boyfriend

How to survive a long-distance relationship.

As of this month, I have officially been in a long-distance relationship for 2 years. I have spent, over the past 2 years, the past 730 days, about 1/8th of this time with my boyfriend. The other 7/8ths of the time I’ve fought loneliness, I’ve woken up in other men’s beds, I’ve discovered yoga and other new interests, I’ve pursued personal goals, I’ve made new friendships while reinforcing old ones, and I’ve learned to live an entire life outside of him, parallel to him, with him. 

I can’t claim to have mastered the secret to living in a long-distance relationship, because there is no secret. It’s just work. As a student you study to learn, as an employee you train to advance, and as a significant other in a long-distance relationship you communicate, you focus, you persevere to stay in love. Hint: it’s easier when you’re already in love. 

For those in or considering getting into a long-distance relationship, some advice: 

Communicate everyday. A common fear when it comes to long-distance relationships is the fear of growing apart - of acquiring a whole new set of life experiences that exclude your significant other. This fear is real. People adapt. They move on. The passing of time ensures this inevitability. The trick is to communicate as much as possible, whether for seconds or hours at a time - via text, via IM, via phone calls, via Skype, via any of the numerous communication mediums that exist today - and to talk about everything, from events as significant as a promotion or raise at work, to the mundane, like deciding between apple varieties at the grocery store or seeing a new hairdresser. 

Distance inherently excludes you from each other’s lives. Communication bridges the gap. 

Be reasonable. You deserve a life. Your significant other does too. You both deserve friends and happy hours and raucous nights out and spontaneous daytime excursions and fun and laughter and more. People tend to do funny things when they’re lonely - they get jealous of experiences that don’t involve them, and resentful of memories that don’t include them. Don’t be that person. Go out and make your own memories. They’ll become great conversation fodder when you’re digging for new things to talk about. 

On that note, sometimes, when you’re in a long-distance relationship, you’re lonely and you probably haven’t had sex in a while and a cute stranger will brush past and make eye contact with you at a bar and you’ll interpret that as an invitation to make out and, basically, sometimes shit happens. Not for everyone, but consider a safety clause (and communicate the conditions of which VERY explicitly). Sometimes, and no couple is exempt from this whether long-distance or not, you’re attracted to other people. It happens. There are millions of beautiful, interesting people in the world, and sometimes, by chance, one of these people will be in a room with you while your significant other is not.

Being attracted to another person doesn’t make you a bad person. However, acting on this attraction without the express, explicit approval of your significant other can make you an asshole. If you think you can handle it, talk about this type of situation in advance and lay out specific ground rules. For example, third-party guests must be objectively uglier. Or they must be a visiting student from a foreign country with a Visa that’s about to expire. Or they must have an uncommon physical quirk, like a lisp or a missing hand. 

Finally, be honest, be in love. Being in love makes being in a long-distance relationship easy. If your love is effortless, if it branches and grows like ivy across a brownstone, reaching and settling into every nook and crevice, being in a long-distance relationship will be a breeze. 

So be honest with yourself and your significant other. Be in love. And if you’re not in love, then end it. This is how you survive a long-distance relationship. 

On you, on this love, on this fever, on distance.

I live in a perpetually fevered state. 

From the way that I walk to the way that I dance to the way that I practice yoga to the way that I engage (or disengage) others in conversation, I handle all areas of my life with a very specific intensity. I often arrive at my destinations panting, the heat from my cells radiating outward and increasing the temperature in the room ever so slightly. When I interact with people, I either make zero eye contact or lock eyes with such ferocity that it just makes all parties uncomfortable - there is no middle ground. 

I make swift, yet firm decisions about places to eat, about life choices to pursue, about people with whom I want to surround myself. I do nothing casually. Even when I write, I either completely unfold all of my truth, all of myself into my words, or I say nothing substantive, choosing to instead hide behind carefully crafted bullshit masquerading as prose. 

And when I love - god, when I love. It is consuming. I’ve always found it difficult to mask my feelings, any of my feelings, and when I love, most of all, it’s so obviously apparent. My love pours out of me, it floods my conversations; I find myself wading through it, trying not to drown in it. This love, this overwhelming, encompassing, ubiquitous love. 

It’s no secret that I’m in a long-distance, open relationship. And to be perfectly honest, on a day-to-day basis, it’s not even that difficult to maintain. We speak everyday. We live our own lives. But it’s when I see him, wake up next to him with our limbs tangled together, spend afternoons doing nothing except merely breathing in each other’s air, and unceremoniously soon after have to say goodbye - everything stops and suspends for a while. An ill-constructed dam has popped up to bar my love.

I swell, I burst. I am overtaken with a desire to seek warmth and affection, to quell this fever, to sate the urge to have my love met. 

It’s been 2 years of this distance, and I make no apologies for the attempts that I’ve made to connect with others, to fill the space that’s been left behind. Because when I think about him and I think about us, I know that this is it, this is my forever.

Whether my love leaks out of me is of little consequence. Not when there is so much of it to offer.