How to get a long-distance relationship to work? What kills it? Being with a partner from a different city is no easy task, especially if you are far away from each other. However, true love can survive distance, and there are many ways how you can help it. What are they? Find it out in this article!
What Kills Long-Distance Relationships?
Before we get on the topic of making your long-distance relationship work, let’s see what can kill it. This knowledge is key to preventing your love from dying over a distance. What should alert you?
- Breakdown of emotional connection—A long-distance relationship may cause your emotional intimacy to break down, which takes you and your partner several steps back. This is especially problematic because it is much easier to misinterpret your partner’s words and actions when communicating over a distance.
- Insecurity—This is a direct consequence of the breakdown of your emotional connection. Insecurity may lead to mistrust and weaken your bond significantly.
- Lack of shared experiences—One of the main problems with long-distance relationships is that couples tend to maintain informative communication, neglecting sharing experiences. Thus, don’t forget to launch WatchTogether and watch a movie with your significant other or participate in other shared activities that you can do remotely.
- Lack of growth—Long-distance relationships suffer from stagnation; they might not deteriorate, but they do not move forward either. This might cause frustration and lead to yours growing distant from each other.
How to maintain a long-distance relationship? You need to prevent all the above from happening.
How Can You Make Your Long-Distance Relationship Survive the Trial of Time? 5 Tips from Professional Matchmakers
What can you do to prevent a break-up? How do you get a long-distance relationship to work? We’ve got you covered—here are some tips to help you and your partner thrive in your long-distance relationship.
Discuss Your Expectations
Communication is the key to any relationship, but it becomes even more crucial with those over long distances. You and your partner need to sit down and discuss your dating expectations for such a situation—that’s a necessary first step to making your relationship work!
Find the Best Ways to Communicate
You also need to find out what communication methods work best for you. Do you prefer video calls, phone calls, or talking via chat? How often do you want to communicate and update each other? You need to answer these questions before getting separated.
Plan Your Schedules Together
You might be in a long-distance relationship, but you still need to spend time together, even if virtually. That’s why you should coordinate your schedules with each other to ensure you can spend some quality time together every week.
Discuss How Often and Where You Want to Meet
Long-distance relationships struggle with a lack of physical contact, and let’s be real: digital communication is not the same as that in real life. This is why you need to discuss the basics for your meetings.
Who should visit who? How often can you meet? How long do you want to stay together when you can visit? Answer these questions to ensure you’re on the same page. After all, meetings are one of the most common grounds for conflict in long-distance relationships, so it’s good to establish how you will handle them right at the start.
Be There for Each Other
You might not be able to be physically present next to your partner, but that should not stop you from supporting them emotionally. If they have a stressful meeting at work, ask them how it went; if they’re excited about a particular activity with friends, share their joy and talk about their experiences. You need to stay connected emotionally, so such conversations might be more intentional than natural (as it is without the distance), but they are the key to maintaining and even strengthening your bond in a long-distance relationship.
The Takeaway
We’ve explained what can kill your long-distance relationship and how you can make it work. Now it’s all up to you. Even with our tips, this might prove challenging, but you should also consider this an opportunity. After all, you can explore a different city with your partner and maybe even move into it in the future—it’s not all downsides; there are some upsides as well, so make use of them!
You might also read: 7 Signs That Your Relationship Is Over