ari ellington
Nov 4 · 6 min read

Why Long-Distance Relationships are Like Onions

Long-distance relationships are most often seen as exhausting, impractical, or doomed to fail. The way we see these relationships does vary on a few variables — how long will the couple be apart? How long were they together before the separation? How far apart from each other will they be? How often will they visit each other? — but generally, it’s our belief that long-distance relationships aren’t quite built to last.

And this makes sense. Not only does psychology support this conclusion in studies, but we can kind of just tell. Whether we’ve been in one ourselves, known someone else who is or has been, or have simply seen it in TV shows, we all understand the loneliness and desperation that comes with a long distance. People crave physical connection and can’t fulfill that when their partner is so far away. Will they turn to cheating? Slowly drift apart? Or just break up? Only time will tell, but it often seems to be a tale of a thousand woes. Nobody wants to be the friend who has to hear about relationship troubles all the time, especially when the solution is a very obvious “just break up already!” but long-distance relationships might not be all bad.

If you’ve heard a young person tell you they have a new internet boyfriend, and that they met on Instagram, and that they’re totally dating now and are really happy, your first instinct might be to roll your eyes. Yet that has been my life. For nearly three years. I have held a steady relationship. We didn’t meet on Instagram or anything like that, but we might as well have. I’ve never even met him in person. He lives over a thousand miles away from me, in a time zone three hours ahead. And I’ve never been in a more fulfilling and healthy relationship before.

People often ask me how on earth I can do long-distance, or remark that they could never do it. My response is always the same.

“It’s easy to do it if you’re with the love of your life.”

And that sounds incredibly fucking cheesy, but it’s true. When you love someone so much that you can’t stand to be apart from them, you’ll do anything to stay together. Even if together isn’t in a physical space. We have phones and instant messaging and video calls and ways to watch movies together and even ways to have sex. So while we aren’t together in the sense of being in the same room, we’re together in the sense of being alive.

For example, let’s say you’ve moved out to go to college, and this is your first time away from your family. No one on earth would say to you, “Well, you might as well give up things with your mother. There’s no way things will work out between the two of you, with the distance and all.” Like, what? Of course you would still keep in contact with your family (if you wanted to, of course). Yet if this happens with a lover, the reaction is much different.

If you watch me interacting with my boyfriend on the outside, I look just like any other Gen Z kid staring at their phone. Absorbed. Missing the world around them. And that just seems sad. So how could this kind of relationship make me happy? How could I, and so many other people, go without being able to look into their partner’s eyes, or hold their hand, or sleep in the same bed?

Truth be told, it’s almost impossible. Every moment of every day I wish he was here. I wish I had someone to hold and someone to kiss. I wish I had someone to just touch. Someone to cry to and feel safe with and spend nights watching the Shrek movies for the tenth time for some godforsaken reason.

It really does just hurt sometimes.


Objects and processes disappear through their use. If you notice a process messing up or it intruding on your work, it isn’t working anymore. It isn’t fulfilling its purpose.

The assembled self uses other systems to operate. These networks and tools become instinctual to use when we use them. For example, we don’t question how useful our fingers are for typing, writing, eating, and everything else until we sprain one, or burn one, or anything else that hinders or takes away the use of one of them. You do not notice your own immune system until you get sick (and damn yourself for not being grateful while you were well). And so, tools and systems work incredibly well most of the time. So much so that we don’t stop and think about even a few out of the thousands that help us every day.

You want to call your mom on the phone to tell her how your day was? All you have to do is open your phone, click on her number in your contacts, and boom, you’re talking with her. But if your cell service cuts out, you’ll definitely notice, and might end up yelling at your phone for being stupid (as if it’s the phone’s fault for cell tower placement).

This is quite useful for almost every walk of life. Particularly, advancing technology makes it much easier for us to work, to find directions when driving home, to cook food, to buy birthday presents, and to even find warmth and shelter. Overall, our quality of life is enormously improved through these tools. But it seems that we only ever get frustrated with them — I swear if I have to reconnect this television to the WiFi one more time! — that we’re more likely to view the negatives of these relationships.

So, counterintuitively, technology seems to awaken our awareness of the difficulties of using it instead of the enormous gains we benefit from these tools working most of the time. Technology is good. It’s amazing that you can read these words right now. Even if you might grow frustrated at how long it took your computer to load them.

We must ask ourselves, how do we appreciate all that we have?

These tools work in networks. Or, as Quinn Norton explained it, everything works in so many networks that we can’t even wrap our minds around how they work. What I mean to say is that the parts that make our tools work are so incredibly complex.

So let’s say again that you’re frustrated at your TV because you have to reconnect the WiFi over and over again because you live in a college dorm and apparently that means your WiFi isn’t a stable connection or something. Okay, cool. But when you’re upset about this WiFi issue, you can’t even imagine why the internet on campus works this way, or what satellites it uses to function, or how many other people are on this same connection, and so on and so forth.

Let’s say your phone carrier is Verizon, and when you go to call your mom, Verizon has just so happened to have not been working, at all, somehow, for the last week, and this continues on for another week. But Verizon isn’t working because its power supplier isn’t working, and they don’t have power because all of their coal mines dried up, so Verizon won’t be working until they figure all of this out.

These networks are connected with other networks. That WiFi from earlier is also tangled in with how your TV works, or how your texts to your significant other are sent, or how your brain fires when he texts you back. Shrek infamously said, “Ogres are like onions. . .they have layers.” But in this case, everything is an ogre, and everything has layers.

Nothing is as it seems.

So, what does this all mean? Well, I suppose that’s for you to decide. In my mind, the idea of networking and invisible practices and assemblage theory totally clicks with my idea of long-term relationships. Long distance relationships are like ogres, which are like onions, which have layers, like networks. Or maybe long distance relationships are absolutely nothing like ogres, because ogres don’t exist, and Shrek hasn’t been relevant in academic discourse since forever. But academic discourse is boring, so I’ll take the Shrek idea, please.

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