The Gavel’s Diatribe acts as the satirical medium for short rants over topics ranging from complete triviality to utmost importance.
Usually when someone mentions long-distance in college, I tend to think of the fated-to-fail pair of high-school lovers that go to different schools, realize that their lives are on completely different paths, and subsequently break up within the first month of the semester. However, now that I am in a long-distance relationship in college with someone I started dating here, I have found that is one of the most rewarding challenges I have experienced.
For reference, my boyfriend graduated from BC this past spring and I am still here for another two years. It is easy to spend so much time together while going to the same school and have your separate lifestyles merge into one. We would go to hockey games together, eat in Lower together, celebrate BC traditions like Marathon Monday and Modstock together, and we even took a class together. When he suddenly graduated and disappeared from campus to start his adult working life back in his hometown a thousand miles away, it was a shock to the system. Who am I going to have spot me while lifting in the Plex? Who am I going to convince to wait in line with me for the BC v BU hockey game for five hours?
Thankfully, I’ve always had an answer to those questions: my friends. Spending more time with them has been a saving grace. I’ve always made it a point to keep those connections strong, but now that I have extra time, it feels like even more of a gift. Having good relationships with your friends is truly the only way to survive the change of starting long distance and I have been lucky enough to have a good group to support me. This has created problems in itself, though, like deciding whether I do a girl’s trip to Miami for spring break or visit my boyfriend. It is a never-ending cycle of time dispersing where nobody ever fully wins—basically the epitome of how long-distance is.
When we first started doing long-distance, it felt—and sometimes still does feel—like a constant countdown until I saw him next. This has caused a personal riff in my psyche. I am so happy with my friends and at school, but something is always missing from what I had before. It’s bittersweet knowing you have someone who’s always there for you but now you’re separated by distance, different schedules, and even a time zone difference when just a few months ago, your days were perfectly in sync. Even the sweet reprieve of summer has been interrupted by the different aspects of life–I was busy with internships while he was on the full-time job hunt.
Long-distance really sucks, but as cliché as it is, it has brought me and my boyfriend closer together as we learn more about ourselves and each other even from a distance. It truly does make the time together more special. Every aspect of our lives has changed, yet I feel as if we are not alienated and we still have so much to relate to even without school in common anymore. It is the true test of compatibility and it has been incredibly rewarding.
Short n’ Sweet
