Why Everyone Should Try a Long-Distance Relationship

It’s hard, but make no mistake: long-distance is worth it.

My boyfriend lives in Berlin. I live in New York. On our last night together before he moved, he looked at me and said “this doesn’t have to be a tragedy,” and, weirdly, it hasn’t been. Sure there are challenges (read: time zones) and disappointments (read: time zones), but our relationship has no more (and, dare I say it, probably a lot less) woe and doom than any other. In fact, there are some aspects of loving somebody from afar that are pretty baller. Hear me out.

I’ve now been in one long distance relationship or another for six years, and I’ve never stopped defending the choice. People want to know when I’m going to come to my senses, when I’m going to pin down a relationship that “works.” To them I say: my relationship is working out beautifully, thank you, and, actually, I think the detractors should try out the arrangement sometime.

I entered my first long-distance romance when I was 17. He was going to college and I had another year of high school. We were together-but-apart for almost all of the half-decade we dated—seeing each other every other weekend when we were in the same state, on Christmas breaks when we weren’t. We Skyped every day. It ended slowly, like a breakup happening under water.

And then a few months after moving to New York, I met my roommate’s friend, a Columbia student, at our apartment’s first party. I very quickly started loving him — problematic because he was moving to Germany in a year. Eight months later, under circumstances aggravated by our relationship’s implicit expiration date, we broke up. It didn’t take, the breaking up. Love is kind of a bully, punting you in the stomach right when you think you’re in control of the situation.

So that means six years of long-distance relationships, including the transatlantic bruiser I’m in now. That’s more than a quarter of my life. Nearly all of my “adult” life.

So you could say I’m something of an expert. An expert in love letters and postcards. An expert in awkward hellos. An expert in first kisses. An expert in “I-love-you eyes” (patent pending). An expert in stilted conversation, a professional-grade scrambler of daily hand-beaten, half-stiff stories about my uninteresting life. An expert in Skype sex. In G-chat sex. It sounds more cultivated than it is; long-distance relationships are proverbial sink-or-swim situations, and these skills were my water-wings. Now, after a few Pokemon-style evolutions, they’re the boat that connects my point of the map with his, some bajillion miles away on the other side of the Atlantic.

Some people are confused in my choice in a partner, ascribing to him no personal attributes other than his current absence. They wonder, aloud, why I work so hard when there are other good, more convenient men on the market. (“On the market,” like they’re rainbow trout on ice.)

Of course, I think of it differently. I have impeccable taste in men—smart, understanding ones. Ones that are these things and still willing to forgo sex with other people for the sake of loving and sexing me in exclusivity at sparse, intensely planned intervals. That says a lot about the quality of man I’m dating, so I’m not sure why people are confused.

Make no mistake: loving someone from afar can be a very poignant experience, but it’s so often a decent, legitimate (and utterly disregarded!) way to love someone. Being apart isn’t always intolerable. In fact, it’s actually pretty great to carry on with life without utterly braiding a self into someone else’s self. Habits go undisrupted. There’s no need to consult someone about nap schedules and mealtimes. There’s no eternal battle about whether or not it’s worth it to incur his judgment when you take the elevator up to your fourth-floor apartment.

For everybody who’s confused about being in a long-distance relationship, listen up: being in separate countries does not make our love a blues song or a sonnet or an alt-rock ballad. It’s a relationship, not a tear-jerker starring Sandra Bullock. Does distance suck sometimes? Sure, but all relationships suck sometimes, and if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that distance shouldn’t be a reason why a good relationship needs to end. In fact, there are plenty of reasons why being in separate countries is actually really cool. For example:

Sleeping in your own bed.

You always have your pillow. You always have your toothbrush. You always have your deodorant and your retainer. You know exactly where your clothes are. You never have to turn your underwear inside-out either.

Romance is kind of the opposite of convenience anyway.

