It’s abroad season, aka the time when relationships are put to the test in the most frustrating struggles of long-distance communication. Just when you think you’ve mastered keeping in touch from your dorm room with semi-frequent FaceTime sessions with family and your best friend from home, your roommate packs up and moves to Europe for a semester and you’re suddenly dealing with a slew of obstacles you didn’t even know were issues until you had to stop yourself from calling them at 10 a.m. your time because they’re sleeping and the time change struggle is all too real. While it is possible to find ways to connect with friends despite being oceans and time zones apart, here are five struggles of doing friendship from a distance:

1. Time Zones

This is the most obvious but by far the worst aspect of keeping in touch with your bestie. At first, you think that five or six hours apart isn’t that big of a deal, so you can’t FaceTime at 11 p.m. on a Monday night because your friend will be (*should be*) sound asleep. Not the end of the world. But then you wake up after a night out and all you want—need, for that matter—is to rehash every single detail of your antics with the one person who will fully appreciate it. You start with rapid fire texting, and then instinct kicks in and you’re hitting speed dial. “Why are they not answering? Pick up!” You yell out loud. Then you remember that it’s 5 a.m. back home and your friend is never up before 8.

2. FOMO

There’s just no way around it, both you and your other half are clearly killing it apart, and a lot of the time you’re too busy to feel it, but then it’s her 21^st birthday and you’re bombarded on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook with pictures of her taking shots with people who are not you, and FOMO slaps you across the face. It’s hard to feel like you’re missing out on the highlights of your friend’s semester that you know you’d rock together. The only consolation? You’ll celebrate doubly hard when you’re reunited, because your birthday is in June.

3. Technology Glitches

The upside of technology is that it gives you a million methods of communicating with your friends no matter how far apart you are. The downside is that technology can be temperamental, and when it doesn’t work, you’re pretty much screwed. Like when the WiFi sucks in your room and you’re stuck staring at your friend’s frozen face when you’re video chatting instead of actually getting to talk to them. There’s nothing worse than a spazzy FaceTime session.

4. Edited Stories

You’re used to knowing all the details about your friend’s life, down to what she ate for breakfast that day. When you’re time zones apart and don’t get to talk every day in person, it just isn’t feasible to communicate every little thing that happened that day, unless you have time to write a text the size of the great American novel before class, which you might, if you didn’t value sleep so much. While you still manage to fill your friend in on the escapades of your Friday night, you can’t tell them everything. Sometimes you just miss the luxury of rambling story telling that really only works in person.

5. Lack of hugs

It seems so simple, but sometimes all you need in life is a giant hug from your best friend when what started as a decent week somehow spiraled out of control and brought you to rock bottom. FaceTime is almost a tease in times like these; your bestie’s face is right there tauntingly through the screen, but the teddy bear hug that you are dying for is so, so far. Obviously there’s only one way to solve this problem, one of you needs to book a flight stat, because you two are long overdue for a good old-fashioned cuddle.