In the best of circumstances, long distance relationships are hard. If you’re lucky, you live within reasonable driving distance where the largest inconvenience is that you might spend most of the week apart. If you’re less lucky, you might live far enough that a flight every other month is the best way to be together. And if you’re even less lucky, you’re separated by an entire ocean on two different continents, and a mere two weeks before one of you visits the other, a pandemic hits and shuts everything down.
I’m in the less lucky category, and I’m writing this post because my girlfriend wanted me to share my thoughts on long distance relationships and pandemics (hey, babe, this is for you!). I’m not a relationship expert (and never will be); I’m just a guy who happens to be in a long distance relationship and has opinions. Take them or leave them.
Since summer 2019, I’ve been in a relationship with a lovely woman from Vietnam, who I had the fortune to visit in December 2019. We’re separated by a vast ocean, with my shiny butt living in northern Minnesota and her delightful self in Ho Chi Minh City. Already, that distance makes things difficult, and more so given the relationship of the United States to Vietnam, which requires far less paperwork for my travel than it does for my girlfriend. Throw in a pandemic, and you can imagine how much more difficult this all is.
In general, I think long distance relationships are temporary affairs. The strong-willed can last a long time without feeling the strain that inevitably comes from relationships reliant on verbal communication without any kind of physical intimacy. The strong-willed can push a lot of that aside. Not forever, but for a long time. Love, after all, can knock back a lot of the sadness that comes with not being with the person you care about, and all it takes is being able to keep reaching for those emotions and rekindle them through regular communication. If you really want something, you’ll make a lot of sacrifices to keep it, and those who are truly dedicated to their distanced partners will find that sacrifice easier than not.
But long distance is hard. In the best of cases, you have a rough idea of the time between meetings. In the worst of cases, time is relative. In the situation my girlfriend and I find ourselves in, the notion of time is fuzzy. This pandemic has taken away certainty. Will we meet in March? Maybe, oh, nope. Will we meet in May? Maybe, oh, nope. June? Uh. July? Uh. When? When it’s safe. We don’t know when “safe” will arrive, but we remain hopeful it will be sooner rather than later. All I know is that the wait is worth it because if we survive this, we can forever say that we made it through a pandemic. That’s a story you don’t see in romances all that often, though Voices of a Distant Star (2002) certainly challenges what it means to be in a long distance relationship.
One possible solace in all of this is that traditional relationships also must deal with that fuzzy sense of time. Date nights might still happen for them, but they’re not the same ones as before. Most of them aren’t going out to the movies or to restaurants or camping or taking vacations. They’re making do at home, creating their own versions of date nights and, in the best of cases, working hard to comfort and support one another and their families from the unexpected isolation in their homes, from financial and personal misery, from the solititude.
Long distance relationships have to do the same, especially now that our choices have been taken from us by something nobody asked for. While Vietnam may be opening up, having seemingly weathered the storm better than most, international travel may be held off for a while. So to make do, we have to spend far more time communicating and comforting from a distance, filling in the gaps you’d try to fill with in-person meetings through text, audio, and video. Those strong-willed folks will latch on to this because, like Dr. Malcolm might have said, love finds a way.
We should take that as encouragement, really, if only so we don’t wallow in despair. A lot of lives have been disrupted or even ruined by this pandemic. But for those of us in long distance relationships, the only real change beyond personal impact is the role of time. We’re still miles and miles apart (or kilometres, for those using the metric system). We’re still doing all the things we were going to have to do before: text and share pictures and find new ways to communicate and comfort one another from afar. We just have to do it longer. And that’s not so bad, really. The pandemic being what it is, we already can’t go outside to socialize the way we used to; in a way, it’s comforting to know there’s someone on the other side of your cell phone waiting to answer your texts with digital hugs. We’re apart, but we’re also together. Surely that counts for something, no?
All of this is to say two things:
Long distance relationships are tough no matter where you are or what is happening around you.
Love is a weird beast that lives in most of us, and when dedicated enough to the cause, it can overcome anything, including long distance during a pandemic.
