My boyfriend and I were together for an amazing year and two months before our departure for college; me to Syracuse, and him to an isolating military college five and a half hours away. The extreme contrast of going from seeing him almost every day to barely hearing from him at all was an emotional shock that nothing could have possibly prepared me for.
It felt like I was diving head first into freezing water before giving my body any time to acclimate, and unaware of how deep I would go before coming back up by air. After almost three months of long distance, I have developed strategies for figuring out how to trust my boyfriend, and trust that what we have has the ability to sustain the test of time.
My experience in this relationship has provided me with an opportunity to grow and discover more about myself from a challenge I never hoped for or thought I would experience, but more importantly taught me that the greatest and most beautiful things, both grand as well as fleeting moments, in life will never come easily.
To prevent others going through similar experiences from feeling as alone as I felt, and provide some clarity to those questioning whether or not they have the strength to try, I have compiled some of the most important lessons I have learned from my own experiences.
If you do not hear from him or her for hours (and hours and hours), they are very most likely busy or do not have enough privacy to sneak in the opportunity to check their phone without the fear of being caught for violating a massive rule. Both of these factors are out of his control, and believe me I understand how frustrating they are, but remember that your significant other is probably really disappointed too.
Talking to you, or the thought of you may be the very thing that encourages your loved one to persevere throughout the day. Do not make the same mistake as I did by allowing the frustration and hurt you feel be the only conversation you have every single day for the first month of school, because no matter how many times you cry about it, until he or she gets the privilege to communicate more often, it will not change.
Trust that if they have the time, they are without a doubt spending it by communicating with you in any way possible, including Facebook messages and Google Docs in my case. With that, if they say something along the lines of "I will be back in an hour," do not get your hopes up because more often than not one hour will turn into three maybe even at least.
Figuring out how to not only maintain but also grow your relationship in order to assure that you grow as individuals you are doing so together rather than apart through not much more than often brief and far between text conversations is a challenge in itself.
Assuming it is even possible to do so, once you develop a strategy to assure that you are spending the little time you have to talk in the most productive way as possible, even still because you cannot employ body language, facial expressions, or tone of voice to buffer the message you are sending and assure it is received how you intend to portray it, texting opens the door quite widely for miscommunication, resulting in more frequent arguments than if you had the opportunity to talk over FaceTime or on the phone.
Your arguments may not be solved right away either so instead of focussing all of your attention on your anger, try to direct it towards your own life where you are. He or she may vanish in the middle of your all of a conversation because all of a sudden they have to go march. For hours. Or go to "chow." For hours.
Or who knows what else, you get the picture. I speak from experience because this happened to me literally two days ago. Also, at times you may feel like neither of you have anything to say beyond small talk; this will feel defeated but is understandable and inevitable.
As our dreaded departure for college became a more and more unavoidable reality, I began to desperately scour the internet for happily ending stories from others who had already experienced what I was about to, or at least posts encouraging the possibility of making a long distance relationship work rather than concluding with the advice stating that you should break up before you should even try.
This is the reassurance I wish I had, so if you are seriously contemplating giving up, stay tuned.
When you finally reunite in person, it will feel absolutely electrifying, almost like the blissful honeymoon stage all relationships experience but even more perfect. Your fears that he or she has become an emotionless robot will be put to rest, the only change you might detect is a new vocabulary of slang that they will forget to explain to you.
Although at first, you may not know how to act around them, soon you will fall back into a routine and it will feel like you saw them yesterday, only you may feel a little more in love and at peace. I have never experienced anything more worth it than the wait to see my boyfriend again, and no matter how hard it is to be physical without him, I would much rather persevere no matter what it takes than be without him at all.
The hardest part is when you are initially acclimating to college when your significant other has the most restrictions on their ability to engage with the rest of the world, and the least amount of free time as well as privacy. I assure you that gradually their military college will become more like your own college, and they will earn the freedom to be able to talk to you more freely, rather than texting for a short while after 10:00 p.m. when they get to lock the door to their room.
Rather than directing all of your attention towards missing him or her, as difficult as it is, remind yourself that you are beginning your own adventure too and you need time to acclimate to your own school. You will not be able to do this if you isolate yourself from your peers by being constantly wrapped up in the schedule of your loved one.
In other words, do not do what I did. Focus on your own college experience and personal growth rather than losing yourself in your thoughts of missing him or her. If you take it one day at a time, one day you will wake up and it will be November, then you will wake up and find that it is May and you are wondering where the time went. Take it day by day, and at the end of the day, if you still feel the love then you are winning.
