A week without my wife, and I'm thinking again about why long-distance relationships are so hard to keep alive — and what my client work says about it.
I’ve been living without Nastya for a week now.
She left for the Carpathian mountains for a two-week training program run by her gestalt therapy university.
We very rarely spend that long apart. In all the years of our married life, we’ve been separated for more than a week only two or three times, because of my trips or hers.
Living without the person you love is sad. At first it seems like you have more free time and attention, but within a couple of days all of that is cancelled out by missing them and feeling lonely.
I once read somewhere that even in very good relationships, the first difficulties start after two to three weeks apart.
Nastya and I have never been separated for more than two weeks, but I think that’s true. As soon as you learn to live without each other, the emotional bond gradually starts to weaken.
I see it in dozens of my clients who are trying to hold a family together across a distance. It isn’t merely a hard task. I’d say it’s close to impossible.
Although this is exactly the question where I very much want to be wrong. I really hope and believe that one day I’ll start finding people who spent a long time apart, didn’t cheat on each other, and managed to rebuild the relationship after the separation.
And even though I personally have very little faith that a relationship survives at a distance, I keep recording podcasts on this topic with recommendations on what can be done. You can find them on my YouTube channel.
Share your thoughts. Have you ever lived apart from the person you love for a long time? What did you do to hold the relationship together?