Why Long-Distance Relationships Suck
It won’t be long before we celebrate our first anniversary.
I remember what I said to him during our early days of chatting: long-distance relationships don’t work and I have no interest in being part of it.
Look at me now, writing about LDRs and how wonderful (and now, difficult) it can be.
Any relationship that we decide to get into can change our life for the better or worse. It can be a source of happiness or misery. When we chose this, we knew it was not going to be easy. We knew what we were getting into.
We knew that there will be no physical presence for a while. It takes us weeks, months, or years to see each other and in between the hugs when we pick him up from the airport is the long wait.
We have our countdowns set up, we check it every 3 days or so just to make sure the days are getting fewer and the next date is getting closer.
We knew we won’t be there for one another during the big days. I consider myself lucky that he flew from Seattle to Manila for my birthday and stayed here for 2 weeks. But it’s not always like that.
For other important days such as Thanksgiving (US), Christmas, New Year’s, we can only rely on video calls. For days when we experience success at work, attend family gatherings, cry about our car accident or losing a job, we can’t be there.
We knew there will be a lot of waiting. This is our 3rd month of not seeing each other in person since he left the Philippines after his two-week vacation in November. I absolutely miss his company, his easygoing nature and how his warm hands wrap mine when we walk to get lunch together.
For LDR couples, being able to go on dates is huge. Sometimes we need to get on planes and ferries and trains just to get to that date.
We knew someone’s got to move. Any LDR is or must be temporary. It’s pointless to work on one if there are no plans to be together or at least be within the same city. Someone has to uproot himself or herself from home for this relationship to become as real as it can get.
There are many other reasons why LDRs suck. But there are a few, good and great things that outweigh the bad.
The sacrifice of being away from one another to work on ourselves, to work on our visas, to save for our travel expenses, to plan for the next 6 and 12 months, is living proof that we will do what it takes for this love that we have waited for, for a long time.
The way it feels to see each other again after 3 days of being too busy with life brings us back to how it was the first time we met whether in person or through a phone screen.
The way he communicates how his day went, how he feels when he’s sick, how he spent his day snowboarding with his nephew, and the way he expresses his love from far away can make up — at times — for the distance.
Tomorrow, we are another day closer to that day. The wait is worth this love that we’re in.
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