Whether you’re in a traditional or a long distance relationship, hang in there. Keep talking. Keep finding new ways to communicate, new things to do together, and so on. Read a book together. Watch a show. Video chat. Text spontaneous nice things. Communicate what is going on. Share good news and joy. It might, if you’ll permit me to be a little cheesy, just keep love alive.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go eat some food made with ingredients my girlfriend sent in a box of Vietnamese goodies. Also, this song is for her:
Reading Time
I Will Ignore Time: Long Distance Relationships in the Time of Corona
In the best of circumstances, long distance relationships are hard. If you’re lucky, you live within reasonable driving distance where the largest inconvenience is that you might spend most of the week apart. If you’re less lucky, you might live far enough that a flight every other month is the best way to be together. And if you’re even less lucky, you’re separated by an entire ocean on two different continents, and a mere two weeks before one of you visits the other, a pandemic hits and shuts everything down.
I’m in the less lucky category, and I’m writing this post because my girlfriend wanted me to share my thoughts on long distance relationships and pandemics (hey, babe, this is for you!). I’m not a relationship expert (and never will be); I’m just a guy who happens to be in a long distance relationship and has opinions. Take them or leave them.
Since summer 2019, I’ve been in a relationship with a lovely woman from Vietnam, who I had the fortune to visit in December 2019. We’re separated by a vast ocean, with my shiny butt living in northern Minnesota and her delightful self in Ho Chi Minh City. Already, that distance makes things difficult, and more so given the relationship of the United States to Vietnam, which requires far less paperwork for my travel than it does for my girlfriend. Throw in a pandemic, and you can imagine how much more difficult this all is.
In general, I think long distance relationships are temporary affairs. The strong-willed can last a long time without feeling the strain that inevitably comes from relationships reliant on verbal communication without any kind of physical intimacy. The strong-willed can push a lot of that aside. Not forever, but for a long time. Love, after all, can knock back a lot of the sadness that comes with not being with the person you care about, and all it takes is being able to keep reaching for those emotions and rekindle them through regular communication. If you really want something, you’ll make a lot of sacrifices to keep it, and those who are truly dedicated to their distanced partners will find that sacrifice easier than not.
But long distance is hard. In the best of cases, you have a rough idea of the time between meetings. In the worst of cases, time is relative. In the situation my girlfriend and I find ourselves in, the notion of time is fuzzy. This pandemic has taken away certainty. Will we meet in March? Maybe, oh, nope. Will we meet in May? Maybe, oh, nope. June? Uh. July? Uh. When? When it’s safe. We don’t know when “safe” will arrive, but we remain hopeful it will be sooner rather than later. All I know is that the wait is worth it because if we survive this, we can forever say that we made it through a pandemic. That’s a story you don’t see in romances all that often, though Voices of a Distant Star (2002) certainly challenges what it means to be in a long distance relationship.
One possible solace in all of this is that traditional relationships also must deal with that fuzzy sense of time. Date nights might still happen for them, but they’re not the same ones as before. Most of them aren’t going out to the movies or to restaurants or camping or taking vacations. They’re making do at home, creating their own versions of date nights and, in the best of cases, working hard to comfort and support one another and their families from the unexpected isolation in their homes, from financial and personal misery, from the solititude.
Long distance relationships have to do the same, especially now that our choices have been taken from us by something nobody asked for. While Vietnam may be opening up, having seemingly weathered the storm better than most, international travel may be held off for a while. So to make do, we have to spend far more time communicating and comforting from a distance, filling in the gaps you’d try to fill with in-person meetings through text, audio, and video. Those strong-willed folks will latch on to this because, like Dr. Malcolm might have said, love finds a way.
We should take that as encouragement, really, if only so we don’t wallow in despair. A lot of lives have been disrupted or even ruined by this pandemic. But for those of us in long distance relationships, the only real change beyond personal impact is the role of time. We’re still miles and miles apart (or kilometres, for those using the metric system). We’re still doing all the things we were going to have to do before: text and share pictures and find new ways to communicate and comfort one another from afar. We just have to do it longer. And that’s not so bad, really. The pandemic being what it is, we already can’t go outside to socialize the way we used to; in a way, it’s comforting to know there’s someone on the other side of your cell phone waiting to answer your texts with digital hugs. We’re apart, but we’re also together. Surely that counts for something, no?
All of this is to say two things:
Whether you’re in a traditional or a long distance relationship, hang in there. Keep talking. Keep finding new ways to communicate, new things to do together, and so on. Read a book together. Watch a show. Video chat. Text spontaneous nice things. Communicate what is going on. Share good news and joy. It might, if you’ll permit me to be a little cheesy, just keep love alive.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go eat some food made with ingredients my girlfriend sent in a box of Vietnamese goodies. Also, this song is for her:
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