On Distance

Distance is a frightful word.

I read this article in The Cut about the loneliness of the long-distance breakup, and this part struck me:

When we were together, I had seen my relationship as existing everywhere: In my apartment, and in his, which I could still see via social media if I dared to look. In the airplanes that took us back and forth across the country, in the phone lines, in my internet connection, in the food we ate together and places we went, in the conversations we shared and people we met, and most of all in the future I'd imagined for us. Maybe my idea of us had grown so expansive, the reality of us couldn't keep up. And when we ended, instead of our breakup eradicating his presence — out of sight, out of mind — for me, it caused him to grow into something more looming and idealized than he had ever been in reality.

​I haven't been in a serious relationship for just over a year now. Ending something that seems so long-term is one of the hardest things you can do (saying that as a mere 20-something, of course). I always knew that my ​​​feelings ​after the breakup ​had to do with ​the ​distance (that ugly word), but I couldn't understand it​ — not really​ — until I read this article.

​If the person in question isn't around, you begin making up stories about them. You start feeling feelings about these made-up stories, and you have to remind yourself that you just don't know — an antidote that's easy to administer, but quite difficult to remember. 

It's because humans think in patterns and stories, though our lives are essentially plot-less. Most of us, myself included, can't come to terms with it. We seek logic constantly. So we make up the stories.

There's a part in On Love where the narrator talks about how the reality of his girlfriend no longer matched his idealized image of her, and so it began to fall apart. People will always think in dualities, but this one can get harder to reconcile over time. It's the reason so many people break up. We no longer match, and we begin refusing to accept the other person for all their flaws that, previously, made us love them in the first place. 

​We build things on imagination instead of reality — our brains secretly enjoy filling in the blanks. It's why we experience such severe, even rage-filled, FOMO based on a few Facebook pictures or a drunkenly-composed tweet. Without those traces, you build stories out of nothing, which sounds incredulous, but it continues to happen.

Try as we might, we can't help ourselves. It's so human, isn't it?

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