By Cassie Sheridan |
I remember distinctly a “How I Met Your Mother” episode where Ted Mosby discusses long distance relationships with his friends as, “a lie high schoolers tell each other so they can have sex the summer before college.” And more specifically, that it never works.
Except maybe, it would work for him and his girlfriend.
That’s the rhetoric surrounding long distance in general. “It never works, but maybe it’d work for me in my relationship.”
In a lot of ways I feel like this is the column I was destined to write. I have been involved in a long-distance heart-wrenching emotionally-challenging relationship in some way since I was a freshman. I know the trials and I know the struggle and I also know the desire and the wanting and the burning, burning, burning hope that your relationship is that exception. I know all too well about “making it work.”
College is a hard time to be “making it work.” You’re discovering yourself through finding friends and passions. You’re engulfed in a culture of newness, a lot of which involves smelly basements and late nights and living wildly and celebrating your ability to have gone to the gym three times this week and have perfect skin. This culture does not look kindly on someone who spends their free moments having marathon skype sessions.
I get it. It’s hard to make sense of why anyone - being 20 years young, with a prime body and heightened sex drive - would be staring googly eyed at a blurry, pixelated face when they could have a partner down the hall.
But maybe that pixelated face makes them fully human in a way you could never understand. Maybe when they talk with that person their soul sings, and their existential intellectual connection is so incredible it’s worth not getting to be naked every night.
But maybe they are kidding themselves. Maybe they are afraid of “getting back out there.” Maybe they are making a huge mistake. Maybe they are limiting themselves.
Here’s the thing though: Nobody wants to hear your critique of their relationship choices.
Everything people critique about those of us involved in long distance relationships (or any relationship for that matter) we have thought already - every day. It has haunted us and overwhelmed us and scared us and the last thing we need is another person saying we’re wrong.
What if your self discovery leads you away from that person you long for? What if that person holds you back like an anchor to your past, sinking you? What if you fall for someone else? What if they fall for someone else? What if you break up and feel like you wasted six months, a year, four years?
You don’t know another person’s heart. Quit critiquing what they long for with a cynical slap of a reminder that long distance never works.
Because why shouldn’t someone try? Why shouldn’t they be the exception? If you meet someone that means more to you than nightly nookie, what’s wrong with believing and having faith that you’ll beat the odds?
It’s not a fantasy. Relationships are work, whether you spend each hour together or once a month or once a semester.
We are all struggling to figure out how to fit in both individually and together, and the last thing anyone needs is the reminder they are probably doing all this work for nothing.
I once tried to be cynical and my soul sobbed endlessly for the one person I’ve never been able to shake. I believe you can make it work. I think it’s hard and difficult and you’ll spend a lot of time longing, but you can make it work. You can make it work if the relationship is real and better than one night stands at Barrel Room or regretted make outs in seedy basements.
Quit critiquing someone else’s choice to put faith in being the exception. Besides, if your hot roommate is still endlessly in love with her high school boyfriend, that means more options for you anyway.
