Going the distance

Falling for someone on the other side of the world has never been simpler thanks to the internet, but sustaining a relationship is something else – a dodgy Skype connection and different time zones are the least of your problems

I'm waiting to hear her voice saying: "Hello you." I tried calling her four times but the calling card said out of credit, even though I just bought the damn thing. We tried Skyping but there was a time delay and an echo. We couldn't get into synch and kept saying: "No, you go first." We gave up. She's going to call me on the landline – the old-fashioned way. We'll have to keep it brief – at 60p per minute.

Everyone said it was doomed from the start; that it was just too far to sustain anything meaningful. If you were to stick a spike into Glasgow, where I live, and push it through the globe, it would come out very near Sydney. "What's wrong with you?" a friend asked. "Maybe you're just too scared of really being with someone."

Of course, I've been emotionally scarred by past failures and have many times run from commitment. And so I could construe that our relationship was just some passing fancy, a holiday romance that repeats now and again. However, after two years, seven long trips, more than ten months apart and many crises, I'd say we are more committed and together than a lot of couples who share a bed every night.

And it's not like we're the only people doing this. Marshall McLuhan, in 1964, predicted the world would become a global village. Decades later, anti-globalisation theorists such as Naomi Klein protest that McLuhan's utopia has become a nightmare; that the world is shrinking but becoming the same unified, franchised conformity. McWorld, NikeWorld… TescoWorld is on the verge of taking over a very large part of Glasgow. It's the same with big stores in Sydney.

The software companies encourage us to become 'liberated' from the Old World idea of national boundaries. Internet dating sites have spawned a revolution in long-distance dating and give tips on how to survive and thrive over distances apart, even selling it as a plus.

Blogs and MySpace have love affairs burgeoning between X in Taiwan and XX in Bishopbriggs. Online daters now travel hundreds of miles for that first date. The long-distance relationship is the new romantic ideal. Cybersex is preferable to touching someone because it keeps the longing intact and there is no messy morning after. If it doesn't work out, you can put your last cyber-partner into the spam file and press delete.

And so the search begins again on Plentyoffish and Match.com. Who's online? Who's checked out my profile? Davetherave29 in Seattle and Hunnybunny47 in Rome. The internet has, for better or worse, revived the long-lost art of longing. Or perhaps it's just capitalism doing its thing again, getting us to want what we can't have. The manufacturing of new desires.

In our months apart, the online tips on surviving a long-distance relationship (LDR) were not much help to us, as they offer the same predictable psychobabble common to all relationship help sites, from clichés – "absence really can make the heart grow fonder" – to bullet point tips such as these:

– Stay in touch. Call or Skype at least once a day, but avoid getting too routine. Make surprise calls. Be open about your emotional needs and problems. Trust is the key.

– Send each other presents.

– Keep diaries of your time apart so you can share them when you are reunited.

– But beware of reunion anti-climax.

Part of the challenge was not to become a typical LDR couple, but the fact is we've pretty much followed the bullet points. Daily communication, little gifts and honesty have helped us endure, although making 'surprise calls' is out of the question as, with an 11-hour time delay and hefty work schedules for us both, we have approximately an hour at night and in the morning when we can call. We speak twice a day.

On the negative side, the websites warn that a certain kind of person might seek out LDRs so they can cheat. That suspicion and fear grow across the distance, and the phone then becomes a method of surveillance and paranoia. "I called you at 8.30am and you weren't there. Where did you sleep last night?"

Infidelity is one of the teething troubles of the LDR; its temptation and threat. We've been through it and survived it, by talking about it and by knowing in advance that this could be a problem.

I met Emily in Sydney. I recall our first morning together, in the Blue Mountains, watching in awe as my shower water went down the 'wrong' way (in the southern hemisphere, it goes clockwise). Then hearing a bird outside her window that sounded impossibly like a parrot, I looked out and there were 15 bright pink cockatoos. That was just the start. Then there were kangaroos on golf courses and a once-lethal snake lying dead on her driveway.

Australia is more vast and alien than I could have imagined. The many towns and cities named after Scots and Scottish places do not make it more familiar. Perth is a metropolis with a vast Asian population that has far outgrown the place it was named after. The town of Menzies is on the edge of a desert greater in size than France and Germany put together.

From the start, we suspected that this love affair was to do with exoticising our cultural differences. Thankfully, we'd both been through it before; both attempted LDRs.

Emily is originally American and moved to Australia 15 years ago to be with an Aussie bloke, but then stayed for the love of the place after that love had ended. I'd had a romance with a woman from New York who had grown to love all things Glaswegian – more than me.

She bought the same Arab Strap albums, memorised the lyrics and sent me e-mails with the latest updates on Weegie slang, as if she were studying for an exam. She wanted to adopt my culture as her own, and the main reason I was with her was because I wanted a way out. Falling in love with someone's culture because you want to escape your own is a real problem.

