ribble's Five Rules for Long-Distance Relationships

This is one of those posts that I have said out loud to so many people so many times that almost no actual writing is required.


1. Know the next time you will be living in the same city indefinitely.

So many people screw this part up.

Have no doubt: being in a relationship with someone means that you see them regularly, that you live close enough to each other that you can spend time together.

Long distance relationships are place holders. For some reason, you have to live apart temporarily. If you can't figure out how to get your lives to a state where you'll be together, in the same city, for an unspecified amount of time, then no matter how much you care about each other, you are going to have to break up eventually.

Once you know how long it's going to take before there's even a chance of living in the same place, you need to make a common sense decision about whether the relationship is worth continuing.

If, for example, you are going to be apart about as long as you've been together up until that point, I'm guessing things aren't going to work out.

Sometimes, being in a long distance relationship is the easy way out - it's like having a boyfriend or girlfriend that you don't have to deal with all the time.

But if it's not going to work, it's not going to work. Ending it now is a lot better than ending it once the two of you have been in the same place long enough for you to realized that you've wasted a year of your life on someone you don't care about as much as you thought you did before.


2. When you spend time together, make sure it is for at least three weeks.

Here are three problems with having a long-distance relationship:

You are in love with someone who isn't there.
You are growing apart.
Part of your life is somewhere else.

When you get a little time to be together in the midst of these long separations, these three problems disappear. Suddenly, you're together, you are both experiencing the same things, one of you gets to see the rest of the other one's life, and you can fuck again.

Great. But. This rush of this initial mix of being together again, no longer pining for the one you love, and fucking will wear off. After about three weeks, you will settle in to the old routines of your relationship.

If this is a bad relationship, that means running in to all the old problems you assumed you'd left behind, plus all the unexpected ones you didn't know had come about since the last time you saw each other.

If this is a good relationship, it means finally being able to enjoy each other the way you should, as two lovers taking each other for granted ... AND it means dealing with all the old problems you assumed you'd left behind, plus all the unexpected ones you didn't know had come about since the last time you saw each other.

This is wonderful only because it's important. If you spend around three weeks together, you'll either come to understand that your problems are real and get out of a relationship that is wasting your time, or you'll solve those problems and go back to your separate lives with a stronger relationship than you had before.

If you dodge the three-week rule, you'll be really, really happy ... until you live in the same place for longer than three weeks. Then you'll be miserable.


3. Fight.

Being in a relationship means having problems. Being in a good relationship means being able to solve those problems. (By the way, I've got a working theory that being in a great relationship means you love solving those problems together just as much as you love having them solved).

If you are in a long-distance relationship and you do not fight, it's not because you don't have problems. It's because you don't want to deal with these problems.

This is normal.

In a long-distance relationship, you're apart, you're lonely and vulnerable, blah blah blah. You will want the time you spend communicating with your loved one to be happy, pleasant time - talking about how much you miss each other, exploring the depths of your love, possibly having phone sex. No one wants to talk about problems.

But, face it, you didn't want to talk about your problems before, either. The nice and horrible thing about face-to-face relationships is that they don't let you avoid your problems (that is, unless you have found a way to avoid all of your problems).

When someone's right there in front of you, you have to start talking about what's going right and what's going wrong before you gnaw your own arm off.

Long-distance relationships make your problems with your loved one easy to avoid. If you don't talk about something during this phone conversation, you don't have to face it until your next phone conversation, and so on.

The problem with this approach is that when you do finally get together for three weeks or more, you're going to have an enormous backlog of things to fight about.

Being together after being apart is stressful enough. If you don't fight about things while it's still optional, the mandatory fight is going to kill off your relationship for sure.


4. Keep living your life.

...and make sure your significant other does the same.

When you're separated from the love of your present (especially when you are moving to a new place) it's tempting to turn off the rest of your life or leave it undeveloped.

They're gone! (at least for now.) It's depressing! Why face all these new people - or even your old friends - when the person you really care about is only a phone call away?

But you can't live for that next phone call or visit, because what kind of a life is a life of waiting? It's important to create your own life around you - friends, places you like to go, things you like to do. You wouldn't put your life on hold if you were living in the same city as your significant person. Don't do it just because you're apart.

That done, talk to your boyfriend or girlfriend about your life. Make sure that the next time he or she comes to visit, he knows about the people you'll introduce him to and about what kind of role they play in your life.

Because you're separated, you two will necessarily grow apart, or at least in parallel. The trick is to keep up to date with what's changing with her, and to make sure she is up to do date with what's changing with you. That, and making sure you'll have plenty of time later to grow together.


5. Do not talk every day

Lastly and leastly, do not talk to each other every day. For one thing, one day worth of material is not really all that much to talk about. For another, you need to have that emotional distance from your person of interest to be able to live your own life. And, for a third, those international phone calls really blow through your savings fast.

That's it, gentle reader. Hopefully you have your own opinions about long-distance relationships, because it's been three weeks without a fucking comment.

Get on it, ribble's readers.