238 Thriving in Long-Distance Relationships

Welcome to Playing With Fire, the podcast for people who are ready to custom build their love. We're talking about non-monogamy, however you design it, as an individuation opportunity. Want to leave the default and make your life spectacularly you? You're in the right place. Jolie, we have a listener question.

Good one. Comes up a lot. We hear this question quite a bit. We've been long distance for years and honestly, I'm tired. How do we keep going without it feeling like endless work? And I hear this question posed in so many. different ways because there are so many different ways to be long distance right what even quantify like what is

long distance, right? I've had people feel like they were strained with a distance of 90 minutes or two hours to travel to each other and other people who are talking about multiple plane flights in order to reach each other.

Yeah. And one of the big differences I hear when people are trying to work through the troubles of long distance is what exactly is the purpose of this relationship? And do we have shared purpose or are we still trying to build shared purpose or maybe, and I'm sure we'll get to this, is the purpose changing? Oh, yeah. As we reckon with what it is- As time goes on. To do long distance, right? Because, you know, I-

So I have clients who are doing long distance relating and they consider themselves to be primary partners, anchor partners. They consider themselves to be like life partners beyond just their... They're dating. They're actually like, okay, we're building a life together. And then I have, and I have this myself, the experience of having partners that are long distance, but.

we have intentionally cultivated a, a kind of partnership that can come and go, can, can actually sort of thrive because it's long distance. Right. And I think that those as falling under the comet partnership. For me, a comet partnership helps me because I understand that the purpose of the relationship is quite distinct from one that I might have day-to-day. life-building activities. And...

And there's all this mushy in-between time of what about when you don't even know? As you're building a relationship, we don't always know exactly where it's headed. co-responsibility are we going to take for each other's life stuff, for emotional support? How clear are we on what the roles are that we play for each other? And that can shift and it can shift. often without even noticing, the want can shift. And then we feel this...

There's the disappointment of, oh, I had started to build some assumptions. I had started to think that I would have this kind of support or it would feel this sort of way. Started to build certain expectations. Yeah. And then as time went on. And those expectations weren't panning out, weren't playing out the way we thought. The pain is real. Yeah. And all of that on top of the fact that long distance relationship fatigue is real.

There's so much that we can't take for granted. We have to do a lot of active nurturing of our relationships. And it can sometimes feel like it's all about persevering.

in itself can sort of grind down it can i think that you bringing up the idea of what sort of relationship it is what what is the relationship for that is a good conversation to have yeah because I've noticed that for myself, and I think I've seen it with other people, where in a long distance relationship, or honestly, any relationship, I find that I'm doing a bunch of, I'm exerting a bunch of effort.

putting a lot of attention and energy and thought and feeling into stuff that isn't actually in line with what the relationship is actually for. And if I have the conversation with my partner. or partners. Like if, if it's not like a primary nesting relationship, but I spend a lot of time focusing on like, I wonder how they're, how can I help them? manage the logistics of their life for example well that's not what the relationship is for it doesn't help and being clear on

what's worth putting energy into, what aligns with the relationship we're building. So I hear you unpacking the mononormative story of what romantic relationship has to... It has to encapsulate all of this. And so if I am in a valued relationship, then I have to do all of that.

But of course, we're talking about defying paradigms. We're talking about custom designing your life. And so ideally, we would have more clarity that we self-created, that we created with the people in the relationship. So pillar two of the… Right. pillars, the five pillars of successful open relating will really get clear on the fact that the relationship is designed by the people in it for the people in it. And that isn't something that we can do and then just say, check, it's done forever.

So I think the very first step, and this is something I do when I'm working with people in private work, is we need to do a check-in on what is the purpose of... an intimate relationship for you? And then what is the purpose of this particular relationship at this particular phase of your life? And that question, I find a lot of people

They like the idea of the question, but then every time they sit down to journal about it, they find themselves distracted. Or we start the conversation and all of a sudden there's some other thing. Or as we start talking to our partner about it. Instead, we pick a fight about something else. That to me is a sign that we don't want to face the fact that the relationship purpose might be quite different than the one we...

we think our partner needs, or it might be quite different from the vision we had had for our own life. And so we're living with this sort of dissonance and it's really hard to hold dissonance. facing, it's a relatively straightforward activity to really be with the question and answer the question, what is the purpose of this relationship? But it can be incredibly uncomfortable.

