If you Google “long distance relationships”, the first things you find are very uplifting ideas about how you can fight through it. How you and your loving boo will survive even though you’re thousands of miles away. I learned there’s even a bunch of apps to pretend you’re together, to plan things, and even to imitate contact -cuddling? There’s an app for that-.
And I’m really sorry, but today, I’m here to tell you the opposite. You see, my story begins like all magical love stories (and it’s literally magical, because he was an actual magician and our first date was an hour long private magic show), we met and we fell in love. Or at least, I did. But the time came by for me to come back home, and for many months, and even sometimes now, home didn’t actually felt like it. I needed him. My only true desire was to see him again, to have him. There were days when I couldn’t get out of bed because the pain was overwhelming.
So I started thinking. We were still talking everyday, and I couldn’t imagine myself with someone else than him. I was determined to make it work long distance. I would try all those weird things I had read on the Internet, I would do anything to make it work. Only problem is, I was the only one in that two person relationship with that idea.
Soon, the illusion of the long distance love made in movies started to fade away. People would laugh at me at parties when I rejected guys because “I have a boyfriend 9000 miles away”, my friends asking me to please stop saying that because I sounded insane. My therapist told me every session to stop lying to myself. My mother started setting me up with guys, just so I could forget about him.
And tickets to Europe from America are expensive. A 6 hour time difference means someone will probably be sleepless the next day. And what’s most important, he did not love me enough to make the effort. I’m not Katherine Heigl in a romantic comedy, and everything that I had read about long distance making love stronger was wrong.
But to everyone who’s not me, here’s the message: if you really love each other, both of you, and are willing to endure an unbearable amount of pain, like someone punching you in the face every day when you wake up, try it. Be sure that pain will lead to an amazing thing someday. Go slow, be honest, do the job. For two people to be in a relationship they need to love; to be in a long distance commitment, you need to love a lot, way more.
And if you’re someone, like me, who loves someone on the other end of the world and is not sure that person loves you back: end it. And I’m saying this when I’ll probably cry tonight thinking about what I had. But no one deserves to be waiting, begging for love. Better things can and will come.