Relationships take time and effort on a regular basis. You have to communicate, ask each other questions, make sure each person is okay and make sure the love and care is always there for each other. However, with COVID-19, there has been a lot of quarantining, not much going out and traveling. Not being able to see your significant other who is 3,000 miles away would be hard. Not only would it make you worry more and put those negative thoughts in your head, but you may start losing that hope, love and care for each other. 

A way to not do that is to make sure you are communicating, communicating, communicating with your significant other. On the website Travel + Leisure, they give you six different key concepts to a healthy long-distance relationship in quarantine. When reading these six key concepts, the one that stood out to me is communication. 

“The key to finding success within a relationship is communication, loyalty, and empathy,” said Nikki Lewis, one of the co-founders of a popular Bespoke Matchmaking service. “Whether they’re good or bad, being transparent with your feelings will make your relationship much more stable. There will be different periods when you will have to give more and take less, and vice versa. It sounds simple enough, but empathy plays a big role when life takes some unexpected turns.”

Reading these key concepts really brought me some perspective into my past long-distance relationships. Most of the time I was able to communicate with my partner. I was able to check on him and make sure he was doing well. We would facetime almost every day. But then all of a sudden, being apart for so long started to put a dent in each other, but also in the relationship itself.

I began imagining what he may be doing, how he is doing it, why he is doing it. I had all these thoughts, but do you think I once thought to communicate these feelings to him? No I did not. I chose to keep all my worries, thoughts and feelings all bottled up instead of communicating in my long-distance relationship. 

The longer we stay in this pandemic, I wonder how all these long distance couples worked it out. How have they been able to build the life they want to build? This pandemic has given each one of us ample time to sit indoors, be more tech-savvy and spend more time with our loved ones, even if it is over a video chat. These couples have been able to communicate, plan their future dates and their future life, and they have been able to spend quality time together, even if they are 3,000 miles away. This is how couples have survived their long-distance relationship while quarantining.