very well. They just all assume I'm anti-boyfriends or something. :P

[Tanja]

yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but my parents freaked out that I was even Facebook friends with my boyfriend. He was friends with one of my best friends before, though, and my parents were like, "just because he's her friend doesn't mean he's okay! He could be a psychopath and you wouldn't even know! How do you know he's not lying on his Facebook?" ...Yes, I'm sure he belongs to a huge society of mass-murdering, kidnapping rapists and they all have fake Facebook accounts that are linked together.

Yep, that's what my dad said, that I'm meeting a rapist and a murderer... I said "dad, do you really think he's been talking to me for 1,5 years just so he could chop me into pieces when we meet?" . That shut him up

[folclor]

heh, yeah, I want to say something like that to my family but they'd take it as smarting-off and start yelling and then everyone'd be mad and it'd get us no where. My parents have zero trust for me and I think it's because...well, actually, I don't know why that is. But, yeah, I think they're pretty convinced he's a rapist/murderer, but I let my mom talk to him on video and he said something like, "I wanted to talk to you in case this goes anywhere" and she did not take that well. ^^;

[polkapiggy]

Well Alex and I became a couple on the 24th Oct. '08 and I told my two best friends (one of which actually introduced me to him and helped me ask him to be my boyfriend!). I kept it secret from pretty much everyone for a month or so, but then a guy at school asked me out and I explained to him I was out with Alex. Im still not sure whether its a good or bad thing, but one of the gossippy girls at my school overheard and told EVERYBODY. Of course, this got very distorted due to the rumour mill and I ended up with people accusing both me and him of awful things. People said horrible, nasty things about him, like he was a paedophile, he was stalking me, I did *things* for him, I was only after him for his money (that one is such a fail- we are BOTH broke!), he was 50 years old. Ugh, it was terrible. However, this meant that I had the opportunity to tell people the truth, which I did. I told most of my friends and to this day they stand by my side and support me ^_^ at first, pretty much everybody was quite harsh about it, but nowadays telling people is SO much easier!! Its the same thing each time...

"where does he live?" "have you met him in person?" "so, did someone introduce you?" "wait, he's AMERICAN?!?!" "oh and he's black too!?!?!?" "what?! YOU'VE NEVER MET?!!?" "a YEAR together? seriously?" "but isn't it hard?" "wow, do you think you love him" "aaawww, are you gonna get married?!"

Some people take it better than others, but by now the story is pretty straight and most people know. Whenever I tell ANYONE I get the same paedophile/creeper lecture from them and it literally just bounces right off, I pay no attention to the narrow-minded people that can't at least TRY and understand. I find that most people can't understand this kind of relationship until they are in it themselves.

Ah...but then, theres the case of my parents. They don't know. Practically everybody else does, just not my parents. Telling them is just SO risky!! Its extremely complicated, but basically I wont be telling them any time soon, to be honest.

[Veiled_Dreamer]

He and I are very complicated, but he is my lover for sure, and I tried to let my parents understand that. I was honest with my mom, totally honest. But then... she started getting really not nice about him. She would bring him up in arguments just to hurt me, she would lecture me about how I'm wasting my time, she would say all kinds of things that she would later apologize for. Then, since I live in a small town, somehow everyone suddenly knew his first and last name and age and all this really stalkerish sounding crap. That freaked him out as much as it freaked me out. The only defense I had, since no one here is going to understand, is I would say, "He's not my boyfriend, drop it." Because he's not, we don't use that title. XD And I just let them believe we were just friends. So then I decided I would just talk to my brother about it, but he started saying things about it in front of people and I couldn't deal with explaining the situation. So I shut up talking to him about my lover too. My mom inquired kind of condescendingly about him a month or so ago, and I said things had changed and I didn't want to talk about it. I'm still very evasive when she brings him up, and now I just pretend like there's no one in my life. No one knows, except my penpal that's also my best friend, and a few of my close friends that are older and most of them don't live around here. No one knows how serious it is, anyway.

Is it the best solution? Hmm. I know that he and I agreed no one needs to know, because that's just how we feel about it. Besides, he's been in an LDR like this before and everyone was very negative about it and even accused him of pedophilia, to his face. Just because he's over 18 and I'm not doesn't make him a pedophile... I wish people would get that. So no one on his end knows, at all, and I'm fine. I know he would never be anything with anyone else before he ended things with me. People on my end are slowly forgetting the name, but I get questions every once in a while. I say that I don't want to talk about it, I do a double take and act like I don't know the name at first, I change the subject, I do whatever I need to to get off the subject. But I'm not a liar (I wouldn't be good at it, I think) so I don't weave a web of lies or anything. Does it hurt me sometimes that we can't be open? Yes. But I think it's for the best right now.

