I’m sure most of you have heard the quote “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” How about “love has no distance?” Or “it’s true love when your boyfriend lives on the other side of the world, and you only see him once a year.” You haven’t? Well I hadn’t either, until I met my soul mate.
My boyfriend, Shivam lives in India, and we have known each other through mutual friends for 7 years before we finally realized that we were meant to be. There are 8,000 miles, two oceans, a hundred countries, and an 11.5 hour time difference between us. Yet we believed in our love, and gave a long distance relationship a try. Now let’s talk about the fact that Utah (where I live) has been in quarantine for the last 6 months, and India has been in lockdown for 4 months. Still, he asked me to be his partner the day before quarantine started, and it has been 7 whole months today of my love in quarantine! Many of our friends told us it wouldn’t work. I mean, 9/10 long distance relationships fail. But we wanted to be the 1/10 that could prove that when your heart is in the right place nothing can keep you apart.
Now don’t let me trick you into thinking that we don’t have problems. Because we do. We fight all the time, but at the end of the day we love each other too much to allow the bitter words that come up in fights to destroy us. We are both at points in our lives where our careers are at the top of the list, and we respect and support each other through this journey. As fate would have it, we are both computer science majors. And as you can guess, yes, he basically does my homework. Just kidding!
The reason that I am writing this is so that anyone that is struggling with a LDR or any relationship that has been affected due to COVID-19 knows that there is hope! Before I even committed to this relationship, my boyfriend understood that I had a lot of baggage to deal with and that there would be days that I would be frustrating and irritating and annoying and bitchy. Regardless, he made it clear that him loving me he would help me love myself. And that has been one of the pillars of our relationship; we spend time with ourselves and learn to love ourselves so that we can share that love with each other. There are days that we don’t get to talk to each other at all because we are both so busy, but we still make time to drop small, cute texts to each other about how our day went and how much we missed each other.
Another thing to keep in mind is that while there may be many that touch your body, there are very few that touch your soul without ever touching your body. And those are the people you want to keep, because those are the people that look past your physical attributes — they look deeper to find out who you really are. They are the ones that talk to you about the things that you never knew you wanted to talk about.
The last thing that you should know is that sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing. Don’t think that you have to jump in and out of relationships just because you are lonely, don’t think that you have to go out looking for the perfect guy, and definitely don’t compromise for someone that “could” be your forever. Take a leap of faith and a net will appear. This is just the beginning of my relationship, and maybe yours too. So keep reading, because there’s more where this came from!