I’ve become an armchair psychologist. With no model to base my long-distance relationship on, I’ve decided I need to make a model.
Through the past four months, I’ve pushed aside my fuck-boi facade and embarked on a loving relationship with an impressive girl who’s much smarter than me. Aoife innately knows how to conduct herself in a relationship, but I have to grapple and theorize in concrete terms to understand my own emotions. It has brought me to invent all sorts of ways to maintain sanity as we try to connect over continents.
With the absence of a woman’s intuition, I’d like to explain my theories. They break down love itself into digestible concepts. And, as a man, this reductive stance on love makes me feel much better about myself, otherwise, I’d have to admit to myself how esoteric and ethereal it all is.
In the interim of volleying across the nets that separate your life from the life of your significant other, ask yourself this question: What are you and your partners’ compatibility on “Frequency of Contact”?
Frequency of Contact
Frequency of Contact is the amount of maintenance between Snapchat, Instagram DMs, Spotify Playlists, Amazon Wish Lists, Location Tracking Apps, and Geocaching Tags that is necessary to make your partner feel safe. It measures how much your lover expects from you, and indicates their trust. If unacknowledged, it can divide couples and can lead to breakups.
The Solution?
To have a long-distance relationship, you need to be in sync. That’s where the partner needs to connect with the place you are. It’s different when Aoife knows which restaurants I got food poisoning at because she can balk at it with me, knowing she’s been there. When I move home, she is out of synch with me until she visits in March.
Talk therapy helps, and so does airing out the traumas of each others’ lives through nights of wine and compassionate nods.
But the solution to the “Frequency of Contact” is having your lives in sync.
With these simple concepts in mind, you can make the idea of “love” a process as easy as one, two three!
