Mind the Gap

            The only time I ever took biology, it was the summer before my senior year. Thirtysomething seventeen-year-olds in cutoff shorts crammed into a sweaty lecture hall, confused by the late July classroom; and on Fridays, we watched movies. One week, I sat with my feet on the desk—the room dark and forgiving—and squinted, absorbed, as a male lion stalked his way under an African tree. The male enters the pride, a British voice hushed, and assesses the task at hand. Without so much as a warning, the lion pounced on a cluster of cubs and proceeded to rip them to shreds. The male knows that in order to assert his dominance, he must first remove any trace of another male’s bloodline. A chorus of girls erupted in “OHMIGOD NOOOOOOO,” as the weight of the visual sank in and our classroom deteriorated accordingly. Eventually, our droopy teacher flipped on the lights and summoned us back with a clap of her hands. “Biology can be unforgiving,” she said, barely fazed. “When some things are viewed as unnatural. Kind of makes you think about stepdads and stepchildren, no?”

            Not venturing to think too closely about my own stepfather—who had never so much as batted an eye at my torrent of teenager, let alone grab my face with his teeth—I gave further thought to that concept: unnatural. To defy the laws of nature, to be something other than regular, to roll off the shelf of good sense for no reason; people dressing their pets up for the holidays, for example. Reality television. Christian death-metal, prepackaged sushi. Kim Kardashian’s proportions. And of course, long-distance relationships.

            That’s right. Mind you, this isn’t some sort of half-assed jab where I attempt to unpack something I never have, nor care to, understand (see: Psychological Statistics 110, and a series of term papers bearing variations on a title of “Unpacking the Blah Blah in Today’s Blah Blah Blah.”) This is something that strikes iron in the pit of my heart, and a reality that I know almost as well as the back of my hand—or the front of the trenches—or the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night to check my email; because maybe, just maybe, he finally wrote back.

            When brought up in casual dinner banter, long-distance romantic relationships have a similar effect as the prevalence of feline leukemia, or the fact that we’re long overdue for an earthquake. They’re conversation kryptonite. People sit around in stunned silence, almost as though they’re afraid it’s contagious; she looks tired, it MUST be because her boyfriend lives far away… if MY significant other lives far away, I will ALSO look tired, and probably lose my job, and collapse in a pile of despair. None of which, of course, is true. But attempting to explain the logic behind a long-distance relationship to someone who has never had one is like telling your grandfather you can’t leave the house because your clogs don’t match your pants. In other words, useless. Not to mention ignoring the fact that no logic exists to explain.

You see, no one enters a long-distance relationship on purpose. It’s not like we meet someone, tumble head over heels, and decide: “This is nice. So you wanna start seeing each other, like, NEVER and gradually lose our connection and minds as we spend all our time on the phone?” Most people, myself included, declared themselves allergic to long-distance love at one point or another; because at the end of the day, no one wants to be that person checking Facebook in the bathroom, or saving their good underwear for certain weekends and not for others. There’s no tutorial for how to navigate a bond that takes place over text message, or college class that tells you what to do the first time your boyfriend makes his shit YOUR problem from miles away—“and while we’re at it, here’s how to do taxes!” There’s no such thing as an urgent question when your significant other lives nine hours ahead, and is sleeping when you need to talk. Long-distance partnerships are unnatural in the sense that they live in the future and past, running over experiences that have or will come, when we’re otherwise trying to ground ourselves into the present. If I had a dollar for every guided meditation that I’ve done on the PERFECTION OF THIS VERY MOMENT, only to battle the voice that exclaims Three more weeks! Three more weeks! I could probably pay off my car.

At the same time, the people who claim—without hesitation—that long-distance is impossible are usually the same ones who believe—without hesitation—that relationships are always hunky-dory when both partners live in the same place. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that choosing to spend your life mirroring another human means issues ARE GOING TO come up: and whether you’re three inches or three oceans apart, the reflection is not always pretty. Yes, when you’re in the same room, you can smile and hug it all out: a huge fucking advantage in the grand scheme of Being Okay. However, when physical touch is not an option, you are left with another advantage—to let small shit go. It’s hard to maintain ego in an argument when your version of Self is contained in the small right-hand corner of Skype. And your face keeps freezing. And you’re left with a moment to stare at yourself on the screen, thinking: Really? Is that how he sees me?

Is that how I want to be seen?

