Why you should appreciate & understand otherness in a long-distance relationship

A healthy relationship is best characterized by two elements: love and desire. Love is about having relationship certainty, savoring emotional connection and cherishing the commitment. You seek security, safety, reliability, comfort and familiarity in love. Desire is about wanting to be with someone. Desire is nurtured by otherness – you seek novelty and mystery. In a long-distance relationship, otherness thrives, so there is an opportunity to reconcile the exciting tension between known and unknown, together and separate. 

• Love thrives on a shared vision in a long-distance relationship.

Because there is a long distance between you and your partner, you seek to neutralize the uncomfortable tension which comes with otherness – you want to emphasize “us” by minimizing the long distance between you and your partner.

When you have a shared vision, your relationship becomes more meaningful because there is hope. You want to know & to be known. You associate ‘love’ with ‘to have’. 

Here is how to cultivate love in a long-distance relationship:

1. Communicate with each other every day. Ideally, you should contact each other at night when you have time to relax at home. This can be chatting on Skype or texting each other on the phone. 
2. Have some shared activities to build & strengthen emotional connection, e.g., watching a movie together on the Internet, having a book club for 2 people, having a dinner date on Zoom, playing video games together online, etc.

• Desire requires mystery.

In order to keep the spark alive, you have to appreciate your girlfriend’s otherness, i.e., the constant mystery in someone that you know and love so truly, madly, deeply and completely.

Remember that your girlfriend is an independent person, so she doesn’t need you all the time. I know this message might hurt to some degree; however, in reality, it actually has the completely opposite effect: When you allow yourself to see her in her flow state, to realize that she is self-sufficient (whether it’s writing her own blog or running her online business or studying at university), you allow yourself to find the mysterious stranger within her, within someone that has become familiar to you. That’s enough to let you want to get to know her as a person all over again. And that’s desire which makes your relationship exciting. 

“Notice how your girlfriend shows up in this world outside of your relationship, and then you will appreciate otherness in this romantic relationship – this helps you maintain a sparky long-term relationship.”