Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her chin rested on his shoulder as they hugged one last time. He closed his eyes and held back his tears. She just cried. A deep kiss, a long embrace, another kiss, she turned away. Once through security, she walked with her head twisted, looking behind every other step, staring at her boyfriend who was standing behind security at the end of the terminal. A last wave from him, a wave from her, he turned away. He started walking. She fell into the seat across from me. The next hour I watched as she rode out the waves of emotions. I could tell what was happening. I knew because I had cried the same tears when I went away to college. I had thought the same thoughts. I had been the boyfriend on the other end of a long distance relationship.

Few of us who have been in LDRs choose to fall in love with someone who lives hundreds or thousands of miles away. When love meets distance, the choice is simple – deal with the distance or shoot the puppy. Let me explain that part about the puppy. See, three months into college, my high school girlfriend’s father had a talk with her. He compared our relationship to a dying puppy, urging her to end us and shoot the puppy. She fired. My heart broke. In retrospect, it was the right thing to do. A lot of you have asked me how you can make your long distance relationship work. I want it to work, believe me. It’s just hard. You have to really want it to work. I’m not going to make this all pretty. Long distance sucks, it’s hard, it’s tough. If you can go the distance with the LDR, what you’ll find on the other end is the beginning of a life together built on something solid. But to get there, you need to be honest with yourself, your partner, and others who want to be your new significant other. In the spirit of the raw side of LDRS, this isn’t pretty, it’s just blunt, and true.

IF YOU ARE NOT 100 PERCENT COMMITTED to doing the work, don’t act like it (especially you theater majors). Pretending is a load of crap and a waste of everyone’s time. FORCE YOURSELF TO HAVE A LIFE WHILE APART. No life apart = no future together (or a very limited unhealthy one). Talking all day, dating via a webcam at night (roommates beware), and traveling every weekend to be with each other is not healthy. It might work for a while, but not forever. HAVING FUN WHILE APART IS NOT A BETRAYAL. BEING MISERABLE APART IS NOT A SIGN OF DEVOTION, it’s just a sign of being devoted to misery. The more you can encourage your significant other to be happy, the more your significant other will appreciate you (that’s the hope). If having a life means growing apart, your relationship wasn’t worth keeping. If you can’t see this, you’re either too insecure or too immature for something so serious. IF YOU CAN’T TRUST THE RELATIONSHIP STOP IT RIGHT NOW because you have NO CHANCE of making it work. Trust allows you to sleep when you don’t know where or what your significant other is doing. Without trust, it’s too much to handle. It will make you crazeeee (yes, I meant for those e’s to be here). AVOID JEALOUSY. IT’S A BEAST that feasts on all the trust in the relationship until it’s gone. AND without trust you have nothing. TALK when there is a problem BUT DON’T CREATE PROBLEMS SO THAT YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT. Also, have more than one person to talk to about the relationship. Find friends, professionals in the counseling office, spiritual leaders, people outside of the relationship, others through in similar experiences. Appreciate that long distance is hard, heavy, emotional, and not something to do alone. Lean on others. AND PLEASE, if you start to develop feelings for someone else or grow apart, DO NOT CHEAT. Cheating only causes more pain on top of the pain of breaking up and ruins the possibility of a future together. Step away from the relationship and do what you need to do.

WHAT YOU NEED TO MAKE THIS WORK IS unconditional love, trust, compassion, empathy, intimacy, balance, confidence, luck, an insatiable hunger to want it to work, and a willingness to do the work to make it work. MY LDR DIDN’T WORK because I had no life, I expected my girlfriend to handle all my problems, I started to get jealous that she was having fun without me, I began to feel insecure, I stopped trusting, and eventually, things got so bad that her dad told her the only humane thing to do was to end it. So she aimed, fired, and shot the puppy.

- Harlan, Editor-in-Chief, The Naked Roommate

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