The Long Distance Relationship That Taught Me Who I Was Alone

Milan and I started dating in Manila when we were both 23, six months before he left for a postdoctoral programme in Germany. The decision to try to maintain the relationship across the distance was made with the mix of genuine feeling and optimism that you can only sustain at 23, before you have had enough experience of long distance to know how specifically hard it is.

The relationship required more of both of us than any previous relationship had. Communication that in a co-located relationship can happen passively - tone, body language, the ambient information of being in the same physical space - had to become active and deliberate.

We talked more intentionally than I had ever talked to a partner because we had no other way. When we were upset we had to say so directly rather than waiting for the other person to read the room.

When something was important we had to make space for it in a scheduled call rather than letting it arise naturally over dinner. The discipline this required was occasionally frustrating and produced, as a side effect, a quality of communication that I have never quite replicated in relationships since.

The harder thing that happened was what developed in the space that the distance created. I was 23 and living alone properly for the first time, building a working life in the city on my own terms, with evenings and weekends that were mine to fill with choices that were not organised around another person's presence.

In that space I found things I had not known I was interested in, developed friendships that were entirely mine rather than shared, made decisions about how I wanted to live that I might not have had the room to make inside a co-located relationship at that age.

When the relationship ended at 26 - not dramatically, but because the distance had finally accumulated more weight than the connection could carry - I grieved genuinely and also found, underneath the grief, a person I was glad to have become.

The time alone had been formative in ways I had not expected and would not have chosen deliberately but am grateful for having had. I was a more developed person at 26 than I would have been if the relationship had kept us in the same city.