When I was deciding which university to attend, my boyfriend, David, was not in the picture. Once I had accepted my unconditional offer at the University of Kent (a whole 260 miles away from my hometown in Devon), I was excited for the adventure that moving home and attending university would bring. Then, eight months before I was due to start, David sort of wondered into my life and has been here ever since.
This happened four years ago. And let me disclose this before I continue. Its bloody hard.
We live a six-hour car, eight-hour train or ten-hour coach journey away. We literally live at opposite ends of the country and we have done for the entire time that I have attended university.
Its long.
I miss him.
We fight.
Literally all of the time.
But. Somehow we have made it work. We have been able to power on through the distance and in doing so, we have kinda become pros at it.
Logistically speaking, we see each twice in a term. As it’s quite a journey away, a lot of planning has to be done beforehand (no spontaneous trips or surprises), regarding travelling to and from. I tend to go back to Devon during half term week and David will come up and spend four or five days, depending on when he can get the time off work.
We aim to see each other at least every four-five weeks during term time and thanks to the beauty that is university timetables, I always get a long Christmas and summer break (man I am going to miss those!).
During the times we aren’t together, we regularly call each other, both to speak about our days and also, just to be in each others company. We also have tv shows, that we binge-watch together over facetime (it’s currently Walking Dead and Greys Anatomy), which makes us feel like we are doing something together, despite being apart.
The one thing that I have learnt, over the course of our relationship, is that that I am stronger than I think. So many people have said things like ‘I don’t know how you do it?’ or ‘I couldn’t be away from my boyfriend/girlfriend for that long’.
Well, you know what? I say balls to that.
As cliche as it sounds, if it’s meant to be, you’re going to make it work. You’ll fight, you’ll cry and you’ll want to pack it all in on more than one occasion BUT do not underestimate yourself; you can take more than you realise.
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