And I think it's something we need to revisit regularly. Ideally, we're going to have a regular revisiting and not just as a dyad or as a polycule, but... with your individual self first, right? If we're talking about building individuation oriented relationships, then I need to also take stock of what is it that, where's my soul calling me? Where, where is my work?

Um, and I don't mean my, my day-to-day work that I might make a living doing or whatever. I mean, where's the energy, where is my life force? Where's my, where's it pointed? And, and I, the question of what is my soul? calling me forward to do, to experience. And for some people, this is actually, this is the game changing question around their long distance relationships because they realize, oh yeah, this is really, really hard for me. And it's exactly what I feel called to do. Right.

This is exact yes. This is a yes and. But the image of rom-coms and the image of our friends having local relationships or all being nesting partnered. can interfere with our idea of like this being okay, this being actually good, this being in service to me and to my path of differentiation and individuation. And when we get caught up in somebody else's.

version of a good relationship, we might imagine that ours is inherently bad or wrong because it's different. So this revisiting is powerful. And while it could be little scary to face it also could reveal that yeah yep you're in it you're in your path right now if the path were totally clear in front of you that's not

yours right it's somebody else already cleared that path yeah somebody's gone there before and it's not yours and so i hear you saying that if i'm having trouble keeping my uh energy up in my relationship here that if I look at my relationship, why, and it's in line, and this is the work that I'm going to do, knowing that this is the work to do right now, that, oh, this is actually comes up out of me. Yes, this is a thing to do.

That makes it feel less exhausting. It's not just output. There's also the input of, oh, yes, my soul is being fed by this. Yes, yeah. Sure. And now this leads me to thinking about what it is to, if we're going to revisit our relationship purpose and we're going to possibly have a new answer to that.

I like to use structure and the structure of time and ritual check-ins to help me create a space where there's a natural... Not natural. Not natural as in it happens inevitably. Natural as in... I have already predetermined that this relationship is going to have a deep refresh every six months or 12 months. And maybe that's going to be over a long weekend or a week that we can actually spend together and do some renewal.

And share the answers to these big questions with each other. And taking the time to do that, and it's a bit paradoxical, right? Because we want to practice being… in our relationships and not just working on them. But I think this is actually something that sits right at the space between being in your relationship and working on it. It's actually- designing the relationship and renewing it, refreshing that design. We can't just leave it. And I think it's in service to...

making sure there's time to be in the relationship because what you're describing is saying, well, we're going to work on our relationship during this time. We're going to have some kind of... routine or ritual that we do every X amount of time. And we're going to visit our whys and we're going to talk about them and see how they've changed. And then when we're done.

We'll just let that be and live into it and be in it the rest of the time. I totally think it's those two things work together. And so that can be. a really fun part of relating i i love um using ritual as a way to to anchor myself into what is this relationship? What does it mean to be in it? And so there's, there's the routine stuff. Like what are our patterns? What are the, the, the happy, healthy patterns, the ones that we like, the, the routines that are like, well, we.

text each other good morning every morning, or we have once a week, we have a cooking date where we're both, yep, we're on Zoom, but we're cooking together. Like those kinds of routines. And then there's like rituals where we actually even deepen that. And we make sure that the ritual has this meaning behind the routine. Because ritual is just routine plus meaning. There's how we get to ritual. So I could take something simple.

like a cooking date had weekly and make it a ritual by... by just bringing a little bit more intention, by making sure that maybe we exchange gratitudes right at the beginning of it, or maybe at the end when we're eating the food we've cooked, we intentionally share things that have made us laugh. over the last couple of weeks. Or maybe we do a reconnection ritual where we're doing gratitude exchanges or making visible how we are present in each other's lives, even when we're not.

physically present. Building that ritual, I find a lot of people, they feel awkward about bringing it up or asking for that. And some people will even get sort of huffy about it. I have seen people and honestly, I don't love this gender essentialism, but the cisgender heterosexual men that I have worked with have been the ones who have tended to say, well, I just don't want it to, I don't want to have to think about it. I just want it.

