Yesterday marked a couple of things for me. First, it was my New York/New Jersey anniversary! Whether I believe it or not, I have been in the New York area for a full year. Yes, I live in Hoboken, but I work every day in the City. The bustling and wonderful City. However, yesterday also marked another important milestone in my life. Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of Richard and me being in a long distance relationship, or LDR for short.
To celebrate this pretty significant milestone, I thought I would share some of the ways that we’ve managed to survive and thrive in our long distance relationship. Hopefully, if you ever find yourself in a long distance relationship, you can take some pages out of our book and make the best of a not-so-ideal situation.
Keys to Surviving & Thriving in a Long Distance Relationship
Create a ritual
A mainstay for us this past year has been to have a ritual-a mutual understanding of when we’re going to talk and how. Every night we talk. It’s usually on a Google Hangout, but sometimes on the phone. Sometimes it’s only for a few minutes while we say goodnight before bed, but sometimes it’s for a couple of hours. The point is that there’s an expectation that we’ll talk late in the evening. Of course, don’t be so strict about your ritual that you stop yourself from doing other things while you’re apart. If one of us has plans, we reschedule. The best part about having a ritual is that it becomes something to look forward to!
Make your home their home
As much as we can, we try to integrate each other into our lives in our respective places. Whether this be hanging out with each other’s friends when time allows, hanging out with each other’s ‘rents or just simply making your home welcome to them. While I try to be hospitable, when Richard visits, I try not to treat him as a “guest.” I try to make my home open to him as if it were his home.
Travel together
Every so often, we try to meet up in or travel to somewhere fun. Remember Toronto? That trip was a blast! Remember San Diego? Another trip where we met up to eat and explore. It’s exciting to explore somewhere new together. In order to see each other, at least one of us has to travel, so it’s not terribly inconvenient for us to just meet somewhere new.
Communicate
One thing that I really enjoy about being in a long distance relationship is that we’re given the opportunity to communicate. To really talk and get to know each other. Every single second counts, so we make the most of it. I’m convinced that by virtue of being long distance, we’ve covered more topics more deeply than we would have if we were in the same city.
Enjoy the journey
Life throws crazy things at us sometimes. After all, that’s what living in flux is all about. If you had asked me two years ago if I had thought that I would ever be in a long distance relationship, I would have laughed at you. I didn’t really understand why people would do that to themselves! It sounded so miserable.
Well, that thinking changed once I met Richard. And, luckily, so far, being in a long distance relationship hasn’t been all that bad. Actually, it’s been kind of great.
Have you ever been in a long distance relationship? What did you do to make it work?
