I’ve been in a long distance relationship for 2 years, and we actually started out that way. New York — Austin. A 1 hour time difference. 1753 miles away. Anyone who hears about it falls into the same line of questioning. How did you guys meet? When are you going to live in the same city? How do you do it? Accompanied with those questions is the familiar look of pity, the assumption that I am miserable in this situation. But my relationship is one of the greatest blessings of my life. It has never been easier to love someone. Not because I’m an avoidant, not because I’m crazy, but because of the person I am so privileged to get to miss. When you find the right person, I actually think a long distance relationship can be the cheat-code for your twenties.
Your twenties are the time to be selfish
When I lament to my mom about our present distance dilemma, she looks confused, as if I should be glad to be in this situation. Her reasoning is as follows. You’re young. This is the one time in your life you truly get to be selfish. You’ll have to live with him for the rest of your life, what’s two more years that you can spend developing your career, friendships, and passions?
Her words resonated deeply with me, and I realized something about our generation. Even though we’re getting married later, we’re taking the responsibilities of marriage on earlier. Moving in together, merging friend groups, selecting careers based on location rather than opportunity, are all examples of how we slowly become dependent on our relationships for happiness.
Our parents had years to develop their own sense of self and platonic relationship before committing to building a life with someone else. At least when they did merge their lives, they had a ring and legal protections to show for it. Right now, we endure the sacrifice required in relationships without assurances, opening us up for heartbreak, regret, and nothing to show for it.
Here’s my hot take. When you’re dating someone, you shouldn’t center them in everything. Prioritize them, yes, but design your life around them? Not yet. Until you enter a serious, committed era — whether marriage, domestic partnership, civil union, etc — your number 1 priority is developing yourself. Why? Two strong people make a durable relationship. Two weak people make a fragile one. Mismatched relationships can be unbalanced at best, exploitative at worst. By investing in your life independent from your partner, you’re actually investing in the health of your relationship.
Just as we meticulously pick our romantic partners, shouldn’t we also meticulously refine ourselves? Yes, our relationships often direct the quality of our lives, but we own half of that equation. The last thing you want is to look back at your formative years, only to realize you never allowed yourself to become you.
I see too many people picking their college, job, and friends after a person they’re not even engaged to. When you have no assurance of commitment, that risk is unsystematic. Unless your purpose in life is to be with this person no matter what, it is unwise. If someone can’t handle a few years of long distance (while you’re this young), how will they handle unemployment, illness, grief, or parenthood? Life’s hardest seasons all require enduring discomfort for something bigger than yourself.
Codependency is strikingly easy to fall into when you’re young, even to the strongest mental warriors. The dopamine rush of love is addicting, far more than finding happiness from within. Long distance relationships don’t really allow you to become codependent unless you spend your entire time glued to your phone, fixated on their every move instead of the beautiful life around you. Most of the time, you’re forced to learn independence. While long distance isn’t the ideal relationship form, it’s a beautiful one that reflects more compassion, love, and patience than the others.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t close the gap eventually. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not natural to have a relationship through the phone. But while you’re this young, while you’re both still figuring it out, what’s a couple years of sacrifice for a lifetime of joy?
Long distance relationships in your 20s develop maturity and mental fortitude
Long distance relationships are the cheat code for your twenties due to their difficulty. They require a next-level of maturity and self-sufficiency while nurturing the tender needs of someone else.
Amongst the most important tenets of a successful long distance relationship is open communication and trust. If you are constantly policing your partner’s “find my”, texting them all day out of anxiety they will fall out of love with you, or protesting their freedom to operate in the real world, your relationship is at the brink of collapse. A healthy long distance relationship does not feature any of these toxic behaviors. In fact, you should encourage each other to spend time on passions, friends, and personal development in this vital period of your lives. At the same time, partners should have an innate respect that deters them from engaging in behavior that would fracture that trust. Communication and trust flow together harmoniously, but when one thread is broken, the entire operation collapses on itself.
Test of True Compatibility
Long distance tests your relationship on all fronts. The couples who crumble in LDRs often discover they were never truly compatible, they were just comfortable. Can you resolve conflict without relying on physical relaxers? Since touch is sparse while in long distance, conversation becomes paramount. Are you confident enough in the future of your relationship to warrant the temporary sacrifice? Do you have a genuine compatibility that transcends the need for constant proximity? Do you know who you are when you’re not with someone else?
Many relationships formed in high school and college are not founded on compatibility, but proximity. Even if we don’t truly like the people we are around, the convenience of the relationship makes it an easy pass-time. The unfortunate reality is that many people never recognize this deep compatibility mismatch until the thrill of a relationship fades. When a fun relationship transforms into a serious commitment, you realize a relationship isn’t just about going on cute dates and planning a wedding. It requires immense sacrifice, consideration, and compromise. This is the person that will be supporting you through the death of your parents, your transition into parenthood, your various career squabbles. When you look at it that way, isn’t compatibility all that matters? When you are deeply incompatible, compromise isn’t just a challenge, it becomes a violation of self.
It can feel like long distance is the grim reaper of relationships. However, long distance or not, your relationship will fall apart if the necessary foundations are not there. The only thing long distance does is expose the disturbing truth that close proximity disguises — this relationship was never going to work out anyways.
When you’re compatible enough, the distance is not a deal breaker, but when are not, loving becomes a burden not worth having. If you can get through a long distance relationship with joy and comfort, your relationship has passed the test of true compatibility. If you can’t, maybe it was fated for ruin all along.