I just want to do relating. I don't want to have to be intentional and meaningful. And I'd invite anyone who's having that feeling to step back for just a second and think about. what it means to say so just just flip that so you want to be unintentional right so you want to be unmeaningful you want to be meaningless i'm sure that's not actually what you mean i think what most people mean there is

I don't want to have to work that hard. But ritual can actually reduce the work that we're doing. Because a meaningful ritual, one that we also refresh and revisit to make sure it still has some... some zing for us can help us not have to scramble for how do I keep this alive? How do I, how do I make sure my beloved knows that they are my beloved and not just a person who I am hoping I can hop on a plane and have sex with?

How do I know that? And we can do that by allowing ritual to happen and also by not... We don't have to make it hard, right? Ritual doesn't mean it has to be woo-woo and it doesn't have to be hard. It can be really useful. We have some great rituals that are, they're very simple. They're very easy even, but they're grounding because.

They're part of our storytelling. They're the story of this relationship. And the rituals I have with you are not like the rituals I have with anyone else. Which, yeah, why would they be? They need to be meaningful for the people who are engaged in them.

Yeah. Different people, different meaning. I really like this one because it's actionable. Yeah. It's a very specific thing that you can do to... maintain and enhance your connection over the distance oh so that said our rituals can get tired right our yeah and like our Our long-distance dating ideas can get tired.

doing relationship check-ins can get tired. I have a relationship check-ins list that has like 16 different relationship check-ins that I can use. And a lot of them are designed to be long distance friendly. And I got to shift them up. And you actually I've noticed you don't seem to need the shift.

as frequently like in any routine that you're in you will often like yep i get into the routine and i'm good that you don't seem to have the drive for novelty of routine whereas i will get to a spot and i'll just be like pouty and be like I don't want to do that. And that's my signal as soon as I can catch it. Like, oh, we just, I need to refresh this. Right. So there are lots of, we could have a set of different things. We can brainstorm ways to do this differently.

Something as simple as like shifting a relationship check-in, because that can absolutely be a really meaningful ritual. Shifting it from just being a phone call where we're talking to being, let's send each other a song. about how we're feeling first. So we each send a song and then let's each open up and just answer a couple of questions about how our individual life is going. Let it be about us for a little bit. Let us take up individual space.

And that can shift us out of the gear of a relationship check-in always has to be about like, what are the logistics of our life? How are we feeling about each other? What are the ruptures we've had? There can be like a really rigid structure that we follow.

I love some structure, but if it gets overly rigid, it doesn't feel fun. And especially over long distance where a relationship meeting might start to become like a primary way of how we even. how we even spend time with each other. I want to reiterate what you said about noticing when these things are in need of change.

And so if you find yourself, these are great ideas. Let's find ways to connect over time. We'll come up with some routines, some rituals. And at the point when you start getting into it and you're like, oh, I got it. I've got to do this. When you start to feel the obligation and the resentment creeping in, time to mix it up. Absolutely. That's your cue to say, oh, it's time to do something different because there's nothing magic about any individual one.

Yeah. You're perfectly open to change. Remember, pillar two, you design it the way you need it. We can get really caught up in enduring.

Right. Enduring things. And I've been, I've been deep in my Hillman again, James Hillman, depth psychologist. And he has this quote, the soul is not interested in endurance alone, but in meaning. And I mean. Yeah, endurance sometimes gives me meaning, but it's just the one thing. Endurance for endurance's sake only takes me just so far.

When it comes to sports, I'm an endurance person. That's what I prefer. And that connects back to the original question, which is, how do I do this so it doesn't feel like endless work? Endurance is, by definition. if not endless, very long work. And if it's starting to feel like that, it's time to find ways to mix it up so that it doesn't feel like that obligation and that blog. Long distance can start to feel like I am.

