Distance can be one of the cruelest things in the world, but nowhere is its cruelty more apparent than in love. The nights you spend yearning for your missing half follow you into the daylight, turning ordinary moments into reminders of what is absent. Every place, every song, every quiet second becomes haunted by someone who exists everywhere in your mind yet nowhere within reach. There is something undeniably beautiful about watching a long distance relationship survive, even when it isn’t your own. It serves as proof that there is a love resilient enough to withstand oceans, time zones, and empty spaces. It reminds us that distance is not always the villain. Sometimes love wins…but sometimes, it doesn’t. The harsh reality is that distance breaks people for countless reasons. Time changes us, priorities shift, communication weakens under the weight of everyday life. Loneliness quietly settles in where companionship once lived. Eventually, two people who love each other can become strangers simply because they can no longer exist in the same place at the same time. Yet when distance succeeds in pulling two hearts apart, does that erase the love that once existed?
I don’t believe it does!
Love isn’t measured solely by its longevity. We tend to treat lasting relationships as the only successful ones, but perhaps love’s value lies not in whether it survives forever, but in whether it transformed the people who experienced it. This is an idea that echoes throughout Plato’s Symposium. Rather than portraying love as mere romance, the dialogue presents love as something that pushes us beyond ourselves. Through the teachings of Diotima, love becomes a longing for beauty, and ultimately something eternal. We are drawn toward another person because they awaken something greater within us, a desire to become more complete. In that sense, distance does more than separate two bodies. It interrupts a journey. It leaves us almost imprisoned between who we were with someone and who we are forced to become without them.
Perhaps this is why separation hurts so profoundly. We don’t only lose another person, we lose the future we imagined alongside them. Few stories capture this tragedy better than the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. When Eurydice dies, Orpheus refuses to accept that love should end simply because death, distance of the greatest kind, has intervened. Armed with nothing but music and devotion, he descends into the Underworld itself, determined to bring her home. Hades grants him one impossible condition: he must not look back until they have both reached the surface. He almost succeeds, but love is rarely free from fear. Moments before escaping the darkness, Orpheus turns around, desperate for reassurance that Eurydice is still there. In that single glance, he loses her forever. His failure is often interpreted as a lack of trust, but perhaps it is something more deeply human. Love makes us vulnerable to uncertainty and distance feeds that uncertainty. We search for signs that the other person still loves us, still remembers us, still exists in the same emotional space we occupy. Sometimes, in searching for certainty, we destroy the very thing we hope to preserve.
Long distance relationships often carry this same burden. Not because one person stops loving the other, but because distance magnifies every silence, every unanswered message, every missed call. Doubt grows where presence once provided comfort. Like Orpheus, we find ourselves constantly wanting to look back, to seek reassurance that what we love hasn’t disappeared into the darkness. But even when distance wins, it cannot rewrite the past. No amount of miles can erase the conversations that made you laugh all night long. No ending can undo the moments that made you feel understood. No silence can invalidate a love that once felt infinite. Perhaps that is what Plato ultimately understood about love: its highest purpose is not possession but transformation. We love because love changes us. Whether someone remains beside us for fifty years or only one season, they leave traces within us that become part of who we are. Distance may kill a relationship, but it cannot kill what that relationship created inside you. So where do you go when long distance has murdered your heart? You go forward.
feeling like I’ve just been schooled !