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Once JB and I were engaged, it was time for me to leave New York City and move to Omaha to be with him. No more long-distance dating for us! We planned to drive to the Midwest over Memorial Day weekend.

By this point, I was ready to leave New York. Now don't get me wrong -- I loved living in Manhattan. I loved being able to read the newspaper on my subway ride to work and then buy a 75-cent cup of coffee from the vendor outside my office who knew how much cream and sugar I liked. I loved that the Chinese restaurant below my apartment would deliver lo mein to my door.

I loved that I had friends from various stages of my life living in the same city. Best of all, perhaps, I loved that I had my family nearby -- my sister in Murray Hill and my parents a 45-minute train ride away in New Jersey.

So why did I want to leave?

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To start with, I was becoming disenchanted with my job in publishing. Also, while I adored my neighborhood near Lincoln Center, my rent was absurd for a tiny bedroom in a fourth-floor walk-up. And I was tired of only being able to buy at the grocery store what I could carry up four flights of stairs and fit into our minuscule kitchen. Plus, I was sick of the noise.

I was looking forward to a quieter city, a slower pace of life and a bigger apartment in Omaha. When we went to the supermarket in Omaha that weekend, we spent several hundreds of dollars on groceries, because we could. Unlike my NYC kitchen, we had the space to store all of the essentials.

But while we were checking out, an unusual thing happened: The cashier tried to make conversation with us. This was an unfamiliar experience for me. In New York, people avoided making eye contact with one another. God forbid you should start talking to a stranger!

I felt isolated at times. In NYC, everything I needed was within a one-block radius. In Omaha, we couldn't even find a Chinese restaurant that made deliveries (not that that was so terrible, because we couldn't find any decent Chinese food either).

What made me the saddest, though, was living so far away from my family. For the first time since I studied abroad in Sydney, Australia, I was living in a different time zone than my parents.

Although I was finally with the love of my life, I was miserable my first few weeks in Omaha. I had no job and no friends. I was afraid to drive but had no place to go anyway. The only thing I could do to occupy my time was obsess about planning my wedding and miss the life I was so anxious to leave behind in New York City.