I know several long-distance relationships which have succeeded. It usually fails due to a lack of trust between individuals. Lack of trust is often due to a lack of communication, which can easily be circumvented nowadays by Skype, texts, calls etc.
For most of human history, long-distance relationships have been impossible to sustain due to travel reasons alone. The internet age has made it much more feasible, but as I found out with my girlfriend, romance and relationships are a different beast when thousands of kilometres separate you.
As we’ve discussed before, failure sometimes is the best way to learn. My girlfriend and I are on our second try now after the intial attempt at long-distance went awry. As it turns out, it’s possible to bridge the gap, both physically and figuratively, but not without major changes to our behaviour. The first attempt didn’t end well, but after learning several important lessons, we managed to move into a normal, ridiculous, local relationship. I won’t be able to tell you how to be happy forever or find the secret to a 50-year marriage. Far from it. Hopefully, this can at least help deal with the problems of being apart.
15.Your Partner Will Spend a Lot of Time With Other People
It sounds obvious, but if you’re not living in the same area, your partner will have to get his or her socialisation fix somewhere else. Most people will tell you that spending time together is key to keeping a relationship alive. When you’re separated by hundreds of kilometres though, your primary method for accomplishing this is by spending a lot of face time with a cold, digital display.
This doesn’t mean you can’t have meaningful interaction. Skype and Hangouts provide great opportunities to spend quality time with your partner both alone and with others. However, they’re no substitute for getting out of the house. If your significant other is going to a concert, a movie or out to dinner, they’re going without you and probably with others.
If you’re the jealous type — and it’s hard not to be in a long-distance relationship — this is especially problematic. You’ll wish you could be there, but you can’t. This causes tension. It also breeds paranoia (which we’ll talk more about in a bit). It may be possible to overcome this by setting aside time to spend together and by reassuring each other that if you could, you’d be doing activities together. However, you can never fully change the fact that when your partner is out having fun and you’re home alone, it will almost always feel just a little bit like rejection.
In this case, a little overcompensation can do a world of good. Chances are that if you’re living in the same town, it would seem overly mushy if your partner texted you to say “I wish you were here!†every time she went to dinner. When you’re a thousand miles away, though, this kind of reminder matters a lot more. You let your loved one know that this situation isn’t optimal. You assure them that if you could be part of their outing, you would be. It won’t fix the fact that they haven’t seen you in months, but it will be a small comfort at a time when every comfort counts.
You can also alleviate your own worries by filling up your time with activities of your own. We all have our own ways of recharging and every night your partner is out of communication is a chance to do things that benefit you. Read a book. Go to a party. Build something. Find something to invest your time in and relax while your significant other is out doing the same.
14.Communication Feels Like A Burden
The first thing that many couples do when attempting long distance is to set up a rigorous communication schedule. Suddenly, you’ve committed to talking on the phone every morning, texting through lunch, and setting up a Google Hangout every night. Before you lay down a rigid chatting schedule, remind yourself how often you saw each other when you were in the same city. Most couples that don’t live together don’t see each other every day. Even if they do, it isn’t often at the same time and in the same way. You’ll likely feel the impulse to maximize communication as a way to strengthen your relationship; fight this impulse. Doing what you think you’re supposed to do rather than what both partners want to do is a great way to ruin a relationship.
13.Financial Strain
Love ain’t cheap. Even if you only live a few hours away from your partner, someone is going be spending a tank of gas or buying a Megabus ticket every time you want to see each other. The larger the distance, of course, the larger the transportation bill. Work time lost travelling can be a problem as well. If every other weekend is spent travelling to see each other, you could be missing out on side money, networking, or career development opportunities. It may feel crass to think about the cost of love, but we live in the real world, and in the real world you have to pay your rent.
12.Not Having Sex Sucks
This is the elephant in the room, right? Everybody likes to have sex as often as possible, biological limitations not withstanding. There are plenty of ways to address the issue of sex, but no matter how you’re going to handle it, you have to talk about it. Some couples employ a don’t ask don’t tell policy while they’re separated. Many couples aren’t down with that, and decide to get by with phone sex, erotic Skype sessions, and marathon sexcapades on those rare moments when they are together. There is no right or wrong answer as long as you’re honest with yourself. Just don’t agree to something you aren’t comfortable with and then get angry when things play out exactly as you and your partner decides they would.
11.You Aren’t Willing to Sacrifice For Each Other
In the twenty-first century, many couples include two career-minded, driven individuals. If your goals are pulling you in different directions, eventually one person is going to have to sacrifice for the other, or the relationship will end. If you’re working towards a creative writing MFA in New York or you’re grinding out that prestigious tech internship in Silicon Valley, are you really going to leave your network and connections to be with your partner once you’ve finished this leg of the journey? Are they eventually going to leave their job and their friends to be with you? Long distance relationships involve a lot of little sacrifices of your time and money over time. Before you commit thousands of dollars and all of your frequent flyer miles to a relationship, it might be a good idea to make sure that you’re both seeing the same end game.
