Long Distance Relationship Advice and Tips

I met my now fiancé while studying abroad in Japan while I was in college. After we met we have done long distance a few times. I’m from New York and he’s from Tokyo it’s inevitable. I’m not going to lie long distance is horrible. In my opinion I think that long distance can be one of the hardest things on a relationship. It teaches you that you really have to trust your partner and be ok with being independent from them. But I will say, if you can do long distance well, it will make your relationship so much stronger. 

My fiancé Kei and I have lived together both in Tokyo and New York and my college dorm room. We’ve also done long distance a lot. We’ve gotten really good at handling it and luckily for us we won’t have to do it for very long anymore. But the two of us sat down and came up with these five things, and there is so much more you could do and more we could say, and maybe we will later, but for now here are these.

In long distance it’s really hard to have moments you want to share with each other, holidays or anniversaries you have to miss. It’s the worst when you’re having a bad day and just want your partner to hug you and make it a little better. I hope these little things help and please share what you do to help make your LDR a little better.

Here are 5 tips:

• Schedule time for each other when you are busy

  • Life can get busy, with school or work your day can blow by quickly. If you aren’t careful and paying attention you could miss talking to your partner for a few days. You could text but stopping to see each other on face time and talk is so important.

• Make sure to keep yourself busy

  • its really hard if you are not busy and wanting to talk to your partner and they are busy. I know when kei was really busy working late hours at his company and going to work really early in the morning it was so hard for me because we couldn’t talk often. But he would call me every morning on his way to work and talk to me as he was walking up this big hill. But once I started working, hanging out with friends and trying new hobbies.

• Try to talk about things other than the day to day

  • It can be really easy to fall into a pattern of just talking about your day, the weather, what you ate for dinner or lunch, but for the two of us its really important to try and have topics we talk about that are not the day to day. I try and ask him questions like; “If you could live in any city for a year where would you live?” or “If you had to pick one meal to eat for the rest of your life what would you pick?” I think you can never stop learning about your partner so you should try and ask them interesting and creative questions.

• If you can try and set in advance a date when you will get to see each other in person

  • For me knowing when we’re going to meet even if it is in 6 months helps me. Knowing I can count down to it helps it go by faster and I’m able to distract myself until we can hang out again.

• Watch the same show together or movies together.

  • Kei and I try to eat at the same time. We’re lucky I can be having breakfast while he is having dinner so if we have time and are both at home we can FaceTime each other and talk while we eat. We also try and watch tv shows together. We try and watch episodes at the same time so we can talk about them. We’ve also watched movies together at the same time but that is harder because of the time difference