It’s shitty and I know it’s shitty but it’s going to be said anyway: False and fabricated as the genre may be, there’s no great romance that doesn’t involve a whole lot of longing. That’s not to say that missing someone creates love in a vacuum, but it would be foolish to deny that daily absence makes every intermittent meeting feel more saturated. It lengthens that getting-to-know-you limerence that has you feeling like a stag staring down a sedan on a dark country road: fear and an exhilarating realization that you’ve happened to cross paths with something more mysterious, more blinding, and more powerful than you can possibly remember experiencing. That feeling, the one that makes poets, lasts much longer if you’re loving someone inconvenient. Of course, reveling in misfortune is never healthy, but for many people there’s a long period where that inconvenience isn’t angst. Or at least, where the angst adds savor.

Prioritizing other stuff.

Work crazy hours, visit your nieces and nephews, exercise regularly. Watch only the bad movies you want to watch, listen to country music, and drink your dinner with your coworkers. It’s liberating.

You have a second home somewhere really weird.

I’m lucky he lives in Berlin because Berlin is a place full of English-speaking weirdos. It’s full of people who drink beer on picnic benches in front of convenience stores until sunrise. It’s got bars in old public bathrooms and bar bathrooms done up entirely in mirror. But wherever he lived, it would be a totally different place than my place, which would double the number of misadventures we could have.

You learn a lot about yourself.

It’s pretty much, to quote the cultural touchtone that is Ms. Hanna Montana, “the best of both worlds.” There’s somebody to G-chat with about the angry banalities of everyday life (the J train; always the J train), but at day’s end, it’s you living on your own terms, figuring out what you want out of the only life you’ll ever get to ride out.

All that being said, if one really wants to understand a long-distance relationship, it’s important to note: you’d still probably shave off your eyebrows and gnaw through a roll of Reynolds Wrap if that meant you could argue about meals and movie choices. But being physically apart is not always the worst of it. Here’s what’s hard:

Greeting at airports.

Smooching for the first time in three months in front of 200 people is not romantic. Plus there’s a tangle of bags you have to figure out what to do with first. Your lips fit together wrong for a second. You are so incredibly aware that there are eyeballs encroaching on Your Moment, so it never lasts very long. Maybe for some people their fields of vision narrow and the stale smell of Starbucks and Burger King melts away. For me, the logistics of the act are very stressful; anticipation has already stripped my nerves, so I’m pretty much a live wire anyway. Luckily I don’t have a car because if there were ever a double-parking situation thrown in I’d probably combust.

The honeymoon fade.

You can probably get a week clutching at the shooting star tail of oxytocin and vasopressinI. In that week you see in Technicolor, the air curling around you like it does for Pocahontas, the world with the brightness adjusted and the tone corrected. It’s a feeling of rightness so sweet that you could not imagine how you had forgotten the experience of it. Everything is different.

So when, after a week, he or she has stopped kissing you on the forehead and those invisible forces that keeps your hands on each others bodies night and day has started to become less powerful, it can leave a bruise on a soft heart, a feeling that’s infuriatingly difficult to justify, particularly for such a reasonable person (ha!) as yourself.

Flights home.

There is no time when the tiny agonies of long-distance are more acute than when they’re slotted between a rolling drink cart (why do the tiny whiskeys cost $9?!) and the sleeping stranger in seat 36B. On the seat-back mini-TV there’s a constant reminder: the plane is going 536 miles per hour away from what you’re now certain is the only thing that makes you happy. By the time a body’s metabolized the peanuts and pretzels, it’ll add up to 3,968 miles. It’s blindingly fast. It’s hard to shake the melancholy, the lost, helpless feeling of being trapped on a floating tin can hurtling toward an empty bed.

The regret.

You didn’t take that walk to the lighthouse under the George Washington bridge like you wanted. You didn’t use that restaurant gift card like you planned. You didn’t watch nearly as much Buffy the Vampire Slayer as was on the agenda. You waited for this visit for months and now it’s slipped away before you even got to eat the salt and vinegar chips you bought for the occasion. What, are you supposed to eat those alone now? You wake up way too early the day he or she leaves thinking about it.

It’s like what Calvin says to Hobbes at the end of summer: “There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”

No matter what you do, no matter how little you sleep, at the end of it you feel like you’d been lied to—clearly somebody should have let you know, somewhere amidst the weeks of chest-tightening anticipation of the visit, that it will end. And it always does.

So you say it to yourself again, alone, at night: it doesn’t have to be a tragedy. And, after a few days, it’s not.

Cover photo by Thomas Long.