A Long Distance Relationship Will Make You a Better Partner

People tend to hold strong, and often unshakable, opinions about long-distance relationships, most of which are founded based on whether or not it worked for them.

Logically, there’s sense to that — if yours turned out to be a terrible mess that faltered after a few months, there’s a sense in not wanting to try again. On the other hand, if you made it to the other side then you’d be more likely to sprout off the benefits. (And hey! Long-distance relationships have a 60% success rate … not bad!)

The truth is, a long distance relationship gives you everything you need to be a better partner. If you made it through a long-distance relationship, there’s reason to believe your relationship can now survive almost anything — you’ve learned the tools to cope without having to do much more than chatting with your partner over the phone.

Communication

Call me a broken record, but this shit is important. But don’t get me wrong: this is not the most important thing in a relationship — and definitely not some sort of goal to achieve (ie, spewing out every thought in your head in front of your partner is not what makes good “communication”), but the general act of being able to talk to a person intimately and calmly is something that is almost always heightened when your main form of communication is via the phone.

In the Zoom era, you have to admit that video chatting has made you a least a semi-more patient person. You can’t go shouting over someone, lest the audio gets fucked and half your words cut out so the point you’re making becomes a scrambled mess. You have to wait, listen to the other, take your turn. Make your words more efficient.

However:

Long-distance won’t make you good at communication

What it will do is point out the fact that you’re bad at it.

This is some sneaky shit right here. Lots of people jump into relationships and don’t realize they’re dating someone with the emotional range of a teaspoon (and even less ability to communicate it) for years.

When all you have is communication, this changes. There’s no sneak workarounds, grandiose gestures, or physical acts that can hide the lack of openness and genuine connection. The difficult conversations can’t be turned into angry sex or passive-aggressively doing the dishes. The most you can do is hang up the phone (and if you do that often enough, you won’t have a relationship).

So yes, communication, but not in a cheesy, share every aspect of my day and tell you exactly how I feel in a given moment type of way. More of an emotional stability, respectful, healthy mindset type.

When we have tough conversations now, they’re always dialogue and solution-based. Emotional arguments don’t get you anywhere, and we learned that by trying it over the phone. Once you learn a solid method, you don’t give it up just because you’re proximity has changed.

Patience

People say that relationships are all about compromise. I prefer to think they’re about patience.

ie., you don’t have to settle, you may just have to wait.

A small example: you want Chinese. They want pizza. You don’t have to settle for Mexican. Have one tonight and the other tomorrow, geez.

Big example: you want them to visit on the weekend. They have plans with their friends in another city because … you don’t live in the same place. One person doesn’t have to cancel their plans and life (that it is okay to have!) to make the other happy. You might just have to wait until next weekend.

If you’ve seen that quote about needing to see someone in stressful situations before deciding if you want to be with them (ie, hanging Christmas lights, being late in an airport, grocery shopping the day before Thanksgiving), just add “waiting to have sex because you live a five-hour drive away”.

People that are worth it will have patience.

In addition to that, love is not constant. It grows, changes, and evolves. You may love someone a little less at times — and you can bet they feel the same about you.

Having patience allows you to give time and space to another without feeling like you’re sacrificing the relationship or your own needs.

Commitment

Love is something we are an active player in. Even if you happen to just “fall into it”, you will end up putting in work to keep yourself there. If you want to be together, you have to choose.

It’s harder to make that choice when you’re apart. Or perhaps, it’s easier to make other choices.

But love isn’t the easy choice, and g-damn you have to choose that it’s what you want, and damn you’ll work for it.

Committing to someone when you know there will be weeks, or even months go by without seeing them says something about the relationship. It’s an agreement between the interested parties saying hey, let’s continue doing this for a long time.

We’re in it for the long haul, and we know it.

. . .

Patience and commitment are the foundations of good relationships, romantic or otherwise. While long-distance isn’t the only way to learn these concepts and apply them, it certainly fast-tracks your understanding of them.

During the first stint of long-distance with my partner I was a heartbroken sixteen year old, upset that I couldn’t do all the fun couple things with my boyfriend that my friends were doing with theirs. My grandmother told me that it was me who was the lucky one because I would get to know him with no distractions. She told me that what we were doing would only strengthen our connection, make us better, stronger. She was right.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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