WHEN I MET my girlfriend, she couldn’t tell what gender I was and I couldn’t tell what country she was from. It was October 2009, and we’d both found ourselves at the only lesbian bar in Prague, where we were both studying abroad.

We didn’t actually introduce ourselves to each other until after three hours of making out on the dance floor, when we were about to leave the bar. I took her back to my dorm room, and the next morning as she was leaving I gave her my Czech phone number, but told her to Facebook me in case I’d misremembered it. She friended me a few hours later, and I went through her photos to try to get a clearer picture of what she looked like; I’d kind of forgotten, since I had been really drunk and, furthermore, not really engaged in our interactions. More stalking revealed photos of her in a cheerleading uniform. “Three words: lesbian French cheerleader,” I texted to a friend, “It’s not the walk of shame, it’s the walk of triumph.”

She texted me first, or I probably wouldn’t have seen her again. I didn’t make it easy for her to get to know me — we both knew what we were after with those ‘hey want to come over’ texts, so why pretend it was anything else? — but about a month into our casual sex and hanging out, something gave. We cared about each other.We decided we were actually “together,” whatever that meant — knowing I would leave Prague a month after that, in December.

We had agreed that we would break up when I left. What was the point of long-distance relationships? What was a relationship without sex? Neither of us thought we could do long distance. Furthermore, we thought we would never see each other again anyway, or at least not for a long time, as I went to school in New York and she lived in France. All we could do, and all we resolved to do, was try to live in the moment, to cherish the moments we could spend together, and move on with our lives.

But I don’t think either of us made an effort to move on. Instead, I learned that I could text international numbers from my phone (and then I learned how much texts to international numbers cost). We Skyped, emailed and Facebooked (and drunk dialed) often, all while making attempts to seem like just friends. It didn’t feel like we’d broken up. I decided to go back to Prague for spring break, using money I’d saved up from my summer internship. I asked my then ex-girlfriend if she wanted to see me again. She said yes. This is when we first decided to try being in a long distance, open relationship together, almost a year ago.

We knew ourselves well enough to know that we would probably not be able to remain “faithful” to each other in a monogamous sense, but we could also separate sex from emotional attachment. If we still had feelings for each other, why let distance and sex with other people get in the way of that? We agreed to follow a set of rules we came up with together. We told each other never to feel as if we had to hide anything from one another, and promised to tell each other if we realized our feelings for each other had changed.

Still, as we waited for March to arrive, distance strained us. You can tell on Skype when people aren’t that interested in what you’re saying, when they’re browsing other pages while listening to you speak, or regularly late to Skype dates.

March came, and there I was in Prague. The second night I was there, we went to a bar, talked about our future, concluded that we basically had no future, and then decided that the only logical course of action was to break up again when I left at the end of break. Our feelings for each other had dissipated anyway, or so we thought.

But it felt so normal to live with my girlfriend in her apartment, to plan around each other’s schedules, to play escalating games of truth or dare in nightclubs using other people. Our feelings for each other returned, perhaps stronger than before. Towards the end of the week, we returned to the same bar where we had first met. There, on the dance floor, we told each other we loved each other for the first time. Two days later, I left, and we broke up, again.

I returned to New York and spent the next few nights sitting in the dark listening to Dashboard Confessional. But my sulking was short-lived, because three days after I was back in the states, my now ex-ex-ex-girlfriend informed me that she was looking for summer internships in New York so she could come and see me again. She asked me if I wanted to be with her, at least until it was certain she couldn’t come, at which point we would finally stop trying to make it work. I said yes and we re-entered our long distance, open relationship.

While we were together in New York that summer, I realized that it wasn’t even the sex that made the distance hard to bear, but the little things, like being able to hold hands, or kiss, or cuddle in bed at night, or have conversations about things we both went through together, instead of recounting experiences we had separately to each other. Even though we said we wouldn’t, we started tentatively speculating about a future together. But even if it was fun to talk about what a future together might look like, we knew at the same time that it would be extremely difficult, and maybe not worth the effort.

The last time I saw my girlfriend in person was in October. She came back to New York for a week to interview with a couple of companies for possible internships in New York next year, just in time for our one year anniversary of meeting each other (we don’t really know when we actually became a couple, so our initial one-night-stand date will have to do). The next time I’ll see my girlfriend is this month, when I’ll be going to Paris, where she currently goes to school, for most of my winter break.

I forget that people are sometimes offended by the concept of open relationships. Some people think it means we’re sluts, or coercive, or manipulative, or afraid of commitment, or they don’t take our relationship as seriously as that of monogamous couples. I can’t speak for others, but for me, this kind of arrangement makes sense to me, for us. Even if we were to be in the same city for more than a month at a time, I don’t know that we would necessarily become monogamous. Our relationship works the way it does because we share the idea that life should be about new experiences and living life as fully as you want, and sex is a way through which one can experience new things. We trust each other enough to tell each other the truth, and to know that our actions, if hurtful, were not meant to be. We’re careful to acknowledge each other’s independence and not make each other feel caged or held back. We don’t need each other, but we would like to share our lives with each other. We can live without each other, but we would prefer not to.

It’s not easy to maintain this kind of relationship, but I don’t think any other kind of relationship comes effortlessly either. It certainly takes more effort to keep in touch due to the distance, and more energy and creativity to keep our feelings for each other strong. It might take more effort for us to understand each other due to language barriers (though her English is better than my French) and cultural differences (I’m a lesbian Asian-American; she’s a bisexual white French woman), but the more different we realize we are, the more similar we discover we are at the same time. I never assume anything about what we mean when we talk to each other, and make sure to ask for clarification if I don’t understand something before reacting. From previous experiences and from what I’ve witnessed from my friends’ dating behavior, my relationship with my girlfriend is much healthier and more mature than a lot of my peers’ monogamous, local couplings.

It hasn’t always been good. Since March, the time we’ve spent apart have gotten progressively longer, and harder to bear as we got to know each other more. Our feelings for each other have fluctuated accordingly. Doubt over how much we actually love each other, how real our feelings are, seeps in at times. But despite all this, we hold on. We’ve grown closer and our relationship has gotten stronger each time we’ve met in person and each time we parted, and each time we’ve seen each other I’m reassured that it is indeed worth it to keep this going for as long as we can.

Every time I think of how I came to be in this relationship, I think, I am so lucky. I am lucky that I met this one girl out of all the girls in that bar, out of all the girls in Prague. I am lucky that this girl turned out to be a relatively well-adjusted, sane individual with the patience and determination to bring me out of my shell. I am lucky we both have the resources to support our expensive relationship, in terms of airfare and foreign living expenses. I am lucky we have access to technology that helps us stay in each other’s lives. I am lucky we both have the intellectual capital necessary to find ways to be together through work or school or internships, even for short periods of time. She makes me want to be a better person, and I know that, for now, I love her, and she loves me. There’s not much else to say, except that we’ll see what happens, when it happens. What else can I ask for? What else can I expect?