[I mostly write fictional stories, but this one is true — some details omitted or slightly modified to protect the guilty.]
This happened was when I was a grad student. I was in love with a woman in a foreign country, but for various reasons (I had limited financial means to go see her, she couldn’t afford to come to the US, and we’d never really established a solid physical relationship due to her hang-ups) that relationship was to some extent on “hold.” Nevertheless I had remained faithful to her for a year and a half as I tried to concentrate on my studies. Finally, I got a fellowship to go do field studies in the country in question — joy! I was pretty stressed out, though, in the last semester before I was to head over there. My “girlfriend” was sending mixed messages: sometimes she would talk about how excited she was that I was going to spend almost a year with her; other times, she’d tell me that she didn’t think I was actually going to end up coming. I tried to reassure her by joking that even if I didn’t want to go, I couldn’t avoid it as all the paperwork was done and I’d already withdrawn from classes for the next semester. That didn’t seem to reassure her. International telephone calls back then were expensive, so we didn’t talk that often. She didn’t have email access either — it wasn’t yet widely available outside of university computer science departments in her country. So we sent long handwritten letters back and forth, and I spent a lot of time trying to read between the lines that she wrote (it didn’t help that I was still learning the language). I knew I loved her and wanted to be with her, but I felt very uncertain about what I was going to find when I finally got over there.