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Lauren O’Malley (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

When I pictured my future relationships as a single person, I never thought I would be in a long-distance relationship. As it turned out, I have had multiple periods of being away from my partner. The furthest distance I have been away from my partner was from Canada to Central America. During the pandemic, I was working as a registered nurse in COVID-19 intensive care units. My partner had gone down to build our vacation home in Nicaragua. I would have liked to have visited, but it was best to stay put in Toronto, as there was such a need for ICU nurses at that critical time. Initially, the time apart was supposed to be three months, but our time apart ended up being five months. Almost half a year! This time apart had challenging moments, but allowed us to grow as a couple in a way we would have never done before. We learned many lessons, but the top three things we learned the most were being patient when communicating, trusting each other and actively listening to each other. 

In long-distance relationships, you need to put more effort forward when communicating. However you’re communicating, via phone, video or texting, the action must be equal to be productive. When you are apart from someone, you are living your separate lives, so making the time to communicate takes a lot more patience. Sometimes one of us wanted to speak with the other, but the other couldn’t. Emotions sometimes took over in these moments. It would be frustrating when you needed to talk and they weren’t available. We learned how to be more patient with one another and not let our emotions spill into how we set the tone of our conversations. If we introduce a conversation with specific tones, that can become the focus, versus the actual conversation. When you’re not in the physical presence of someone, you can’t read their body language or always understand the scenario they are in. Having patience until we found the time to talk helped us have productive conversations when we were apart. 

As much as we needed patience in specific times when we could not communicate, trust was equally as important. Life can be unpredictable. Sometimes our days don’t always go as planned. My partner’s days had many more hiccups than mine. Power outages are much more common in Nicaragua, and they disrupt wifi connections. If he was unavailable for a FaceTime date, I had to trust that something came up or there was a good reason for him not answering. We can’t always be in the same place as our partners, even in regular relationships. Trust always has to be present for relationships to work. But with long-distance, your trust in another has to be strong, because you are not seeing them at the end of your days and getting that physical connection and validation. You have to have trust and have confidence that the other person has your best interests in mind, even when you can’t see it or hear it.

Actively listening was another big lesson that we learned when we were apart. I sometimes struggled to listen actively to my partner when we communicated our experiences. I was in winter lockdowns, with vaccine mandates, while he was in a hot, third-world country where the pandemic looked utterly different. It was quite a time to be apart in such different worlds. We learned to actively listen to each other to understand each other’s separate lives. When either of us made assumptions or interrupted, the other felt frustrated, as we felt misunderstood. In relationships, we need our partners to understand us, not to necessarily agree, but to have our points of view acknowledged. We learned to make an effort to listen actively, which helped us understand each other’s daily life better, allowing us to be supportive of one another even when we were so far away. 

Being in a long-distance relationship forced my partner and I to learn to communicate better than before. We had a decent communication foundation, but our time apart revealed what needed work. We learned how to fine-tune our skills to support each other daily. The distance would have been much more difficult if we were unwilling to put the effort in. Understanding how to support each other through listening, patience, and trust was the critical foundation to keeping the relationship strong when apart. The distance taught us much about each other and gave us the tools for stronger communication today, when apart and when together. 

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Lauren O’Malley was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, and moved to Toronto in her mid-twenties, where she works as a critical care registered nurse. Lauren loves her RN job, but aspires to educate and help people in other ways. Writing is one of them. Lauren values time with her family and friends, and loves to chase sunsets.