Long Distance

Are you starting a long distance relationship or trying to understand long distance relationships? This is my story on my long distance relationship.

It didn't start as long distance, we met in high school through mutual friends. My best friend at the time was dating him, and before you think I'm a terrible person for being with my best friend's ex, let me explain. They dated for around a year, and their relationship became toxic. She cheated on him more than once and she broke it off with him. After they broke up, she made all of our friends hate him. I felt that wasn't fair because he truly didn't do anything to deserve that. I became closer to him and lost touch with my friend. No, not because of him, we just drifted apart and I became closer with other people. About a year and a half later we started dating and well the rest is kind of history.

Two years later and we're still together. We graduated together and that is when everything changed. He got accepted to a military university across the country. I was on the West coast and he moved to the East coast. Being together every day to seeing each other once every couple months was brutal. I'll be honest, it was probably one of the hardest times I've dealt with. During the first couple months, I became depressed. I became incredibly lonely and lost not knowing what to do. I felt all my happiness was gone when he left. I swear I cried every time we called. I was a complete mess and I didn't know how to get out of this rut I was in.

The first year of long distance is always the hardest. The main two things of getting through long distance is trust and communication. We both had lots of trust in each other so that wasn't a issue however, we struggled with communication. It seemed like we fought a couple times a week because of miscommunications. That put a huge toll on the two of us. We eventually figured that it was because of our texting. All of our miscommunications were always caused when we texted, so we lessened our texting and called more. We still text, but we call and FaceTime most of the time. That really made everything a lot better.

On February 23, 2017, he proposed to me. He proposed while we were snowboarding at Big White Ski Resort at the highest peak. I'll be honest I kind of knew it was coming because I heard him asking my Grandma for her permission. It was one of happiest days because I get to marry my best friend. This happened during our first year of long distance and we knew we would be doing long distance for a least another year. That was hard; to get engaged and have him leave to go back to the east coast within a couple days, but it made me more hopeful.

We are currently in our second year of long distance and I'll be honest, our relationship hasn't been stronger. We've been through so much in the past four years of being together and it's really shaped our relationship. A lot of people think that long distance relationships don't work, but that's far from the truth. It can work if you both put in the time and effort for each other. Yes, it might not work out for some and that's okay. We made it work because we wanted it to work. Long distance will make or break your relationship and that's the harsh reality of it. Moral of the story is long distance is hard work, but it's worth it for the person you love.