“They’re bad, they don’t work and they should be outlawed!” Safe to say you’re not really in favour of long-distance relationships, then?

“It’s just that so much of the nature of a relationship is communication and support, and you can’t tell me that doesn’t get compromised over long distance,” my anti-long-distance-amour friend explains. So much for all that absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder crap. Or maybe he’s just bitter.

I don’t really blame him. It’s tough when your girlfriend bails on the relationship for something as trivial as her future. “I just felt I had no say in the matter,” he admits. And the fact that she decided school was more important than him was a bit deflating. They tried the long-distance thing for awhile. It just ended up turning into a long-distance — and subsequently very expensive — breakup.

I lasted a month in my one and only long-distance relationship. I, too, bailed on the relationship to go to Montreal for school. I couldn’t bridge the distance gap. He came from Toronto to see me one weekend, and I knew it was over. Just like that. I spent the whole weekend trying to come up with excuses for why I didn’t want to have sex.

We’d spent every day together before I left. He knew about everything that was going on in my life. Then I embarked on this big change, and I felt like there was just no way he could understand and be there for me in the same way. Letters and phone calls only reveal so much. We didn’t have e-mail yet. He suddenly felt like a stranger.

That’s part of the problem with correspondence relationships: you can’t stick your hand up any old time and ask questions. That extra second of silence on the phone is automatically filled with doubt and questions when the person is probably just trying to dig a resistant booger out of their nose. This is particularly pronounced in overseas calls — heavy discussions don’t work with an echo.

The long-distance romance is one of the great relationship tests. It can spell the beginning of the end or, if you move away and suddenly realize you can’t live without the other person, the beginning of the beginning. It’s not a guarantee, but chances are that the more time you’ve had to build something before one of you takes off — I’m sorry, moves away — the more durable the relationship will be from afar.

A close friend is struggling with this. She’s been involved with this guy for a little over a month and he’s about to take a job in another city, less than two hours away. He has said unequivocally (and obviously speaking from bad experience) that he won’t get involved in a long-distance thing. She finds it harder to accept that geography is going to end something she thinks is pretty great, and that he isn’t willing to change his entire life to be with her. “It drives home the fact that you’re not important enough to make them stay,” she says, cringing.

I do know people who manage the long-distance romance. One friend of mine carried on a seven-year relationship throughout which she and her partner lived in the same city together for only one of those years. Now they live together (in the same city) and have a kid.

Being in different cities fosters independence in the relationship, says (hopes?) one friend, just new to love from afar. “You remember you had your own life, and you get the taste of being single again — that ego-boost when people are attracted because you’re out on your own.”

Of course, the other person is getting the same thing. And while you’re stuck in the same old city, they’re in a new environment where a little sexual attraction might be just the thing they need to feel welcome. With all those nights alone, the constant threat of infidelity is another big challenge to the long-distance relationship. “That long-distance feeling” only goes so far.

You can learn to appreciate each other, and not just sexually. “I realized how much I counted on seeing her every day,” says one-half of the last couple I mentioned. The other half agrees that continuity is a big issue. “When you only see each other once a month, there is such a pressure for you to get along — for everything to be smooth and wonderful — that there’s no time to fight.”