going the distance

Shared Styles

GO I N T H E G

Long distance relationships can be controversial, but college students make them work.

By Meredith Welborn

“Yeah, good luck with that!” said the Uber drive upn hearing about my long-distance relationship. It was just one of the intrusive comments offered up about my long-distance relationship. Arthur and I talked via phone for three months before he came to visit me for the first time in almost two years — talk about nerves — so how hard could long distance be?

Roughly 75% of college students are in a long-distance relationship at some point in their lives, and 35% of college students are in a longdistance relationship at a given time, according Laura Stafford’s 2005 study, “Maintaining LongDistance and Cross-Residential Relationships.”

If so many college students date long-distance, why do so many people, like that Uber driver, dismiss it?

Whether or not a relationship fails is not due to the proximity of one person to another, says Jennifer Pirecki, a Nashville-based author, speaker, educator and psychotherapist in private practice who focuses on marriage and family counseling. The difference between failures in long-distance and close proximity couples is the way in which a relationship breaks down, she said.

Laziness, Pirecki said, is a huge factor for couples who live near each other while longdistance couples tend to savor their time together. On the other hand, long-distance couples miss out on day-to-day life with their significant others, which can present problems if marriage is ever in the question.

“A bond between two people is, in essence, a living thing,” Pirecki said. A relationship needs to grow in order to survive, and “usually, if we’re not contributing to the relationship, we’re depleting the relationship in a way that will catch up with us at some point.”

For long-distance couples who want to transition into marriage, Pirecki advises them to spend about a year in a shared space before getting married.

Meg Bergstrom-Dix and her husband Jeremy did exactly what Pirecki recommends.

Meg, who graduation from SMU in 2019, met Jeremy during her senior year of high school, and they started dating long-distance when Meg started college. Upon graduation, Bergstrom moved back to California; the couple got engaged in November 2019 and tied the knot in September 2020.

Dix found that she and her husband were able to focus more on themselves while they were apart. Long-distance dating “really helped me find who I was and who I wanted to be independently,” Dix said.

Pirecki agreed. Their arrangement allowed each of them to pay attention to their own individual development, he said.

Dix said that she was able to build strong and lasting friendships, keep up her grades and join a sorority. And, while it wasn’t always easy, every time they saw each other in person made their proximity negligible.

Experts urge that both people need to be 100% invested in the relationship for it to work.

Whether you’re terrified by the idea of longdistance or you’ve been doing it for years, do what is right for you and your significan tother — and definitely don’t take advice from your Uber driver.

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