My boyfriend goes to Cornell University.
That’s a statement that always gets a reaction when I say it. “I know,” I say with a smile, “I got a smart one.” People tend to react because Cornell is an incredibly prestigious institution, and it’s true— I did get a smart one.
But people also react because Cornell is in New York, and New York is 3,000 miles away from where I go to school in Stockton, California.
I grappled with this new struggle a year ago, with the excitement and pride I felt for my boyfriend at this incredible opportunity and with the incredible fear I felt that our relationship wouldn’t be able to stand up to this profoundly difficult change. That we would break under the tension that trying to reach across a country placed between us.
"It isn’t that I didn’t want him to go,” I said. "It’s just that I also really, really wanted him to stay.”
I have now been living with the reality of a long distance relationship for a year, and those words resonate with me even more profoundly than before. I think this is because I have learned a truth about long distance relationships that no one seems to want to say:
They suck.
I know that this isn’t the case for everyone and that, in fact, some people are far more comfortable having some space between them and the person they love. But for me, not being able to see my boyfriend— not getting to hold his hand as I walk through the grocery store, or lean my head on his shoulder as I watch Netflix, or hear his heartbeat as I fall asleep at night— totally blows. My experience with a long distance relationship is not so much that distance makes the heart grow fonder. The heart was already more than sufficiently fond. Distance just makes the heart sad, and lonely, and kind of needy.
This isn’t to say that my relationship with my boyfriend isn’t still wonderful and fulfilling. As a matter of fact, it is true that the distance forced us to confront some problems in our relationship that otherwise could have gone unaddressed for far too long. As a result, we’ve gone through some really rough patches in the past year, but we’ve ultimately come out stronger for it. For my part, I think our relationship now is better than it’s ever been before.
My relationship with my boyfriend has changed because of the distance between us, and the stress that it puts on us both. But if it had remained stagnant, I don’t think that it could have survived. And here is the central, most essential thing that we have seen over this year: we both want it to survive. We are both committed to one another and to making our relationship endure in spite of the obstacles. I still don’t want to have to say goodbye at the end of the Skype calls, and I still wish that the time we share in one another’s presence could be longer, but we care about one another deeply enough to wait patiently for a time when that can be possible.
Until then, we send pictures. We tag one another in funny memes on Facebook. We plan for a beautiful future. And we wait. And it is worth it.
Because what we have is (still) stronger than the miles between us.
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