We started out in the same place. We were blessed with nearly a year of each other’s undivided attention. We learned we loved and we left. Four-and-a-half hours, 250 miles. That’s how long it takes to get from my home in Pittsburgh to his in Washington D.C. As a 19-year-old without a car or stable income, he might as well have been halfway around the world.

But that’s the reality of college relationships. In college we are lucky enough to meet, befriend, and love people from all over the country. My freshman year, my best friends lived everywhere from Florida to Jersey, and saying goodbye to them over our breaks was always a little extra sad. When it was time for summer, when friends transfer, when friends graduate, the fear will always be “Will I ever see them again?”

And truthfully, you can’t ever know the answer to that.

It’s kind of a separation from the real world, college. You have your own community in which everyone operates relatively similar within the same vicinity. You eat at the same places, go to class in the same buildings, and sleep down the hall from one another. But that can change so quickly. Aside from breaks between semesters, aside from all other less common reasons people depart from their school, it only lasts four years. The relationships you form, friendships or otherwise, are going to be impacted after graduation in some way. You may become closer with some, and lose touch with others. The only real difference lies in the way you roll with the punches.

I know this all seems pretty depressing, but what I’m trying to say here is that the real determinant of the success of a long-distance relationship is in the ability of the couple to change their relationship to fit the new circumstances.

Change.

Most people are terrified of it. Some people refuse to do it. Others embrace it only on the basis that the change goes entirely as they expect it to. But honestly, no matter how you feel about it, it is still going to be difficult, especially if you liked the way things were going before this change was necessary.

In a long-distance romantic relationship in college, you go from spending every day together, probably most of the day, to not seeing your significant other at all. That’s it. One day you’re sitting on a hill outside your dorm building watching the sun set, ignorant of the fact that you’re going to have to say goodbye very soon, and the next, you’re in your bedroom at home, feeling like half of you is missing. And that is not an easy pill to swallow.

You can call. You can FaceTime, Skype, text, write letters, send emails. You can even poke each other on Facebook. But it’s not the same.

You are going to miss them. You are going to miss them so powerfully you won’t know what to do with yourself. It’s so easy to focus on their absence. It’s the easiest thing in the world to go about your days feeling incomplete, talking to them mostly about how sad you both are that you aren’t together, daydreaming about the next time you will see each other.

This may feel like the right thing to do — to act and think in a mindset of loss, to grieve for the relationship you physically cannot be a part of at the moment. Really, though, this is not helping either of you, and it is certainly not helping you to be together.

When you think of your significant other, you should be thinking of all the things that make you so happy about them — the way they mess with their hair when they’re tired, their infectious laughter, their fascination with all things philosophical.

Please keep your eyes on this, not the seemingly insurmountable distance between you.

I wish someone had told me this. I wish someone had reminded me that no matter where he was geographically, I still had the man I loved with me. It’s easy to lose that — to replace them in your mind with a ghost on a screen, a message notification on your phone. I did not know how to adapt and as such, regrettably, watched the relationship fail in front of my face.

Don’t be like me.

Loosen your grip on the empty place where they should be. Remain enchanted by what you are able to have with them. It’s so hard watching them grow without you, but you are growing too — and it doesn’t mean you have to grow apart. Changing individually is inevitable, but changing together is within your control. Learning all over again how to function as a couple is a struggle. Being so far apart, some days you may feel like you don’t know them at all. But the truth is, you know them just as well as you did the day you said goodbye. What you DON’T know is the “US.” You are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the new ways in which your relationship must travel in order for it to continue to exist. But it can be done.

At no point along the way will you probably feel like you know what you’re doing, feel like you know what you’re in for. Tumultuous, most certainly. But if you are able to successfully make this change, successfully become a part of a relationship that is able to move and grow with you, instead of in spite of you, you will never have to wonder if you’ll never see them again.

College may be where it started, but that is not where it has to end.