Long-Distance Relationships: What I Think I Know About Them

A few months ago, Serious Girlfriend Who Lives 600 Miles Away and I exited the initial honeymoon phase of our relationship. When we were first together, staying up half the night to chat by IM trumped our sleep schedules, and writing epic emails was more important than food, hygiene, or bathroom breaks. Eventually, of course, our initial all-encompassing fascination with each other began to fade. Our partners, our cats, our hobbies, our unread books, our friends, and our neglected work all began to demand attention. My children thought I ought to return to providing them with food on a regular basis; her new job went better, she found, if she was well-rested. We soberly noted that we had been spending money we didn't have in order to see each other.

It was rough there for a bit. We liked the "You, You, It's All About You!" stage. We worried that without that energy driving us, we couldn't give each other the reassuring attention we both need. We thought that if we decided to live scrupulously within our means, we'd hardly ever see each other. My family considered a move that would have put us much closer to her; when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, we wondered whether a relationship across such a long distance had a future at all.

When we got over our individual and mutual fits of hysteria and despair, we were clear that although our relationship had changed, we didn't want it to end. We set out to make an intentional transition to the new form our relationship would take, post-honeymoon. In the course of this intentional transition, I wrote up what I called my Three-Point Model of Long-Distance Relationships, and I would like to share it with you now.

Su's Three Point Model of Long-Distance Relationships.
The long-distance relationship, or LDR, is maintained through three forms of contact. The importance of each of these forms of contact can vary from relationship to relationship, even to the extent that one may be absent or near-absent, but it behooves the thoughtful person to consider their role and importance.

Type A: Low-impact daily or near-daily contact.
Type A contact is accomplished through things like texting good morning or good night, asking questions like, "how was your day?" or "what are you up to?" or reporting on minor life issues like, "my cold is much better," or "I finally got the washing machine fixed." Sending phone pictures of your tasty glass of beer or the cute thing your cat is doing would also fall into this category. 

This type of contact often takes place in between or during other activities, and is prone to interruption. For instance, it might take the form of a couple of quick texts from work that end abruptly when a meeting begins or someone comes up to you with a question.

Some relationships will have a lot of this, and some will have very little. I was talking to Live-In Sweetie about this, and he pointed out that he and his long-distance best friend do almost none of this kind of thing. For a year, I was in a long-distance relationship with Lovely Girlfriend. She had spotty internet access, a very busy life as a single mom, and two jobs, neither of which allowed for much texting or IMing. It was a rare treat if we managed to have a real chat rather than exchanging a text or two during the day. But we always texted goodnight at 10 p.m. You wouldn't think that would be a big deal, but it meant a lot to both of us. It was just a couple of lines but was a way to remind us we were thinking of each other, our little moment out of every day.

Serious Girlfriend and I text and IM multiple times most days; sometimes these turn into actual chats, but we can't count on that. We also follow each other very closely on Facebook. 

Type B: Short-duration focused one-on-one contact 

In a local or live-in relationship, this is things like Live-in Sweetie's and my habit of going out to breakfast two mornings a week, where we have an undistracted hour or so just with each other, with no chores on our minds and no kids, work e-mail, or appointments to interrupt us. Whereas Type A contact is prone to being interrupted at any time by other demands, in Type B, you've hopefully got the other person's full attention. 

In LDRs, Type B contact could be phone calls, chatty e-mails if you're the reading and writing type, Skyping, or even a long on-line chat by text or IM.

Live-in Sweetie and his long-distance best friend do some Type B. They get on the phone every so often and the conversation is never less than an hour. It's their major way of keeping in touch between visits.

Type B contact requires mindfulness and effort. Unless you live some kind of charmed life, you have to make it happen. A place in your calendar has to be cleared during which you can focus. Live-in Sweetie and his friend make dates to get on the phone so they can both protect that time commitment.

