I got even more comfortable when we actually went out. He had grown up on the East Coast and reminded me of guys I knew from school. I was enamored with him pretty quickly. Grad school was really competitive, and I liked having him as a refuge from the pressures of studying. Before long we started talking every day. And it got more serious from there.

After about a month of dating, David went home to Virginia for the holidays. He called to catch up and then dropped the news: Things weren’t great there and he had decided to move back to help his family with their business. “I’m not coming back,” he said, and I was shocked. We never officially discussed entering a long-distance relationship, but we just kept right on talking at our normal pace. It wasn’t ideal, but school was so strenuous that I thought the lesser time commitment might actually be preferable. 

We ended up talking all the time. We’d text throughout the day, and when I got home, from classes we’d Skype. Then, my first narrow glimpse into the future: I started to feel that sometimes David was disrespectful of me and my time. He would call every morning around 8 a.m. on the East Coast because he wanted to wish me good morning or just to talk—he always wanted to know everything I would be doing that day—but it was 5 a.m. in California and I needed my sleep. When I brought it up or playfully complained about the wake-up call, he didn’t take the criticism well. He’d deny it was a weird thing to do or shut down entirely.