Love Lost in Translation

Logistics seems like the primary challenge of long distance relationships. Figuring out how to stay connected across miles of separation requires intention and planning. Falling in love is easy. Staying in love and committing to a relationship that allows little time together takes work. It would be easy to blame the distance when it doesn’t work out, but that’s the reason that requires the least amount of personal reflection.

Sometimes, the love gets lost in translation. There’s a disconnect between our intentions and their interpretations. Cue misunderstandings and growing tension. The scale tips, and we stop adding up all the ways we’re grateful for the relationship and begin adding up all the ways it’s letting us down. When we start keeping score, everyone loses.

My experience isn’t representative of the whole of long distance relationships in general, but I know that love languages were the biggest challenge for me in maintaining one. My primary love language tends to be both physical touch and words of affirmation. This is how I give and receive love. Words across a distance are easy. There are so many ways to utter them and so many variations in our language to affirm our feelings. Physical touch is infinitely more challenging with a physical separation.

There are so many other ways we show love with physical touch other than sex. A simple touch can signal affection or even offer comfort. Something as simple as a brush of a hand on a tough day can offer solidarity. I didn’t realize how much I relied on nonverbal communication for comfort in particular until it was stripped from me as an option. I found every other form of comforting at a distance to be hopelessly inadequate. There’s something powerful about being present with another person in their grief and being both a literal and metaphorical shoulder to cry on — and something bleak about needing to express comfort in this way and being unable to do so.

Add in a global pandemic with travel restrictions in place, and there wasn’t even the hope of being able to do something as simple as sit in the same room. I had all this love to express and limited ways to express it. It’s almost funny to think of how many ways I tried.

I offered up words in every form and sent them winging into the world by phone, by text, and by mail in handwritten letters. I offered gifts in place of hugs, quotes in place of a hand held, and memes in place of a shoulder to lean on. I tapped a reservoir of empathy, reached inside for understanding, and helped where I could. My own world was crumbling beneath me, and yet I kept finding ways to send love out.

Then, I was left to let love go.

I wonder if part of the problem is that I expressed love in all the ways I needed to receive it. I was left with the nagging feeling that no matter how much I sent out, little was being received. Love was somewhere lost in translation, falling far short of what my partner needed and still so much less than what I wanted and needed to give. With one of my primary love languages subtracted, I was left unsure of how I was meant to bridge the distance.

Words might have helped, but I wasn’t saying the ones I needed to by that point. In a year of overwhelming loss, I knew there was so much more left to lose. I was afraid. So, I bit back the words and choked on the taste of them. I think now that even uttering them wouldn’t have saved what didn’t want to be rescued. But I’ll never know.

Love languages are a factor in any relationship — more so even when there are other challenges in play. It helps to understand the ways we best express love as well as how we prefer to receive it. Then, we make adjustments between our preferences and theirs. This is how we learn to speak the language of love.

Love isn’t just one language — or even the five ones we know. It is specific to each partner, learned anew with every relationship. There can be an endless variety. Loving one person well doesn’t teach us the best way to love another. Only the one we love can really teach us how to love them — but we have to be open to listening.

Disconnects happen when we insist on loving someone in the way of our choosing — and not in the way that they need. Love languages aren’t just a matter of preference. It’s how we interpret what happens in a relationship. If we prize words of affection and fail to get any but receive plenty of acts of service, we may still feel un-loved because we’re not getting love in the way we need it. One action may communicate love to us while another fails to translate.

Of course, I can’t just point to one thing and blame it for a relationship ending. There are always other factors. Yet, the more I think about it, the more I realize that all the love I was giving may have never been received. It might have been lost somewhere between his needs and mine.

The logistics of a long distance relationship are a challenge. We budget time and money, shift schedules, and create space in the day for the other person. Our phones become a lifeline to love, keeping us connected. But technology can only do so much. I look back and wonder how much of my relationship was really both of us asking the other Can you hear me now? until the final, inevitable disconnection.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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