[ettie]

For me it was always out there but without actually saying it if you know what I mean. My boy didn´t tell anyone but they all knew because he came to visit first and he was never interested in Spain before then, plus they noticed he would talk on the phone at weird hours (time difference is 6hrs). For my family it was obvious the same way and specially when he came because I suddenly took a long trip to show some foreigner the country and stopped by my parents to introduce him. It wasnt until they realized it was a real thing and not just a summer thing that they started asking questions like "when is he coming back" or "what is going to happen" or "are you in love"

[polkapiggy]

Just because he's over 18 and I'm not doesn't make him a pedophile... I wish people would get that.

THANK YOU! i wish people would understand that!! Alex's birthday is one day after mine, and when I turn 15 in june, he'll turn 18. Suddenly people see something wrong with the age difference the moment he's 18. At the moment, nobody see's anything wrong with 14 & 17, but 18? Everyone seems to think the moment he's 18 he's automatically a paedophile!

[Andy]

THANK YOU! i wish people would understand that!! Alex's birthday is one day after mine, and when I turn 15 in june, he'll turn 18. Suddenly people see something wrong with the age difference the moment he's 18. At the moment, nobody see's anything wrong with 14 & 17, but 18? Everyone seems to think the moment he's 18 he's automatically a paedophile!

You're 14??

I thought you were 16 lol.

You've got A's at GCSE level already too? Man you must be super-smart!

[Veiled_Dreamer]

I'm 14 and he's 20... which sounds so spectacularly awful XD but I'm 15 in April. >.> So five and a half years.

Are the GCSEs a standardized test in Britain? I took the ACT two years ago in seventh grade and got 89th percentile... of all high school students. XD I don't know if those results were accurate though because I had never taken a higher level math and still got like 56th percentile in trig. =P

[polkapiggy]

You're 14??

I thought you were 16 lol.

You've got A's at GCSE level already too? Man you must be super-smart!

haha, yes I'm 14, but im not super-smart, i just work really really hard! And it helps that I did two GCSE's in year 9 so i got them out of the way, so this year I can focus!

Are the GCSEs a standardized test in Britain?

Nope, they are almost like a high school diploma, but quite different. Basically, for the last two years of secondary (high) school, you study for your GCSEs (General Certificate of Standardized Education) which are for each subject. Its really quite complex, but basically each GCSE is made up of coursework, and exam (but some have no coursework). Each subject is different in how much the coursework accounts for and how much the final exam accounts for. So, for example, I'm taking food technology. This year is my first, so I spend the whole year doing "coursework" which is just making the food and then doing a project on a particular food item, and then at the end of next year i'll take the final exam. The coursework makes up 60% of the marks, and the exam is 40%, and so at the end of it I will get a grade for my GCSE in food tech. Every subject works differently and the system varies enormously from subject to subject (in Art, 65% is coursework, whereas in Religious Education the coursework is only 15%!)

Sorry if that makes no sense XD

[Veiled_Dreamer]

No, that does make perfect sense. That's really interesting. I'm from America and I have a lot of friends overseas, I never had any clue what they were talking about.

[Andy]

I'm 14 and he's 20... which sounds so spectacularly awful XD but I'm 15 in April. >.> So five and a half years.

I can understand why you'd think that, if I'm honest I even raised an eyebrow when I read it! (Sorry! )

Having said that, Tanja is exactly 5 years and one month older than me, so for 30 days some 6-7 years ago, I was 14 and she was 20! It's kinda weird to think of it like that!

She won't thank me for saying that either... :S


PS I'm officially the first LFADdict now!

[polkapiggy]

My sister and her boyfriend are 4 years apart, so when she was 14, he was 18. Nowadays there are 16 & 20. Personally, I see nothing wrong with age differences (in MOST situations). Its the few people that go too far with it that give a bad name to everybody else. If my parents protest about the age difference between Alex and I when i do finally tell them, I'll just wave the fact that Lexi and Jarreth (my sister and her boyfriend) are even further apart than Alex and I.