Tips and advice for couples managing distance, including communication, trust, and staying connected.
On the first Sunday of November, I sat in a Safeway parking lot in Phoenix. It was 6:10 at night, and his call had not come. Ethan lived in Chicago back then, and Arizona never changes its clocks. His phone jumped back an hour, and mine stayed put. His call finally came at 7:10 my … Read more
It was 5:40 in the morning at O’Hare, and sleet was hitting the windshield. Ethan pulled up to the Terminal 1 curb with the hazards on. It was February, near the end of our second year of long distance. I had a 7:05 flight back to Phoenix and a lump in my throat. A security … Read more
I asked myself the “are we ready to move” question for almost a full year before I actually did anything about it. It is a bigger question than it looks, tangled up with career, money, family, and fear all at once. Eventually I figured out a handful of signs that helped me tell real readiness … Read more
For the first year of our long distance relationship, “someday” was doing a lot of heavy lifting. We both wanted to close the distance eventually, but neither of us had said out loud what that actually meant. It took an honest, slightly terrifying conversation to turn someday into an actual plan. Here is how we … Read more
Fighting over video call is a special kind of miserable. You cannot storm off to cool down without the whole thing freezing on an ugly paused frame, and you cannot reach for their hand when things get quiet after. My boyfriend and I had our worst fight of the entire two and a half years … Read more
I made almost every mistake on this list before I figured out what actually works. My boyfriend and I did two and a half years apart while he finished a job contract overseas, and looking back, most of our worst fights came from the same handful of habits. None of these mistakes mean your relationship … Read more
The first time my boyfriend flew out to see me, I had planned every single hour of the weekend. By Sunday we were both exhausted and a little snappy with each other, and neither of us understood why. It took a few visits to figure out that a good long distance visit is not the … Read more
I stayed in a long distance relationship for four months after I already knew it was over, because I could not tell the difference between normal distance struggles and actual warning signs. Every long distance relationship is hard sometimes. That is not the problem. The problem is when the hard stuff stops being occasional and … Read more
I spent three weeks convincing myself I was being paranoid before I finally admitted that something had actually changed. He was not doing anything dramatic, he was just doing less. That is the hardest part about losing interest in a long distance relationship. There is no single moment, just a slow fade you can talk … Read more
My boyfriend and I spent almost two years living eight hundred miles apart. The hardest part was never missing him, it was watching the romance turn into a scheduling call. We got so good at logistics that we forgot to flirt. Bills, time zones, whose turn it was to plan the next visit, that was … Read more
