So you’re dating someone long distance. Lucky you, right? Those familiar with long distance love affairs know that if you’ve got a long distance relationship, you’ve got a full time job, and it doesn’t pay — at least not in real American tender. But don’t fret. Just follow these eight tips, and you’ll be enjoying your long distance relationship a lot more than most of your friends are enjoying whatever passes for romance in their lives.
1. Talk Every Day
The most important tip for making a long distance relationship work is to be so doe-eyed, star-crossed, stomach-flipping crazy about each other that you have to talk every single day — possibly multiple times. You never see each other. You’re deprived of love’s most basic perks. You’ve got to have an emotional bond on such a soul-shattering, spirit-bending, molecular level that time and space are seen as but pesky obstacles on your quest to carve a sacrificial amount of time out of your every single day to fuel the unquenchable fire in your heart. Also, the more people around when you’re talking — the better. They’ll be throwing up, which is the surest proof of true love.
2. Talk to Other People About Each Other
Another key to making a long distance relationship work is to truly believe that you are the first two people to have ever felt this way about each other in recorded history, and to see yourself as divinely anointed with the task of spreading your Gospel of Love to every friend, family member and hater that comes within shouting distance. Ideally, you should also believe that you are the only people who have ever fallen in love more than three miles away from one another. You should spend significant amounts of time explaining to people why Death Cab For Cutie’s Transatlanticism was written specifically for you and your long distance lover. Even perfect strangers should not be safe from your sermon of how you met, what the other person is like, what they might be up to right now (if you’re following Point One, you won’t have to guess) and why your relationship is superior to whatever they’re enduring at the moment. (Usually, it will be.)
3. Stop Going on Dates With Other People
This doesn’t seem like any kind of novel idea, but it’s such a common mistake that it bears mentioning here. Going on little dates with other people is the easiest way to make your long distance relationship into a series of drunken hate-voicemails, threatening packages and arson attacks. These days, it’s easy to end up on a date that you thought was nothing more than an opportunity to eat a hamburger with someone else. You misunderstood a text message (more on these later) and next thing you know, someone is trying to have sex with you in the middle of the street. The best way to avoid this is to never respond to any advance, friendly or unfriendly, from a single human of the opposite sex. Dogs and other animals as well. Just to be safe.
4. Text Always
While this may seem to be a sort of addendum to Point One, it’s not. Not only should you speak to your significant other every day (preferably for extended periods of time and ideally where there is potential for nakedness), but you should also spend a good deal of your time texting this person. This allows you to constantly know what your long distance lover is doing (see Point Two and then also Point One again). Texting can also lead to sexting, which only sounds dumb to people who’ve never been in a long distance relationship.
Read more: Liz Riggs & Tyler Huckabee, HuffPost
