Those hanging tough through long distance relationships know that the process is full of emotion and takes the strongest of us to get through it. There's never enough time together and always too much time apart. Some days feel really long and the hardest really test character, persistence, and love. The best of us know though that if it's supposed to work, it is always worth it.

When you're in a long distance relationship, you get creative. Every day you think about the upcoming date that you're supposed to see each other again and you try to find a way to meet up before that. You know the cities in between and get really good at figuring out how many hours it would take to get there or how early you can head out of town or how soon the next weekend opening will be coming around. Calendars become your best and worst enemy. Hours, days, weeks it doesn't matter, the miles always make the next time feel so very far away.

When you finally get to see each other, it is the greatest relief. For however long or short of a time you get to be together, you try to make up for all the missed time. You want to just go to dinner together because then it would feel like any other night. You want to just sit on the couch together because then it would really feel like any other night. All the normal things normal people do every day are the things you miss most, and those are what you want to cram into the days together.

There is such a build up to finally getting to see each other that sometimes it's even hard to be happy the whole time you're together just because you know that your next 'Goodbye' just means the next 'Hello' is further away. It's hard to make time together positive when during the time apart you're constantly either mad, sad, and/or frustrated. And you want to talk about that. You know, sometimes you want to show them what the separation does to you.

You cry a lot. You question the future all the time and you wonder if it's supposed to be this hard. You let yourself be sad when you're alone and don't always tell people how much it kills you to wake up in the morning without them there. The worst part is you always think that if one of you changed something or sacrificed something that you could be closer, together. You think I could do this and move to be with them but then you wonder why they couldn't do the same. It's a hard circumstance but good communication can make anything work out.

Long distance stinks, bottom line. But good things don't always come so easily. When it's really hard and bad times come day after day remember that if it's supposed to last that it will. If you're supposed to be sad right now so you can be happy for the rest of your life, then that's what you'll have to face. If good times together only come in small doses every few weekends, then maybe that means you'll have every day with that person soon enough.

Long distance is a choice. People decide that love is stronger than miles or hours apart and that the heartache is only temporary. People make it work every day; one by one something gets us through it. Whether it's thinking about the good memories you've already shared or that upcoming date you finally get to see them, we get through it. It takes strong people, capable of feeling every emotion in the book, who know that they didn't sign up for easy, they signed up for something that's worth anything thrown at them. Long distance stinks, but we can do it, it will be worth it.