Since then I have started to make my peace with Scotland and won't be running away. I have two children here and I'm going to be here for a decade, at least. Ironically, it was the exact same week I decided this that I met Emily.

At the end of our first week, we wrote down a list of reasons why we shouldn't even try to do this. Point two out of 12 was that perhaps we both fear intimacy. Point seven: perhaps one of us would try to turn this into a book. We are both novelists, hence the reason for the suspicion. We both know the necessary detachment from life that then breeds a need to go head-first into experience, so that you can, in time, turn around and detach yourself again, so as to write about it. It's an appalling, vampiric way of life and authors are notorious for it: feeding off their real lives, then backing out to fictionalise it.

We knew this, but at Sydney Airport when we first said goodbye, I told her I was going to abandon the novel I was working on, to try, instead, to write about what was happening to us, in fictional form.

She bought me a notepad in the duty-free lounge and the first chapter of the novel Distance, which I wrote on the 22-hour plane trip home, describes our first goodbye. The rest follows two characters who go in different trajectories to our own. I reset the story in New York and Edinburgh. It took a lot of negotiating and reading over the phone, but after six months the characters left us alone to get on with the many complications of our own lives.

The longest we've been apart is three months; we are just starting our second three month-er. I've been to see her three times; she's been here four. It's all about numbers, time differences, dates. Her last trip lasted four months.

She loves the sun, the Bondi Beach lifestyle. But the way it's worked out is that her return trip has taken her back into Australian winter and she'll return here as autumn ends. She will have a year of winter. We both suffer from seasonal affective disorder, and the lack of light in Scottish winter is not something anyone should willingly endure.

So, why not just have a relationship with someone in your own country? We have raised this question with each other often. But then again, we'd both been trying to have relationships with people in Sydney and Glasgow, and had been failing miserably. Communication breaking down with your live-in lover in the very same room is much worse than the problems you face with international line connections.

Skype failed us again, with a juddery picture and time delay. Even when the clocks change, they do not do so as you would expect. With Australia being a former British colony, you would think it followed obediently to British demand, like the way they celebrate Christmas in mid-summer, with Santa Clauses passing out on Bondi Beach from heat exhaustion.

But suddenly, in autumn, our nine hours apart became 11. It became harder to talk. One of us was always just waking and the other yawning from staying up so late to chat. We speak every day, twice a day for between 20 minutes to an hour.

And the worst thing about it, even if you are on Skype, or on some cheap international calling card with 100 minutes per pound, you feel you are measuring the minutes. Every second must be meaningful, and so you miss out on the things that normal couples have – the trivia, the banal everyday stuff: walking the dog, and this person I met, and what I had for dinner.

Questions about these things are asked but the replies are always re-caps, abridged, because time is ticking. You must always stay away from that thing that needs to be said – "God, I wish you were here" – which only leads to silence at so many pence or dollars per minute.

We laugh about the Skype problem. Emily gets to see my face through my webcam but I can only hear her voice and see a static picture of her that she's posted. So I end up looking at my own moving face on screen, trying to make myself look more cool or handsome for her, while she too is looking at me.

She jokes that I'm posing, pouting, being vain, that I'm self-obsessed. I'm not. It's just a software compatibility problem. As with long silences and late phone calls, I've had to learn not to read too much into everything.

Perhaps I desire a way to inject a good old-fashioned sense of detachment and longing. This is the way to keep the early stages of love alive. The infatuation. The need for craving and weeping; the outpouring of letters.

At the turn of the 20th century Franz Kafka had a long-distance love affair with a woman he had met for five minutes, which lasted five years, thanks to his letters. Writing is a dead art-form but still the need to love across impossible distances survives. It may even have grown since the internet. In the culture of instantly satiable desire, the one thing we perhaps long for, more than sex, is longing itself. To do it the old-fashioned way.

Maybe my friends were right – what I need is distance between me and the person I love. Some reinvention of the romantic ideal. But still, Emily and I have talked about this. Eleven hours apart and perhaps the time delay is a symptom of how it really is between men and women. Perhaps we need our distance.

We both laughed about how women prefer to have sex in the morning and men at night. A friend of hers had left her partner because they couldn't get into synch sexually. We were in hysterics… then there was the phone silence because we couldn't touch.

Why would anyone do this? I don't know. We don't. She will be here in Scotland in less than three months. In the meantime, all I know is that she will call at 10pm my time, which is 7am her time. And so I wait for her to have her cup of English Breakfast tea and get herself ready before she picks up the phone and dials my number. And when I pick it up, I will wait for her to speak first and she will say what she always says: "Hello you."

• Ewan Morrison's novel, Distance, is released on Thursday (Jonathan Cape, £12.99). His first novel, Swung, is available in paperback.