Love Lost in Translation

Can you hear me now?

Logistics seems like the primary challenge of long distance relationships. Figuring out how to stay connected across miles of separation requires intention and planning. Falling in love is easy. Staying in love and committing to a relationship that allows little time together takes work. It would be easy to blame the distance when it doesn’t work out, but that’s the reason that requires the least amount of personal reflection.

Sometimes, the love gets lost in translation. There’s a disconnect between our intentions and their interpretations. Cue misunderstandings and growing tension. The scale tips, and we stop adding up all the ways we’re grateful for the relationship and begin adding up all the ways it’s letting us down. When we start keeping score, everyone loses.

My experience isn’t representative of the whole of long distance relationships in general, but I know that love languages were the biggest challenge for me in maintaining one. My primary love language tends to be both physical touch and words of affirmation. This is how I give and receive love. Words across a distance are easy. There are so many ways to utter them and so many variations in our language to affirm our feelings. Physical touch is infinitely more challenging with a physical separation.

There are so many other ways we show love with physical touch other than sex. A simple touch can signal affection or even offer comfort. Something as simple as a brush of a hand on a tough day can offer solidarity. I didn’t realize how much I relied on nonverbal communication for comfort in particular until it was stripped from me as an option. I found every other form of comforting at a distance to be hopelessly inadequate. There’s something powerful about being present with another person in their grief and being both a literal and metaphorical shoulder to cry on — and something bleak about needing to express comfort in this way and being unable to do so.

Add in a global pandemic with travel restrictions in place, and there wasn’t even the hope of being able to do something as simple as sit in the same room. I had all this love to express and limited ways to express it. It’s almost funny to think of how many ways I tried.

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