When ever someone says to me they are going to have a long distance relationship, alarm bells ring. But there are certain things that you can do in order to give your relationship the best chance of going the distance.
1. Time is a Factor.
Have a timeframe in place. Living apart is not going to be an indefinite solution. You need to have a time limit in place so that you have a end in sight.
A one year plan is a good place to start.
If the time apart is going to be longer than this, you really need to consider an alternative because you will find this very difficult to maintain without one or both parties tiring of it.
2. Give and Take.
The point of a relationship is to have a partner.
If I were you, I would move heaven and earth to be with your partner. 
Sometimes, we need to make sacrifices to be with the one we love.
That may mean one of the partnership giving up family, friends, job or career in order to live in the same place as each other. Sacrifice is not all bad though.
Within our marriage, my husband and I have both sacrificed things for each other, but it is a balance. He gave up a year of travel to wait for me to finish university, and later on we moved away from his family to be nearer to mine when we had children. I sacrificed myself by putting my career on hold so that we could raise a family. He wants to go to Kung Fu on a Wednesday night, but that is my Yoga night, so one of us has to give up what we want to make the other one happy sometimes.
As long as you don’t feel that you are the one always sacrificing, and neither does he, then you have a balance.
Relationships are all about give and take.
If you are going to resent your partner from giving up your place of residence to move closer to him or her, you need to ask yourself “What is really important here?”
3. Prioritise.
Weigh up your options.
If you love your job, and love your partner, can you get a transfer within the company? Have you looked for similar jobs elsewhere?
Is it practical to both move somewhere new for a fresh start together?
4. Get a hobby.
Keep busy.
When my husband was away for too long with work I was so busy with having 3 kids under 4 that I didn’t have time to scratch myself let alone sit around and get lonely.
5. Friends
Surround yourself with friends, but don’t have too much fun!
You don’t want to pine away in your bedroom listening to sad music. That is unhealthy. But, on the otherhand, don’t go partying with your friends all of the time and plaster your face all over social media having soooo much fun.
This will lead to jealousy and a jealous lover is hard to placate when you are miles apart.
6. Trust
This leads to the next point – TRUST EACH OTHER!
Above all, relationships are built on a solid foundation of trust. If you don’t trust each other to stay faithful, then a long distance relationship is never going to be successful.
7. Visit.
Visit each other as often as is possible.
You need to meet up, and have the best fun as much as you can so that your relationship can continue to thrive despite the circumstances. You should aim to see each other at least once per month at the bare minimum.
Make the visits quality time.
You might spend a weekend holed up in a romantic hotel away from it all, or go on a mini-break to Cancun.
Make it romantic, and make it often.
8. Telephone.
Call and text daily.
Say sweet things, send photos and tweets, be in each other’s lives even though you are not there in person. Be interested in what the other one is doing without being overbearing.
9. Surprises
Send flowers and surprise gifts in the post.
Everybody like a surprise.
It might be a bunch of flowers or something small and meaningful, like a shell you found on the beach, a rock shaped like a heart, jewellery, a book. Anything that means you are thinking of each other.
Do you have anything to add to the list of things to help make a long distance relationship work? By far the biggest piece of advice that I want you to take with you today is that a long distance relationship is only going to be a temporary thing and you really need to begin taking steps to change your circumstances so that you can be together before too long.
It will really test your love for each other, but that being said, that which doesn’t break us only serves to make our relationship stronger.
So if you can do the hard yards, you will end up with an even more powerful bond than ever.
Love,
