Since many Loyola students are from out-of-state, I imagine many are in or have been in a long-distance relationship at some point.
I too had a boyfriend when I first left for college. That boyfriend and I naively thought a long-distance relationship was going to be easier than it actually was.
In truth, it brought out the worst in both of us.
In the beginning, we were both very devoted. We would write e-mails constantly and talk online. Unfortunately, we were never living in the same country, so calling or text messaging became expensive. Soon, we didn’t speak for extensive periods of time and when we did, it was to argue incessantly about how I never called or how he didn’t understand how busy I was. When we were physically together in the same place we never argued, so the first year apart was particularly hard.
They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but in our case, distance brought to light our faults as people. I discovered he was a jealous person and I could be greatly indifferent. He would check my e-mail—which I foolishly gave him access to — for clues of unfaithfulness and he’d use things like Facebook against me. “If you have time to go out with your friends and post pictures of it on Facebook, then why can’t you call me?” he would ask. After a lot of nagging and violations of my privacy, I would stop speaking to him and we would break up.
And then we would get back together.
The problem with long-distance relationships in college is that — at least in the beginning — you go home for holidays and then for the entire summer. This gives you the opportunity to face the ex you get along when you’re together, but not when you’re apart. You are left with a serious dilemma, a fatal attraction that allows you to overlook the mistakes committed by both parties over the time you were apart. This is especially true if you and your significant other share the same friends and the same hangouts.
And so the vicious circle of breakups and make-ups begins, until both of you near the end of your college careers. You don’t go home as much as you used to and because you hardly see each other anymore, the fighting and getting back together that kept the hope of a future relationship alive ceases. This is the major crossroad for a long-term, long-distance relationship. You and your significant other either decide to make it work and make plans to be together in the same place after graduation, or you go your separate ways.
So my lesson learned: long-distance relationships suck. If I’d realized this sooner, I may have spared his feelings and my own, too. In love I can take a lot of things, but to my dismay, distance in a relationship is not one of them. As we say in Spanish, corazón que no ve, corazón que no siente — a heart that does not see, is a heart that does not feel.