advantages of long distance relationships
When we hear that a couple lives 11 time zones apart and can afford to come together only once in awhile, it is natural to offer condolence for the pain. We should more fairly envy them for their luck.
Whatever our longings may indicate, it is simply much easier to love when someone isn't there. Far from an unfortunate necessity, living apart should be recognized for what it truly is - an advantage.
Much goes right when we live a long distance away. Online or over the phone we never assume the other person should be able to read our minds without us having to explain what is actually in them. We accept that we have to describe our days as well as our desires in words and pictures.
We cannot help but do the thing that holds couples together - communicate. .
We accept the other can live without us and therefor make the effort to be the sort of people someone can freely choose to be with. We work at it.
We can benefit from what jealousy otherwise prevents us from admitting how much it helps us to feel like desirable potent people, to be able to go out and flirt with someone else for awhile without too many questions being asked.
In other words how profoundly loyal a whiff of surface disloyalty allows us to be.
Apart we appreciate, It's a strange quirk of our minds that we only notice what is missing - the money we do not have, the weather we long for, the car we don't yet own. Yet once anything is securely in out possession it disappears.
We only see in a sense of notice what is not there.
The best way to lose ownership of something is to own it. The surest way to forget your partner exists is to be sure she is beside you every night.
When we are apart we can sample the enjoy the gentle suffering of loneliness over the intense rage of suffocation. We never have to find out how much it can tarnish love to be with someone who has a different idea of the correct way to place a towel.
Too often when we are living together we locate the difficulties of our relationship in an incorrect place. We think it is the wrong person we mistaken gotten involved with rather than keeping in mind we are with the right person trying to do a very difficult thing - share a home.
It may in the end, strangely, be easier to love than to share a restroom.
The book is often thought to be more important then the essay. So the living relationship is often thought to be superior to the long range version.
And yet without ever meaning to do so the long distance relationship may simply, despite all its evident challenges, throw out some the absolutely ideal conditions for true love to thrive.
