What Do You See?

Image Credit: http://www.xinhuanet.com

This image seems to be a long winding road, moving around things that all in its path, rather than just going straight through. This is how relationships can work. Besides the typical roller coaster analogy, long distance relationships can be like a long winding road. 

When you love someone enough to stay in a relationship where you might only see each other once a month, things become distant. As much as you might try to talk to each other everyday, it becomes difficult to stay close when your lives become messy and busy. You are going from one thing to another, weaving around obstacles to be able to talk to or see each other. 

You have your ups and downs in every relationship and the distance only makes it more difficult. Look at the curves in the road as your downs and the straits as your ups; You might have different arguments or times where you go days without talking to each other. Those things are always going to be followed by the straights in the road though, the good and simple parts of your relationship. You get to either see each other or talk on the phone for hours on end. 

This last year, I experiences one of the biggest "curves in the road" that I ever have with him. He is in his second year of college, taking 18 credit hours and has a full time job while I am a student athlete. With this being said we both have very busy schedules. This makes things more difficult when you add 3 hours in between you. There was a time that he was suppose to come down to see me and spend the weekend but things got too busy and he had to cancel. It was also his busiest working month of the year while I was having a hard time dealing with my ACL recovery. I was feeling very alone while he was having a great time with work and his friends but was not able to talk to me throughout his day. I felt like he was not making time for me but I never said anything until it was all bottled up and I blew up on him. He did not see that he wasnt making time for me and that I was alone dealing with a big time in my life. Because our schedules were so busy, we did not have a lot of time to talk about this issue so it only became a bigger problem the longer we were apart. 

When he was finally able to come home we sat down and talked about all of the feelings we had towards the situation. This is again when I realized how important communication is. I should not have bee keeping these feelings to myself for as long as I had because he then could not see the problem developing in front of us. This has helped to to always be honest with him when I am feeling something specific which has helped me grow because sometimes the feelings I have are difficult to explain.

In long distance relationships, you must cherish every good thing and be intentional with your time together because those curves in the road are inevitable. 

Remember, "This too shall pass." Everything, whether it is good or bad, it will pass and the opposite will arise. These are the curves in the road that will turn into straights then vise versa. We endured a big curve in the road but then were able to work things out, together and things were back to normal.

Do you think this is a useful analogy? Does it help to understand issues in long distance relationships a little more?