Why Breaking Up Is Better Than A Long-Distance Relationship

Why Breaking Up Is Better Than A Long-Distance Relationship

School’s starting. For a lot of people, that means living away from home the first time, figuring out how to cook, what combination of seven different alcohols makes a different punch, and which of your first-semester professors posts their notes online at the end of the class.

With all that coming and going though, there’s another phenomenon we might be missing: this week, hundreds of thousands of normal relationships just became long-distance relationships. A lot of guys are facing this dilemma: they’ve been with a girl for six months or so, now one or more of them is going to college in a different town, and they’re hundreds of miles apart. So should you keep this relationship going?

I’m here to tell you that no, no you shouldn’t. Kill this relationship. Kill it with fire.

Why Long Distance Relationships Suck

I was in a long-distance relationship for a couple years, where the miles were in thousands, not hundreds. Now, it was only long-distance about four or five months of the year. Same deal; attending university, which suddenly caused a huge distance between us. And yep, it f*cking sucked.

There’s the relationship aspect of it, for starters. Take this simple equation, for example:

Jealousy = Proximity of beautiful women to you x Distance between your girlfriend and you

So, now you’re going to attending a institution which is practically overrun by young, beautiful women, and you’re going to be farther away than ever before. Don’t think she won’t be keenly aware of this fact. Don’t think, if the reverse applies, that you won’t be keenly aware as well. It’s entirely the worst time to be in a long-distance relationship.

Sure, there are now things like Skype, Facebook, unlimited calling plans and more. But an honest question? Do you really want to be Skyping an hour (or more) every night? Do you really want to resign yourself to the ritual of coming home early from the pub that you were at with your buddies to make a phone call to her, while you realize that the things you talk about increasingly reveal your worlds are becoming separate from each other?

This all sounds bleak. At this point in columns like this, the normal course of action is to give you the good news and explain why it gets better. But nope, it gets worse.

So your relationship itself is going to be put under strain. You’ll enter (theoretically, unless you cheat) into something approaching a near sexless existence. At some point it will occur to you that you’re having to fight harder and harder to preserve something that is less and less rewarding.

Is my advice here being influenced by my personal experiences? You bet your ass is is. But having gone through this kind of sh*tshow myself, I’ve had the chance to watch other people doing the same thing. Which kind of brings me to my second, and in some way bigger point.

It’s not just that your existing relationship will get worse. It’s that my own experience, and those of people around me, pointsto one fact:

The people who are in long distance relationships miss out the most when it comes to trying new experiences and truly immersing themselves in their new lives. I’m not just talking about sleeping with other people, which is part of it, but frankly you get can by in life without sleeping with oodles of people. It’s the fact that you can’t really commit to a new city when you’re driving home every weekend to see your girlfriend. You’ll be the guy always turning down invites to awesome weekend events, saying either “Sorry, I’ve got to head back home for the weekend” or “Sorry, my girlfriend’s visiting and I told her I’d spend the weekend with her.”

It happened to me, and it happened to other people I went to university with. Once I was free and clear, I saw good friends, both male and female, sadly miss out on so much because they were heading back and forth every weekend, taking extra classes to get through their degrees and soon as possible, and generally having one foot in each city. When I finally ended things in my long-distance relationship, all I could think about was how much I’d missed out on by not taking the decision to end things earlier. And I was only part-time long-silence.

But...

There’s caveat here. Many successful relationships have at some point come through a bit of long-distance. If there’s a definite end in sight, like one of you definitely moving to the other’s city within six months or a year, then go for it. If you’ve been together five years and this is just a blip, then go for it.

But for those of your starting your degrees, remember this: there’s nothing temporary about four years. You don’t know what comes afterwards, and even trying to commit yourself to a mediocre four years for a relationship that has existed for six months is quite probably crazy. In most cases, your best course is just to end it on the best terms you can and then move on. Do it properly, and you might even gain a friend, and leave things open to get back together in the future, while opening yourself up fully to your new world.