Hi lovelies,

The idea of a long-distance relationship is not as new as we might imagine it - while the internet and social media have brought a new wrinkle to it, people have been pining over loved ones overseas for centuries. Either because they were members of Royal families waiting for the promised day, or because a partner had gone away to war, or for any other reason, pained love-letters have been winging their way across oceans for as long as there has been mail.

So the idea of a LDR has been with us for some time, even if the reasons aren’t always the same these days. But while there is a lot of advice out there for how to keep an overseas love from falling by the wayside, one thing that is often lacking is information on how to deal with the situation when that distance is closed. If your love’s secondment to an overseas company comes to an end, or your saving and fundraising reaches the target where one of you can move, you need to be prepared for the next step. Because, as much as you may have been dreaming of this moment, the reality still needs to be prepared for.

Keep the best elements of your LDR once it becomes SD
There are always parts of a long-distance relationship that both partners like - in truth, they wouldn’t survive to this point if there weren’t. In the case where you’ve finally been able to unite as a close-distance or even co-habiting couple, it’s a good idea to keep some of those elements. Maybe you met half-way for city breaks together, or texted funny things you saw in the course of your day to one another. Those little things helped your relationship stay above water in the tough times, and it’s a good idea to keep them as part of your life now.

Acknowledge that it won’t all be easy now
When your relationship distance is removed, it will be tempting to think that it was the one thing holding you back and that with it gone, everything is going to be easier. Maybe it will - but it’s helpful to recognize that where once your biggest challenge was how to send flowers to another country on your partner’s birthday, proximity can bring its own issues. When your time together was a few hours on Skype every night there wasn’t much time for wrinkles to appear. You still have to work at making a relationship work, and that’s not a bad thing. Coming through tough times is what forges the best relationships.

You can also take the help of a Daily Horoscope to get to know how you relate with each other and understand your partner better to increase your chances of having a deep, fulfilling, and lasting relationship.

Don’t romanticize the “before times”
The early days of a relationship are something we’re conditioned to look back on with real fondness: the swoon and the specialness of falling in love, those are what we remember. We often airbrush out the panicky feeling we experienced when we didn’t hear from our new love for five minutes, or the incredible paranoia that they’d suddenly just back out of the relationship. In a similar vein, don’t look back on the long-distance times in an idealistic way. Almost everything about being in love is easier with proximity, and even the hard times are easier to resolve. Keep what was good about the LDR, but don’t idealize it, because it wasn’t ideal.