In choosing to be in a long-distance relationship (because yes, it is a choice), we are given the opportunity to examine ourselves more often than we’d like. Our insecurities come to the front of the stage, do a tap dance, and ask: “Are you happy?” And in the space between bodies, there is an answer. We are forced to check in with ourselves—questions like, “Do I know the difference between a light, compassionate touch and a Vulcan death grip? And which one am I doing TOOODAAAAY?” And as we look down at our white knuckles, strained, we are faced with the heart-wrenching, savory task of learning to be our own friend.

My first round of long-distance love was an accident. I left for college, and it was only after my then boyfriend and I spent hours talking on the phone that we turned to each other and asked: are we still together? Because the opposite felt simply impossible, and yes: it appears we still are.  Our summer lasted for four years. For such a delicate beginning, it wasn’t long before that relationship turned comical in its mess: sobbing into voicemails, laser-like obsession with email, stereotypical addiction to misunderstanding. Worst of all, mistaking that for the adrenaline of being with each other; because “See?! I broke it. Now we can fix it. We can do this thing, right here, together.” It was only recently when I came up against this scar tissue that I realized how deep it had run. In every interaction that follows an unhealthy one, there can be the temptation to bolt—it’s not your fault I’m damaged!—or go round and round on the carousel of past hurts, reenacting familiar battles until someone gives up; however, you can also get your ass off the horse. Now in my second long-distant relationship, I no longer mistake pain for depth. While this one also caught me off-guard, the decision to follow it came from a place of mutual truth: confidence, albeit surprise, at the way our love morphs as we move. Like walking down the sidewalk and seeing a single blade of grass rising up from between cracks in the cement, and feeling a tender kind of amusement at the fact that it hasn’t been smashed. The decision to stay comes easily when both people think: Life without you… no longer an option. So hey, want to grow as I grow?

Being in a healthy long-distance relationship requires a number of things: One, ditching movies. The fact that John Cusack’s character is not outside your window has less to do with the fact that you’re bicoastal, and more to do with the fact that he doesn’t exist. Two: we must forego the shameless romanticizing of other people’s relationships. It is easy to look at another long-distance pair and think, “Oh, they just write letters and gaze fondly at one another’s photograph while coordinating for surprise flower arrangements in their respective places of work, how PERFECT”—while meanwhile, you’re drinking alone and yelling at Skype when the internet blows and the call drops…again. It is difficult, but far more worthwhile, to pan for gold within the current of trust that YOU share; you and that one other person who knows that the distance is hard, but believes that you’re easy to love. No matter what way you cut it, it sucks to have a person-sized hole in the fabric of your life. It sucks to feel the absence of your loved one in the little things you do: the making coffee, brushing teeth, day-to-day perfection. On the flip side, there’s the light—the simple secret—of walking down the street with your heart blazing Yes. I am loved. Because someone out there thinks you’re swell enough to suspend their disbelief, to send you photos of the food they made, and wait for the day you’ll cook together.

Long-distance relationships afford us something we don’t often get: the opportunity to miss someone. It’s tempting to lean on technology—a lure that I believe can be neatly summarized by the time I walked around Urban Outfitters with my phone overhead, desperately searching for service so that my boyfriend and I could continue our existential argument over Facebook—however, we needn’t live there. Letting time and space dance between conversations can feel like a kiss, or it can feel like the scariest shit in the world; but at the end of the day, these relationships let us go home to ourselves. In fact, they demand it. They require a certain level of Owning Our Shit, which not everyone wants to do: I’ll wager that no one feels stellar looking at the screen and saying out loud, “I have no idea how to convey my emotions on the internet.” But getting off the computer with a load of forgiveness, and loving yourself as you are—taking your shoes off and rubbing your feet in the grass—that is the part that feels good. That, and the promise of making it better tomorrow.

Like most things, long-distance relationships are what we make them: long, short, painful, lusty, beautiful, complex, fun. Building a life far away from your partner-in-crime IS unnatural (the lion cub enters the savanna, seemingly unaware of what waits in the brush), but so is assuming there’s only one way to build life. Stone by stone, bird by bird; unnatural does not mean impossible. Impossible is lazy. And anyone who has spent seven hours on a train, or cut out individual hearts to glue on an envelope, paying ten dollars to send it Express Mail to make sure that it gets there on time—anyone who has ever known love that is lazy knows this kind is anything but.