Your partner receives great news about a promotion or the opportunity to enroll in a prestigious education program. The only problem? This great opportunity is on the other side of the world.
If following them isn’t an option, and you don’t want to break up, then you’re left with the dreaded long-distance relationship. Before you start feeling lonely, keep in mind that 75% of Americans are in a long distance relationship at some point in their life.
The two hardest things about being in a long distance relationship, besides being away from your partner obviously, are communication and boredom.
Read on to find out some tried and tested ways of keeping the spark in your long distance relationship alive.
6 Ways To Keep the Romance Alive in Your Long Distance Relationship
So you’ve decided to take the plunge and see if your relationship can stand the test of distance.
While it is certainly not an easy road, these tips and techniques will definitely help your long distance relationship steer the course.
1. Be Positive
Like anything in life, a positive outlook will get you everywhere. Be positive about the success of your long distance relationship. Remind yourself of times that you’ve been apart for short periods and how the two of you stayed connected.
Just as importantly, ditch the negativity. When you tell your friends and coworkers that your partner is moving across the world, it’s amazing how many people will straight up tell you that long distance relationships are a waste of time.
Even well-meaning friends want to share horror stories of the partner who cheated on them for months or suddenly ghosted them after months or even years of being together. Get those people out of your life, and don’t let their bad vibes bring you down.
2. Manage Your Expectations
This is incredibly important. Before you or your partner even starts packing a suitcase, you need to sit down together and set some ground rules so that you can each manage your expectations.
Whether you’ve been together a year or a month, you’re married or not, it doesn’t matter. As soon as you start making assumptions about what the other person thinks or feels, you are going to run into trouble.
Be sure to be as open and honest as you can when you’re setting these ground rules. Are you exclusive? To what extent? These may be uncomfortable topics now, but being on the same page will keep your relationship strong in the long run.
3. Trust Your Partner
You had the conversation about the status of your relationship and you know where you stand with each other. Now, you have to trust your partner.
Besides the fact that jealousy is an ugly emotion that drives people away, you will legitimately lose your mind if you second guess everything your partner says.
We’re not saying, let yourself be walked all over! But you also need to trust and listen to your partner when they say that someone is a friend and nothing more.
4. You Don’t Need to Talk All the Time
People will argue back on forth on this point. Some people say that the key to a long distance relationship is sharing every minutia of your life with your distant partner. We, on the other hand, could not disagree more.
Communication is a huge part of maintaining a long distance relationship. But telling your partner what you’re doing every minute of every day is not just going to bore them to tears, it can start to appear possessive as well.
Instant messaging apps, fortunately, or not, give us the ability to see when people were last online. If you start to get frustrated because your partner is online but not replying, it’s possible that you’re sending them a few too many messages.
Remember, it’s good for them to miss you a little bit!
4. Talk on the Phone
There’s a joke in the television show Community after one of the main characters receives a phone call, “Brita was born in the 80s! She still uses her phone as a phone!”.
If you were born after the year 1990, you’re probably more used to sending messages than actually calling anyone. While messaging is a great way to stay in touch when you don’t want to disturb the other person, talking on the phone is important too.
By hearing the other person’s voice, you feel more connected to them compared to just seeing the words on the screen. If you really don’t have time for the occasional call, leaving your partner voice notes can be a nice touch as well.
5. Keep Each Other… Excited
In the famous words of Poison, “talk dirty to me!”. Just because you and your partner are separated by distance, doesn’t mean you should ignore the intimacy in your relationship.
Before you get flustered, we’re not saying you need to send each other nudes if you’re not comfortable with that. Keeping each other excited and aroused can take all forms. In fact, you don’t have to send pictures at all!
Sending messages with a flirty message or some details about your next meeting will be enough to get them thinking about you and keep your relationship far from stale.
6. Do Things Together
I know you’re looking at me and thinking, how can we do things together when we live in different places?
What did you and your partner bond over when you first met? If you’re like any other human, it was common interests in things like films, television shows, books, and music.
Living apart, you can still enjoy those things together. Read a book one chapter at a time so you can chat about it. Or binge-watch a TV show together over Skype. One of my favorites is watching sports together – you hardly even notice you’re in different countries!
This will also help if your conversations have dulled to just being about your work and what you’ve eaten that day.
Stay Strong and Look Forward to Being Reunited
Long distance relationships are tough and we don’t want to tell you otherwise. But with some hard work and commitment, true love can stand up to anything.
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