My boyfriend and I started dating senior year of high school, and from the beginning of the relationship, I made sure he knew that I didn't plan on going to college in-state. He was thrilled to be accepted into a prestigious private school about thirty minutes from our hometown, and I was ecstatic to begin a new life three states away. We both knew that we wanted this relationship to be a long term endeavor, regardless of the struggles we faced while so far apart.

Both of us learned so many lessons about ourselves and our relationship during our year apart.

The first and hardest lesson I learned was that not everyone is supportive of a long-distance relationship. There were people who I have known my entire life who told me that it wasn't going to last. There were friend's parents who told my mom it was 'cute' how we thought that we would be able to keep the relationship alive even while so far apart.

To us, it didn't matter. If anything, it made us more determined to prove all those people wrong. As we went into our first year of college, we knew that we had a lot of work ahead of us; not just academically, but in terms of our relationship too. And yes, there were definitely times where it felt like work.

That's the second thing I learned from our time apart: you both have to be willing to put in some work. There has to be a new way to talk and communicate about issues because a good old fashioned sit down and talk about it doesn't quite work when you aren't in the same state anymore. Both people have to be willing to adapt the relationship to the circumstances.

For us, it meant nightly skype calls, texting throughout the day, and lots of shared memes. We had to find new ways to connect and still have time together even if we weren't physically together.

Another lesson I learned is one that will most likely not come as a surprise at all. There will be people who you meet who either don't believe that you are in a long-distance relationship, or don't care.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of people who I met in various circumstances that seemed to think my relationship wasn't serious or valid because of the distance between us. There's this idea that college long-distance relationships won't last, so they thought they could just wait us out.

This directly correlates to the next and biggest lesson I learned, which is that trust is the most important thing.

I made plenty of friends that my boyfriend didn't know because he wasn't at school with me, and he had friends that I didn't know either. We both trusted each other and the strength of our relationship to not need constant updates of where the other person was and who they were with.

I knew that at the end of the day he loved me and had made the choice to be with me, and that wasn't going to suddenly change.

Don't get me wrong, there were still times we fought, still times we got upset, and of course, times where we just wanted to be in each other's arms to make everything okay.

But my boyfriend explained it perfectly when I asked him what he himself had learned from our time apart:

"I learned that there will be testing times over what could be the smallest thing, but as long as perseverance and trust are mutual then everything will be okay."