What should i expect from a long distance relationship?

Sometimes I forget most people are monogamous I swear.

Yeah, those numbers are based on monogamous relationships. Lets pretend those numbers are 100% accurate, those are still A LOT of love for someone who is monogamous.

Lets pretend one love every 10 years.

Average relationship is 5 years. 1 year or 2 to get over the last heartbreak. And then it will only take you 3 years of being single to find another person you love. That my friend is not the definition of rare.

Now, if the person weren't in a monogamous relationship, then they would be able to allow themselves to fall in love with other people while they were in their existing relationship. Which means the numbers would go WAY up.

I for example have been with my husband for 8 years now. The first love of my life. But since meeting him, I have met 2 other guys where we dated for 6 - 8 months. At the end, circumstances didn't allow anything else to form, but those two guys stumbled into my life without me even trying to look for it. Just happened. Its wild.

Its honestly so common. Like, so so common to fall in love. We are built for it.

Its so easy to fall in love, that in this thread we have 2 -3 people who are in love and they have most likely never spent more than a continuous month with the person who they are passionately dedicating their lives to right now. That's how easy we fall in love. It doesn't take much and even physical space can't contain it as long as you communicate often enough. Its wild.

And that's great, but sadly not everyone is as lucky as you apparently are.

My warning is more to the OP who is only starting to look into this whole thing. It is quite common for people to put their real lives on hold for their long distance relationships.

I have met people who don't go out to hang out with friends, stop going to parties, stop meeting new people etc because they have to be tied to skype and a computer in order to spend time with their significant other. That's a sacrifice that no other relationship would need since for other people you can go to parties and hang out with friends with your significant other so you don't have to choose. Long distance relationships make you choose between your significant other and friends/family way more often that other types of relationships.

If it works for you great, but just be vigilant of it

 

Okay, so I’m terminally late to this party.

But given that I have some experience in the matter, I would like to add that this gets at the heart of my best advice in case of long-distance relationships.


Now, my general advice is to try to avoid them. They have all the pitfalls a short-distance relationship has and then some. This might sound hypocritical from someone who made one work. But a lot of that “making it work” is outside of your ability to completely control, so it’s a bit like playing on the lottery to get rich. It works marvellously if you win the jackpot, but in a vast majority of cases it’s not an optimal strategy.


Yet, I can’t read something like “Long distance relationships make you choose” etc. and not offer some insights.


First of all: a factor to take into account, but which is mostly out of your control, is where your relationship style is on the cerebral/physical scale. I read a lot above about “humans just need touch and sex”. And that is true. But some just need more than others.

Personally, I think my success at the long distance thing is massively aided by he fact that I don’t really need a lot of physical stuff. Three months without sex (or even so much as a hug) is just not a big thing to me. Six months, and I start noticing it’s been a while. Nine months is roughly where it starts to grate a little.

Meanwhile, I know a lot of people for which a week of separation is already enough to start feeling majorly depressed and deprived. Which I fully understand, because I’m like that on the cerebral end of the scale, where I require interaction every day or every other day at the longest. Just not of the physical kind.

What can you do to make yourself one or the other? Nothing, really. It’s just something you need to know or find out about both yourself and your partner. The amount of physicality you need gives you a good idea of how long you can keep mustering the strength to go through with this without a chance at bridging the gap.



Secondly: I don’t think a relationship actively makes you choose between living in the local world or the online world. They’re living things, but they don’t generally make demands of their own. And there’s plenty of couples living in the same house who have fairly separate professional and/or social lives and who can make it work.

BUT! There is very much a conscious element in keeping a healthy balance. Like Smurf, I, too, have seen people completely retreat from the world. Every bit of free time was consumed with sitting online talking, spying online on when the other was last online, obsessing about what the other was doing if they weren’t online. Offline interaction became tinged with this sense of “I tolerate you real-life friends, but only until my life can really begin”.


And yes, that is unhealthy.

It can be surmounted, but it requires a lot of conscious planning and cooperation.

My best advice is really to plan each interaction ahead of time, and NOT STRAY FROM THAT PLANNING! I had three one-hour calls scheduled with my boyfriend a week, and that was it. Those were social plans like any other. We kept to them even if they were inconvenient. We did not add extra calls even if they were convenient. We could WhatsApp, but it would explicitly not come with any expectation of immediate reply or even checking the message.

And even slightly more extreme: we had to support the other in living locally. If my boyfriend went to a weekend sleepover with friends, or to a conference, or to a family outing, I did NOT bother him while he was gone (well, the odd quick whatsapp exchange before bed or in the morning clearly happened. But otherwise his day was dedicated to local activities and I made sure to damn well respect that).

Even harder, if either of us noticed the other one pulling back from their offline life, we were to mention it and urge them to go out and have a life again. That happened more than I like to admit, especially since it was often him admonishing me to go out more, and not report back until I had done so.


It requires a great deal of self-denial, for sure. But also see it as an investment in a healthy relationship. You wouldn’t chain your partner to a real wall. So you shouldn’t chain them to a virtual one. And you should stop them even if their natural inclination is to do so themselves. Good partners build each other up, and don’t hold each other back.

It also requires a lot of trust. If you’re a naturally insecure person (and in a way, we all are), it’s tempting to see any stretch of noncontact as a threat. As a proof of infidelity even. But them’s the breaks in a relationship. If you trust your partner, you have to accept that some parts of their life are just to be lived through, and you can’t be present for all of that.



Finally, I think there is a vital component in having a frank conversation on what happens if either one DOES meet someone interesting locally. When you’re newly in love, that’s the last thing you want to talk about, I’m sure. You want to talk about how lovely the other’s eyes look, even if just on a computer screen.

But, I urge you to have that conversation nonetheless. If you follow the above advice, and help your partner have a healthy local social life, there is a certain probability that they’ll meet someone who is lovable, single, compatible, interested, and above all, local.

And it’s best to accept that possibility. Accept that it’s probably a better option for the partner for whom it happens. And that you should, in that case, dissolve the online relationship in a friendly and orderly manner.


I can’t tell you how that conversation should go. But for me, it basically came down to both of us accepting that it might happen (even if we agreed not to actively go on dating or hookup sites to facilitate it). And how such a notice of termination would look like. And to pledge our support and if possible, enduring friendship.

Did I ever have to deal with it? Well, somewhat. I definitely developed some crushes on local people. Didn’t work out with those people for a variety of reasons (in most cases it was because they weren’t gay, lol), but that is fairly irrelevant, as it DOES happen in a lot of cases. And it’s best to just prepare for it.

So be open about your thoughts. Even if they could threaten the relationship, keeping them secret will threaten it even more. And that is, honestly, advice I’d give for ANY relationship, long- or short-distance.




Yes, I know it’s kinda counterintuitive. Apparently the best advice I can give to make it work long-distance is to know whether it could ever work for you, to LIMIT your interaction, and to actively prepare for its dissolution. And to work to keep on the same page on all of the above (because even if you can do all of those things, it takes two to tango)

Yet, it seems to have at least increased the very low odds I started out with. So I present it as the sum total of my investigation into the matter.