Serious Girlfriend and I have very little of this right now, and the loss of it was the hardest adjustment for me. We hope to have more, and have experimented a bit with phone calls, or with setting aside specific times for on-line chatting, but mostly this problem has been solved by a couple of visits in which it became clear that we didn't need a lot of Type B to maintain our connection and ease with each other.

Type C: Visits

Visits! Glorious, glorious visits.

There are two aspects to visits:

C1: how good they are. Do you feel the connection when you're together? Do you enjoy your visits?

C2: how often they happen. Do your lives allow for the time and expense?

Lovely Girlfriend and I felt that we could feel our connection slipping if the gap between visits stretched out to two months or more. We thought every six weeks would be ideal, though we never achieved that and didn't think it was an option. Of course, she and I had very weak Type A and Type B contact. More of that might have made longer gaps between visits more OK.

Serious Girlfriend and I also think two months between visits is pushing it. We sometimes visit each other's homes, because this is less costly than meeting in the middle for a weekend tryst. These visits give us a chance to see each other's partners and friends, visit favorite haunts, and lounge around. But they can be challenging because one of us is in Type C mode, away from home and more or less on vacation, while the other is still surrounded by their home and its demands. Time alone during home visits tends to come in chunks of a few hours at a time, because we both live with long-term partners, and I have kids. Sometimes the kids and I visit her. That's a special kind of happy chaos, but a little lacking in intimacy. I'm sure this could be quite different for people who live alone.

We have found that visits where we both are away from our homes for a weekend are essential for feeling our connection to each other, and we recently learned the hard way that no number of home visits can alleviate the anxiety we both start to feel if it's been too long since a weekend tryst.

It also really helps keep the anxiety at bay if we know when our next visit is going to be. Right now, other obligations in our lives are making it impossible for us to have a firm date. "Sometimes in August," we think, or "maybe over Labor Day weekend." We would much prefer something we could put on the calendar and count down to.

There are a lot of variables that are going to make other people's experiences and needs different than ours. Just how long-distance the relationship is, for instance. Serious Girlfriend and I find ourselves envying people who live within 3 or 4 hours of each other. That's a distance you can do for an ordinary weekend: leave on Friday after work, come home late on Sunday. With 11 hours between us, we pretty much need a three-day weekend plus at least half a day off work to make the travel worthwhile. (On the other hand, I have an east-coast friend whose sweeties are a couple on the west coast, and he puts in a full day's work on the plane on Friday, spends the weekend with them, catches a red-eye home on Sunday night, and reports to the office on Monday morning. I am in awe.)

The thing about the 3-point model is that it's useful to know which of these things best top up your tank. I, for instance, love Type A contact. I want to know how that meeting went, or what that itchy rash turned out to be, or how everybody liked the new recipe. I like knowing what's up in the daily life of my sweetie. That doesn't matter so much to some folks, and sometimes it's flat-out impossible to do long-distance, but if I can have it, I want it. That's important for me to know, and it's important for Serious Girlfriend to know, too. We don't have the luxury of all the A, B, and C we can handle and more; we need to put our efforts where they'll do the most good.

Update: a friend of mine made the following comment after she read this, and I liked what she had to say. She gave me permission to include it:

This seems like an excellent summary for a newish LDR. My experience is that there are additional challenges that start to kick in at about the 5-7 year mark.  

1) That kind of commute (when it begins to feel more like a commute than interesting travel) is a very long and sometime frustrating commute. I think being mindful of parity in terms of who makes this effort would be a very good idea. Speaking here from the experience of not being mindful enough about that.

2) There is a kind of nebulous quality to a long-term LDR that I think may just be inevitable. You have a home and your sweetie has a home but your relationship together does not have a physical home. I don't know what the answer is for that one. There may be none.

Erika Moen at ohjoysextoy has a comic about being in a long-distance relationship. She and her husband were intercontinental for several years. They would envy us our paltry eleven hour drives and our shared time zone. This comic is NSFW, as you might expect from a website called ohjoysextoy. Her points are not all the same as mine, so I offer her to you as another point of view.

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