I am obligated. This is my duty. I made a promise and we miss out on the joy. We miss out on, and sometimes it's because we've gotten frustrated. Maybe we got ourselves into a long distance situation. that we thought we could sort of hold it at arm's length and it would be okay. And then it becomes a more and more meaningful relationship. And now it's painful to feel how we don't have things that we would if we were up close.

And then we can over rely on endurance and survival in order to make this like, okay, I'm going to stick in it. But also it's now sapped us of the joy of being together. And the endurance and survival mindset, at least for me and maybe for you as well, is there's just the one way to do it. I have to do it this way because this is- what's possible. Yeah. Breaking that open and realizing, well, there's, we could do any number of things and breaking that up can loosen that.

that tight grip that feels like it's just dragging you down. Yeah. So I think we need to talk about the grief. Sure. I mean, we've had several episodes about grief. And how like the grief of relational change, the grief of jealousy. And you and I are relatively well acquainted with grief. The grief of a long distance relationship can be very tricky because I find it has the quality of ambivalent grief.

I've chosen this. And so I can keep reminding myself, I am choosing this. And also it can feel like there are constraints. There are things that are happening in the world that are forcing this to happen. So I may feel helpless, feeling helpless while you're also feeling. grief while you're feeling the sadness of, it's odd though. It's this ambivalent grief, ambiguous grief where, is it loss?

this person loves me and they told me this morning they loved me, but they're not here. But ambiguous grief is harder in many ways because also it's not very honored. Grief around visible loss. And when I say honored, I don't just mean about... like your community honoring it, but also us. Often we talk ourselves out of it. Like, oh, I don't get to be sad about this because. Yeah. And this is really tricky because like the grief, Francis Weller talks about grief being a portal.

But if you don't have imagination, if you aren't feeling grounded and connected to yourself as a unique individual, if you can't imagine. meaning into this, then you can just feel grief just feels like sort of endless loss. It doesn't feel like it's transporting you anywhere. And so how can we interject? imagination back into long distance relationship? How can we...

stop. I mean, I find one of the things that happens is if I'm working with a dyad who are at a distance or a polycule where there's significant distance, especially often all of the conversations start talking. to become about what they don't have. They're really frustrated and they're stuck in a conversation and lacking the imagination. Can't move out of this because the grief is just sitting there. And so it becomes like a primary.

aspect of this relationship is the grief of what we don't have. And then it becomes actually the thing we do is we sort of mourn together constantly. This reminds me of what it is to ride my bike. I'm riding along. There's a rock in the road. I don't want to hit it. So I look at it. So I hit it. Yeah. And then there's another rock. But if I look away at all the other things that are happening, I will often miss that rock.

And I don't like writing from rock to rock, from morning experience to morning experience. Yeah. But we need ways to, yeah, like you said, honor the grief and also let it sit alongside everything else. Maintaining relationship satisfaction is also about what we imagine we should have. Because if we think we should have something that we don't have.

In other words, if we feel like we are entitled to having a close distance rather than long distance relationship. Or if we just feel the should of like if. if my life were better, like this is it, this is the thing that's missing, then it's hard to achieve satisfaction. It's hard to let ourselves simultaneously feel should and satisfaction. How do I bridge that gap? And one of the things we could potentially introduce is the imagination of

like wild creativity. What is this gap? What is it forcing in the relationship? What is happening that would never happen because you have this distance? Like actually invite that back, that conversation back in because we... Just like when we leave the mono paradigm and enter a custom designed paradigm, we can... over idealize monogamy and start remembering it as being happy, go lucky. And I never had any worries and everything. We forget the challenges. We can over idealize the.

close-up relationship over the distance relationship and start to neglect to notice the value in the distance. Oh, that's a really good one. So the, the imaginal exercise of, can we actually, can we allow ourselves? And here's the, here's the actual, I think the actual trick is when we're in a long distance relationship.

