For the first year of my long distance relationship, my version of self-care was a face mask and a bottle of wine on a Friday. It looked like caring for myself and it was really just numbing a Friday.
Real self-care turned out to be less pretty and much more useful. It looked like keeping my own calendar, sleeping on a schedule, and not letting one person three states away hold every good feeling I had.
Here is what actually worked for me over two and a half years of distance. I am not a therapist, just a woman who got this wrong a lot before she got it right.
Protect Your Sleep Before You Protect the Call
My partner was two time zones behind me, which meant his ten o’clock was my midnight. For months I stayed up for him and showed up to work wrecked.
I told myself it was romantic. By Thursday I was crying over a parking ticket and blaming the relationship for how awful I felt.
We moved our real conversation to my morning commute and his late evening. Same two people, same amount of talking, and suddenly I was not a raw nerve by midweek.
It helped to settle the question of how often you should talk in a long distance relationship before the schedule ate my sleep. Once we agreed on the amount, the timing got a lot easier to move.
If your sleep is the first thing you sacrifice, everything else on this list stops working. Tired makes a normal silence feel like a crisis, every single time.
Keep One Plan a Week That You Would Not Cancel for Him
I used to cancel everything the second he said he was free. Dinner with my sister, a gym class, a movie I had wanted to see for weeks.
It felt like devotion and it trained me to treat my own life as the backup plan. After a while my friends stopped asking, which hurt worse than any missed call.
Now Wednesday yoga is not negotiable and he knows it. I go, I text him after, and the relationship has never once suffered for it.
Start with one thing, not five. One plan you hold onto teaches you that you are allowed to be somewhere he is not.
Stop Using Your Phone as a Comfort Object
My worst habit was checking if he was online while I was supposed to be relaxing. A bath with my phone on the edge of the tub is not a bath, it is surveillance with bubbles.
I started leaving it in the other room for one hour a night. The first few times I felt itchy and kept inventing reasons to go check it.
By week two that hour was the calmest part of my day. Nothing bad ever happened in sixty minutes, and I had been bracing for something for months.
The phone is how I reach him, so it cannot also be how I soothe myself. Those two jobs pull in opposite directions and the soothing one always loses.
Put Your Feelings Somewhere Other Than the Relationship
Every hard feeling I had used to go straight to him. A bad review at work, a fight with my mom, a flat tire, all of it dumped into a nine o’clock call.
He is kind and he listened, but our calls became a complaint department. We had fifty minutes a day and I was spending forty of them on damage reports.
I bought a cheap notebook and started writing the raw version down first. Whatever was still true after I wrote it got brought to him, and most of it was not.
Our calls got warmer within two weeks and I was not holding anything back. I was just arriving with something other than a list.
If your calls have turned into logistics and venting, these things to talk about when you run out of things to say helped me refill the well. A notebook handles the dumping so the call can handle the connecting.
Move Your Body on the Days You Least Want To
This is the most boring advice on the page and it is the one that worked fastest. A twenty minute walk outside changed more bad evenings for me than any amount of talking did.
The catch is that I never wanted to go on the days I needed it most. Those were the nights I wanted to stay horizontal and feel sorry for myself.
So I made the rule about shoes, not effort. Put the shoes on and walk to the end of the block, and if I still want to come back, I can.
I have turned around exactly twice in two years. The rest of the time I walked for half an hour and came home a person who could have a normal conversation.
On the really heavy days I pair it with the other things that help, which I broke down in dealing with loneliness in a long distance relationship. Moving does not fix the distance, it just makes me someone who can handle it.
What I Would Tell Myself at the Start
Self-care in a long distance relationship is not the bath or the candle. It is refusing to let your whole mood live inside somebody else’s schedule.
Some weeks I do all of this and still feel flat by Sunday. That is allowed, and it does not mean the system failed or the relationship is wrong.
Pick one thing off this list and hold it for two weeks before adding another. The woman who shows up to those calls rested and full of her own week is a much better partner than the one I was at the start.
