The love languages of love distance lovers are pretty much restricted to verbal affirmations, quality time, and gift-giving. There are many (what might typically be called) relational restrictions and romantic inconveniences – lack of physical touch, long-unfulfilled longing, time difference. Hand touches and enfolding arms must be converted into these few available love languages – the verbalisation of touch, the reconceiving of unreachable arms and bodies. Rather than heartbreak and hopelessness, these conditions can be responded to with a certain measure of creativity, of love-fuelled perseverance. It has taken time and tears for my girlfriend and I to learn this fact of adaptability.
We’re both writers and we’re both lovers; we use our words. We use our love.
One such technique of mitigation is the Apple iOS 16 Shortcuts app. The iPhone user can schedule text messages to be automatically sent at any time of day or night. For example, I have a 3:30am text scheduled for every night. Its contents can vary; sometimes I send her sonnets or Lorde poetry, sometimes soft and love-heady sentences from my own head and heart. I like to imagine that I have these early mornings that I’m leaning over and whispering in her ear while she’s half-asleep and hair-mussed. Or that I’m capable of dream telepathy. It feels like I’m there when I can’t be, and there’s a sort of dual comfort in that. I know that she can feel me there, that her nights are less lonely and the distance less gaping.
- You press ‘+’ in Automations, then ‘Create Personal Automation’.
- You select the ‘When’; the ‘Time of Day’ and frequency of Repeat.
- Then you select ‘Add Action’ – ‘Send Message’.
- You choose its ‘Recipient/s’.
- And then you type out your love messages.
(Remember to turn off ‘Ask Before Running’, as this makes the process non-automatic and means you have to approve the Automation first!)
There are other coping mechanisms; most of them about personalisation and offering up as much of the self as possible. She sent me her jumper, soaked in rose-scented perfume and with a little ‘E + A’ stitched by the wrist. Sometimes she sings to me. Scent and sound are two examples of touch-free sensory stimulation, creating a powerful effect of physical closeness. I hand-write her letters so she can see my scratchy penmanship, know how I write and the places where the ink has smudged, know that my fingers and now hers have jointly touched its pages. We carve out time each evening for phone calls and Facetimes, and there is such love in this ritualism and consistency.
Love surpasses all distance.