I’m going to be 100 percent honest with you guys: When Richard and I discussed being in a LDR for the first time a few months into dating, I was all for it. Richard, on the other hand, was not so much…
I learned a lot from the good and the bad from my first LDR, and I just knew that having a LDR with Richard was going to be no problem. I knew I loved him. I knew I cared about him. I knew I could commit to someone so special without needing to have that person physically in my life every single day.
Richard had never been in a LDR before. Thinking of living an ocean apart from each other after having lived just down the street from me for a whole year made Richard nervous, scared, and unsure about the whole thing. When Richard would get nervous about the prospect of a LDR, I would interpret it as his lack of commitment, his lack of enthusiasm, and worse of all, his potential lack of love for me.
But what I didn’t take into account at the time was this: Being in a LDR is like bungee jumping. If you’ve done it before, all you can think about is the exhilarating rush of jumping off the platform and experiencing the freedom of the free fall, making you feel more alive than ever! But if you’ve never done it before, all you can think of is “How do you drum up the courage to jump off somewhere so high only being tethered to a platform by a rope?!”
So instead of hearing Richard’s nerves in an empathetic way, trying to understand what it must be like to all of a sudden throw yourself into a LDR with the one you love, I was listening to Richard’s concerns with a filter dominated with impatience and experience, knowing that we had all the right ingredients to make a LDR work (commitment, communication, care and most importantly – love) and wondering how he couldn’t see that it was going to be alright in the end!
Using the bungee jumping analogy again: Instead of giving Richard the space to freak out over his first bungee jump, as all people do one way or another, I was just yelling “Richard! You’re going to be fine! I’ve done it before! It is so fun! Trust me! Just jump!”
Reflecting on it a few months after our first conversation on LDRs, I realized that I approached the topic completely wrong. Instead of telling Richard to push through his fear and trust unconditionally because his love for me should guide him there without a second thought was quite small-minded of me. I am someone who lives without regrets. So, while I wouldn’t want to take that moment back because it taught me so much, I wish I could have approached Richard’s nerves a different way by creating a space that allowed him to share his concerns, his nerves, his thoughts, and his feelings without judgment and with unconditional empathy. Ultimately, I wish I could have given him space to give into his fears so that he could move on from them in a safe way.
I know now that if Richard wasn’t serious about our relationship that he would have never entertained the idea of a LDR. The mere fact that he wanted to discuss the option with me and took my feelings on LDRs into account – that was the sign of his unconditional love for me. His nerves, his hesitation, his feelings – those were signs of his humanity.
It’s important to know the difference, and I have definitely learned my lesson.
Slice of Life 