Then we have these periods of time when we come together and we get to be in shared space. Love that for us. And it often, not always, but often is time when we have a very vacation vibe. And so we can over extrapolate the idea that we're going to get that vacation vibe if we're up close all the time. Except that's not true. Except you can't, yeah. This is also true with partnerships that I've had where...

I'm not living with this person. They're not available to have a deeper relationship with me. Which means I get to keep anticipation and longing. I get to keep the sense of mystery with them. I get to never have to worry about paying the bills with them. But it's hard to... keep bringing ourselves back to that. And it tends to frustrate us to realize, oh, right. I can't have just, I can't have just the fun, awesome part of this. I would actually be getting the whole package.

That exercise, I find it's not necessarily fun because it reminds you that, oh, right, right. There would be aspects of my partner that would drive me nuts up close. There would be hard things, but it can. bring us back into a little bit of equilibrium and, and also remind us what it is that we have the unique things that a long distance relationship brings that.

we don't get, we never get when we're up close. You've done some long distance relationships. And it's always interesting to me to hear you tell stories about the things that you've done and the ways that you... the grand gestures you make for them. And that like those, and I'm like, Oh yeah, that's very different from the, this up close day to day relationship you and I have. And.

I think it's just really easy to miss that and forget about it. So when we're doing that, that renewal conversation, six months, every 12 months, when we're, one of the things to look at is, well. What are both sides of the coin that would happen if it were different? If it were different. And we find the golden shadows of being long-distance partners, the beautiful spots that, wow, I don't usually...

Remember that that actually is beauty in my life. I love this. It's similar to staying in the relationship. It's actually staying in it so deeply. That you're looking at all of the whole picture. Yeah. What is good about this? Forget about the fact that you may or may not appreciate the distance. It exists. It exists. What's it for? How does it help?

Where's the joy, which will counteract the, the fatigue that distance sometimes brings. And of course, then let's let me, let's close out. Like just thinking about the. You and I have a lot of structure that we put in our relationship and we are up close to each other, but we have a lot of structure that's designed to help us bring fresh energy. into this relationship. And when we let those moments, when we don't practice those habits, things get worse. Having some...

experimental, fresh, new, like we're going to try something different, right? To reanimate, to like revivify the experience. And this can be, it can be tempting to skip this. with distance because the distance is providing that sense of anticipation and longing. Oh, yeah. And so then we may over rely on routine. So I started talking about ritual and routine.

But that doesn't mean it has to be the same all the time. Like you can have meaningful ritual that also has really fresh juice to it. You also can have those little gestures. Like maybe the morning text is valuable. but maybe there's also some new gesture to try out, some new way of connecting. It's a thing worthy of experimentation, but also worthy of just finding out.

How do we each respond to the unusual, to the thing that feels like, oh, that was innovation. I did not expect that in my life. And some people... do not care for that. For some people, that doesn't feel safe. And for other people, that feels like love. So learning. And sometimes we have to learn the difference by trying it out.

So if you've heard anything or if you've got your situation out there and you're thinking, yeah, but and you have like some other aspect of your relationship that you're like, well, but what do I do about that? Bring it to an AMA call. Bring it to one of our ask me anything calls. And this is the kind of topic that we are talking about in our ask me anything calls for playing with fire because.

We're getting the conversation started here. That's right. But ideally, you will come and join us. Let's be in conversation. We have our full year program where people can get into day-to-day, week-to-week conversation with us, but the AMAs are there for...

all the listeners for everybody who wants to come. And they're small group environments. So if you've been nervous about like, oh, I don't know. I don't want to just show up and like be lost in a crowd. No, just come talk. It's us. We'd love to see you. This was great, Ken. Thanks for bringing this conversation up. We got to talk about these sticky areas. Yes, we do. Relating. Thank you.

There's no one right way to design your relationship. And lots of people, actually about 25%, according to a recent national survey, are interested in some type of open relationship. But how do you know if you are ready to open up happily? Not everyone is and that's no problem. I've got a 60 second quiz that will give you the answer.

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