10.No Set Reunion Date
Long distance relationships generally happen for a reason. One partner may get a job in another city, go back to school, or need some time to take care of family business. All of these things can happen on timetables; all of them can have a firm end date. If there is no time table for reuniting with your significant other, that’s a problem. If you don’t have a date to look forward to, your will to work through rough spots will diminish. If you have no idea when a tough situation is going to end, it is much harder to justify to yourself why you’re putting yourself through it in the first place.
9.You Can’t Feel The Relationship Progress
Eventually, you have to move in with each other or break-up. Generally, that’s how relationships work. That point usually hits around the two to three year mark, depending on just how commitment-phobic the two of you may be. I’ve seen it happen as early as six months in, but those relationships tend to burn brightly and then flame out. When you’re in a long-distance relationship, you can’t incrementally increase intimacy, there is no way to further connect your lives. No matter how cheesy it might be, there is meaning behind keeping some clothes at your girlfriend’s place. There is something to making your boyfriend a key. Moving in together is a huge step. If you don’t have to take any of these steps, then you can keep a comfortable distance between you that allows for the denial of any incompatibility. One of the greatest dangers of long distance relationships is that you end up dating the idea of a person and never come to terms with your partner’s flaws.
8.You Grow Apart
There is a good chance you went the long distance route because you and your partner are at different stages in your life. For example, one of the most common long distance scenarios is one partner is still in college while the other enters the working world. This means that one person is living in a protected dream world of booze and philosophy while the other is coming to terms with the harsh realities of student loan payments and slum lords. It’s often said that you can’t make anyone change; it is equally true that you can’t stop someone from changing. Whether one of you is in college and the other is working, one of you is floating through your twenties while the other is starting their career, or one of you finding yourself while the other is settling down, it is important to be frank with each other about how you’re evolving. Sometimes reuniting after a period of long-distance isn’t just asking someone to move, it can be asking someone to fundamentally change who they are. Surprisingly, that doesn’t turn out so well.
7.You Were Never That Into It Anyway
One of the best things about long distance is that it has a nice way of speeding up the inevitable. Economist Tim Harford sometimes gives dating advice. He recently stopped by NPR’s Planet Money podcast to answer questions from the lovelorn. Harford made the point that many people in relationships don’t correctly perceive the “sunk cost.” By this, Harford means that we often consider the good times in the past as having a factor on our present relationship. They don’t. You can’t gain anything from the good times you already had, the love you no longer feel, or the lost intimacy that is slipping farther and farther into the past. When you live in the same city, have the same friends, or share the same apartment, reminders of the past are all around you. Breaking up doesn’t just mean ending a relationship; it often means fundamentally altering your way of life. Many long distance relationships that end are relationships that were held together by a combination of guilt and comfort, despite an absence of love. Sometimes distance is just what you need to gain some perspective and get out of a dying relationship.
6.Words lose their meaning over time
Words are nothing without action, but with the distance between you two, any and almost all action is impossible. So you make up for this impossibility with words, but words only tell and do nothing in showing the person on the other side of the world what and how you feel. You keep sending long messages to each other until you see that words never make up for physical absence. You can only write or say “I love you†so many times until all it becomes is an empty bunch of letters put together into a sentence that will never be enough to mean anything.
5.Lack of communication
A Lack of communication is one of the number one relationship breakers, but slightly more so for distance ones. Communication is all you have in a long distance relationship, let’s not front. If that goes out the window then everything does. Communication is so essential because you never know what’s going on.
4.Argument
Fight, Fight, Fight. At first these will start off as the most minor things. Then they can develop into the heavy stuff that can actually lead to something. The arguments can then become more and more frequent, with more time between the argument and forgiveness until finally one of you cracks and pulls the trigger.
3.Meeting Other People
Now we’re onto the more painful reasons for why long distance relationships fail. Presumably, when your boo moves abroad they’re not gonna do it all alone. They’re gonna do it for work/study purposes. Presumably, they’ll have colleagues/fellow students. Presumably again, there will be some of the opposite sex. After spending a lot of time with such and such a person, they may decide to go with a new option. The same could happen to you.
2.They don’t work anyways!
Not all long distance relationships work. Many of them are just the beginning of the end for a couple who used to have a classic relationship; and quite often a naïve waste of time for couples who met online.
But not all classic relationships end up in marriage and love for-ever-after either. And it’s for the better – because not all relationships are actually meant to work out – relationships go through a natural selection process and only the partners who best fit each other stay together.
So it’s okay that some LDRs don’t work out, what’s not okay is to say that ALL LDRs don’t work out, which is plain wrong. Because they do work as long as one main condition is being met: the presence of reciprocal love and commitment, which makes everything else fall right into its place.
1.Sex
Some of us just can’t control our urges and desires and the lack of frequent sexual pleasure pushes us to end things. Us human beings have a deep, innate hunger to reproduce. That hunger can be incredibly difficult to control and we may slip up here and there. If that’s the reason the relationship ends, then so be it. Fair enough.
