It’s tempting, when you’re feeling down or your relationship isn’t going well, to look online for reassurance or advice for what you should do. It’s easy to just type in a few words on Google or Pinterest and find hundreds of articles that sound so much like what you think you need to hear. But what I’ve realized, after five and a half years of long-distance, is that what you need to hear can’t come from somebody else. So I stopped reading relationship advice.
My first Her Campus at UVA article was about making long-distance relationships work. Looking back now, I regret publishing that article. It was my story, and it was too personal. It hurt reading the edits to my narrative, because the words weren’t mine. They didn’t fit my voice, or my feelings. I thought I could help other people in long-distance relationships figure out how to manage being in that type of relationship. But since writing that article, I’ve seen so many variations of the same topic, over and over: how we make it work, how hard it is, how to survive once long-distance is over. The thing is, the one person that I should have been be listening to, aside from myself, was my boyfriend.
I found that reading about someone else’s heartbreak, someone else’s arguments, someone else’s engagement, will only make you try to force their story onto your life. But the truth is, and it’s so obvious: each relationship is unique. Only I know, and can figure out, what I need. I don’t need a blogger or writer to tell me what to say in certain situations, or how to cope with the hard times. Once I realized what I needed, the only thing I had to do was express it. I’m not saying it was easy, and I’m not saying it’s not tempting to search for solutions online. But being open and communicating, with my boyfriend and with myself, provided so much more clarity than any relationship article I’d ever read. My happiness cannot be found in the form of a “how-to” article. Relationships are about two people, not two people and a blogger.