when we hear that a couple live 11 time zones apart and can afford to come together only once in a long while it's natural to offer Sympathy For The Pain we should more fairly Envy them for their luck whatever our longings May indicate it's simply a lot easier to love when someone isn't there far from an unfortunate necessity living apart should be recognized for what it truly is an advantage so much goes right when we live a long way away online or over the phone we never assume that the other person should be able to read our minds without us ever having explained what's actually in them we accept that we'll have to describe our days as well as our desires in words and pictures we can't help but do that thing that holds couples together communicate we accept that the other can live without us and therefore make the effort to be the sort of people someone would freely choose to be with we work at it we can benefit from what jealousy otherwise prevents us from admitting how much it helps us to feel like desirable potent people to be able to go out and flirt with someone else for a while without too many questions being asked in other words how profoundly loyal a whiff of surface disloyalty helps us to be a part we appreciate is it's a strange Quirk of our minds but we only ever notice what's missing the money we don't have the weather we long for the car we don't yet own yet once anything is securely in our possession it disappears we only see in the sense of notice what isn't there the best way to lose ownership of something is to own it and the shest way to forget your partner exists may be to ensure they're beside you every night when we're apart we can sample the gentle suffering of loneliness over the intense Rage of Suffocation we never have to find out how much it can tarnish love to be with someone who has a different idea of a Cutlery drawer or the correct way to suspend a towel too often when we're cohabiting we locate the difficulty of our relationships in a very erroneous place we think that it's the wrong person we've mistaken got together with rather than keeping in mind that we're with a pretty right person trying to do an exceptionally tricky thing share a home it may in the end strangely just be a lot easier to love than to share a bathroom our love stories are suffering from a mistaken cultural hierarchy just as the book is often wrongly thought more important than the essay so the Livin relationship is too readily assumed to be superior to the long range version and yet without ever meaning to do so the long-distance relationship May simply despite all its evident challenges throw up some of the absolutely ideal conditions for true love to thrive we should be wise to embibe a few of the lessons life normally only teaches us when they're in Sydney and you're in Vancouver and carefully import them into our lives even with the people unfortunate enough to be right next to us