As many of us are graduating school, long distance will be thrust upon us. This essay is not to scare you, but to assure you. A strong relationship can make it through the harsh winds of distance, and a weak one will break. I’m not advocating that you force long distance, but if it has to be that way, why not view it differently? Depending on how you view your life decisions, isn’t this test a good thing?
One person cannot be your everything
We center early relationships far too much in our society, especially as girls. Every conversation seems to gravitate towards the newest love interest, as if securing a man is still a woman’s greatest accomplishment. A relationship is undeniably a central aspect of your life, but it is far from the only thing. Our passions often fall in the back-burner of the soulmate search, so much so that we forget that one person cannot be your everything.
To expect your partner to fill every cup in your life — lover, best friend, sports buddy, therapist, supplemental parent, etc — is an unfair standard. No matter how amazing your partner is, you need other people to fill your life. Society was not built on a nuclear family. We used to live in villages. We used to care about more than just our immediate decedents. We used to not be this lonely.
So many young people expect a relationship to fix all of their problems. Therefore, the presence of friends can threaten one’s sacred view of their relationship. While you’re young and impressionable, you may desire to lace your partner into every aspect of your life. You ask if they can come to girls wine night because they’re a “girls’ boy”. You cancel plans because you just really want to be there when they get home from work, every day. Slowly, the relationship absorbs you. As a result, your friends are slowly pushed out, one arm reaching in as they’re trying to grasp the version of you that they once loved too.
There is a misconception that we don’t need our girls (or boys) after a certain age, that our partner should fulfill all of our needs. Additionally, the anxiety that we ought to solely prioritize our non-committal, dating relationships to maintain them is a lie we tell ourselves. It couldn’t be more false. Even after marriage, our platonic friendships are an essential part of our wholistic joy. Friends can connect deeper with us on some hobbies. They may have similar experiences and shared memories. I think some people are afraid to invest deeply in friendships out of fear they’ll devalue the need of their relationships, but that is the result of anxious attachment and a fear of abandonment. Both forms of love serve distinct but necessary pieces to a happy life.
You do not have to pour all your water into one tree’s soil constantly. One day, it will flood, leaving you with water damage and no water left for the rest of the garden. We need to pour into ourselves as well. Our twenties are about finding our sense of self in the weeds of new adulthood. It’s about finding joy and happiness from within, even though that process is often messy and riddled with mistakes. Relationships let us delay this necessary process, hence why so many of us lose ourselves in them so young. Our desperation to avoid our own growing pains drives our need to constantly be with someone, with anyone. We forget how to be alone. It’s like we forget who we were without love, and that the only way to maintain our current sense of self is to fill the gap with another person — even if that person isn’t the right fit.
Life is defined by perspective. Great relationships do not need to be attached to the same branch to grow together. You can be two close trees with intertwining roots anchoring you together. Instead of viewing distance as a curse, I view it as a temporal blessing. How blessed am I to have a wonderful relationship that provides natural barriers to developing toxic codependency? How grateful am I to have a boyfriend who encourages me to follow my dreams even if its thousands of miles away? How thankful am I to have a relationship so connected in shared values that it can withstand the test of distance? How lucky am I to grow with someone without becoming them.
Long distance is far from easy. Many days, you just want to be with your partner. You want a shoulder to cry on. You miss them desperately. You’ll have difficult conversations over a phone. Sometimes, you may feel like you’re barely in a relationship. These pains are only evidence of the depth of your love. To miss is to love, and oh, how lucky I am to have someone so easy to miss.
At the edges of long distance are the explosions of joy in your chest when you see them rushing towards you in a busy airport. They’re the tender moments of love shared in the fleeting moments. The warmth of their embrace after months of phone calls unlocks an eighth chakra. It’s the small surprises, the movie nights, and the genuine attempts to bring comfort in an inherently uncomfortable situation. You find here that love is all around us. In the flowers and the fruit, in the calls and the cuddles, in the days spent together and nights far apart. It’s all about what you make of it, and if the person you’re doing it with agrees.
When you open your eyes to all the love surrounding you, you’ll never feel it’s lack. Either you’ll be a victim to long distance, or embrace the opportunity it affords. If you spend all your time counting down the days, waiting at the phone for a text back, and crying over a situation out of your control, long distance will be unbearable. That’s watering one tree so much, it begins to drown. Instead, you can water the garden: friends, family, hobbies, dreams, passions, and love. It’s not just how you to make long distance enjoyable, but create for a life worth living.
So yes, long distance can be the cheat code to your twenties if you use the time correctly, find joy within yourself, not others, and are building towards a future with your partner. Eventually, when you do close the distance, your relationship will feature two beautifully unique trees with connected roots but distinct flowers, producing sweet fruit that feeds everyone around you.
Hello friends! I have many thoughts on love, dating, and relationships so if this was your cup of tea let me know and I’ll share more! You probably noticed some changes around here! I added a podcast format, posted earlier, and have a lot more pictures. This is what being part of my paid tier will feel like! I will still share this content with free subscribers, but a little later and without the podcast aspect.
If you’d like to hear more practical tips on how to keep the excitement and romance alive in a LDR, comment below and I’ll write up something on that!
You probably noticed I’ve added a paid tier! I know, big big steps, and truly no pressure at all. There are just some things I’d love to do and say that I’m not comfortable sharing on the free platform, so that’s where those experimentations will go, even if it’s just me, myself, and I. To learn more about it (and what I offer in it), check out this post.
That’s all I have for now! See you later :)
Share this post