emotional intelligence Archives

What I Learned Developing a Long-Distance Relationship with a Woman from the Other Side of the World

I wanted to reflect on the lessons I learned from dating a woman living on the other side of the world. My ex-girlfriend is a Thai woman who was living in Cambodia, and we met when I took a trip there.

One major mistake we made is that we did not give enough time being together in the same place. For context, we went on a few dates while I was in Cambodia. Then after chatting for a month and a half by text, we met together for two weeks in Vietnam, before I went back to New York where I lived at the time, and she went back to her home in Cambodia. Then three months later, she came to New York for what turned out to be a month and a half trip visiting New York and also Washington state.

After this, we decided to travel the world together, which in effect involved living together on the road. That was too soon for such a step. To be clear, I don’t think touring Vietnam, New York, and Washington state were bad trips. They were very impactful experiences that deepened our relationship. Our problem was that we did not know enough about each other to decide to live together while traveling the world.

That was too big of a jump for where we were at, and it turned out to be the wrong call. Once we traveled together, we realized all sorts of incompatibilities and tensions that eventually destroyed our relationship.

Traveling with a significant other in itself can be difficult. One of my friends quibbed that traveling together is a relationship “on hard mode” as you constantly have to make complex decisions together while also being potentially tired and removed from a stable rhythm or sense of place. But I don’t think that primarily explains why we had the tension. We did not do enough work evaluating whether we were compatible in the first place.

Compatibility is difficult to evaluate when a relationship is long-distance. That’s one of the long-distance relationship’s biggest difficulties. Living in the same city (even if they live on the other side of town) allows you to see the person in your daily routine. You can feel out how you feel with them everyday, how your lifestyles’ overlap or conflict, and what to do about the latter.

Some in my generation insist that couples should move in together before getting married to evaluate whether they are compatible. I would go that far per se, but living in the same town is important. Seeing them as you go about your day and week and doing the many little things together that make up regular life helps you understand whether you fit.

Our long-distance relationship was stuck on the honeymoon phase, where we were head over heels with each other, perhaps naively so. Psychologists who have studied this phase of relationships report that people usually notice our partner’s flaws but do not consider them a big deal. Instead, we tend to minimize potential problems in favor of the positive aspects. It’s in later stages of the relationships that we truly process these flaws and any other tensions in the relationship and actively work through them. It’s necessary to do this to evaluate whether you two really are a good fit.

When a relationship is long-distance, you often communicate on your own terms. Whether it is texting or calling, you interact with the person according to your schedules. You may speak with your partner frequently – for example, at this time, I generally spoke with her twice a day – but there’s something about only texting, chatting, and video-calling that does not help move the relationship out of the honeymoon phase.

I believe the reason is that these virtual, long-distance communications are not a major disruptions to our day-to-day lives. It’s by incorporating the other person into our day-to-day lives that tends to move the relationship out of the infatuation stage and start to show the frictions inherent in the relationship. It both allows us to experience them enough to get under our skin, but it also requires more of a shift into our lives that causes friction.

I remember a priest in my home church growing up once reflecting in a sermon about his experience counseling new couples planning to get married. One of the first questions he asks the couples is, “During your fights, how do you two fight? What do you tend to do?” Some newly dating couples will respond that they have never had a fight before, and he’ll tell them to wait until they get through a major fight and then come back to get married. For him, having had a fight is a sign that they are close and not having had a major fight demonstrates that they are not intimate enough for marriage. Genuine intimacy requires getting under each other’s skin, which necessarily produces friction and tension.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that we never fought while our relationship was long-distance. It was not intimate enough to do so. Unsurprisingly, during our trips together traveling (both in Vietnam, New York, and Washington), we did fight. The longer we were together, the more significant our fights became, precisely because we were sharing more of our regular lives together, leading to greater opportunity for connection and friction. The long-distance phases, though, felt similar to freezing fruit to prevent it from ripening: typical reactions were suppressed, preventing the relationship from moving to the next stage.

What is the alternative for someone in a long-distance relationship? I don’t know. Ideally one should close the gap and move to the same place, but in many circumstances, that is not realistic. This is still what I have noticed at least, even if it can be a hard truth for two people considering dating who do not live in the same place.

Seeing People’s Inner Child: De-escalating Adult Conflicts by Addressing Unmet Needs

Many adults still act like children. Some routinely; others only on their bad days. When you see someone lashing out impulsively or defensively when they argue with you, it can be helpful to step back and see their inner child to put their behavior into perspective.

This is not the same as agreeing with them: they still may be wrong. But seeing their tantruming inner child can help you understand what needs they feel are not being met and are causing them to lash out. This can be something you address directly. Figuring out a workable way to acknowledge and maybe address that need within the bounds of your own goals can be a practical way to get through the moment, especially when they are in a position of authority over you. This usually slows them down and helps deescalate the situation.

At the very least, it can help empathize with them. Empathizing is not the same as agreeing, nor is it the same as allowing or enabling any inappropriate behavior they may be doing. It is understanding their behavior enough to see the human inside, often a series of needs screaming to be heard, and confronting it directly. Even if your empathy is not safe to show in the moment or if they reject your empathy, empathetically acknowledging the feelings of another is about maintaining your own humanity and not allowing another’s behavior to curb your ability to acknowledge and address the humanity of others around you.

So, how can this help you respond? Others have spoken at length about how to use understanding to negotiate and reduce conflict (see this for example). One can use empathy to diffuse a situation by acknowledging their side, to demonstrate mutual self-respect, or if necessary, to set proper boundaries for one’s own needs.

Pausing to reflect on the needs the other has can help remove you from the intensity of the situation, which would help you form the nuanced response necessary. It can allow you to understand not only their needs, but your needs and develop an effective strategy for how to meet those needs in the moment. Often, when someone seems to come after us, our bodies move immediately into a reactive, defensive response. The perceived threat puts us into “go mode” and taking an extra second to understand empathetically gives us the space to pull back, assess the situation anew, and use both our emotions and reason to develop a better, strategic response.

Instead of launching, you pause and force yourself to think about it from their perspective, sometimes you realize aspects of your behavior that you do need to address. Worst case scenario, after you reflect for a bit, you still conclude that you are wrong, and in that situation, taking a step back allows you to help confirm that, and you are now in a better mental space to respond appropriately.

What Are Emotions, and What Do They Tell Us About Ourselves?

Many are critical of emotions, seeing feelings as something that stifles them, as something they must overcome with reason and rationality, but that is foolish in the long run. We should be aware of our emotions because they teach us crucial lessons about ourselves and our needs.

Emotions are one of our internal mechanisms to orient us towards what we need. Thus, they are crucial. Even though sometimes emotions can be overwhelming or lead people to make decisions in the moment that turn out to be poor ones, we should not ignore or suppress our emotions.

Instead, we should seek to understand what they are telling us about what we need. Anxiety is a sign that we consider whatever we are anticipating as important. Worry and fear area signs that we are concerned about our wellbeing. Anger is a sign that we feel an injustice has threatened ourselves or others we care about.

At the end of the day, they are signals. Signals that can turn out to be correct or incorrect. Sometimes we are angry at something that we discover is not a real injustice, and sometimes, what we fear turns out not to be much of a concern. But often they are not wrong: our minds can be very good at assessing what is important.

Either way, it’s important to process the emotion, understand why you feel it, and then determine the best response to having the emotion. Through this, we can synchronize our emotions with our rational thinking. Using our reason to think about whether our emotion’s assessments are missing important information, and in turn, determining whether our rational self is ignoring something our emotions are picking up on.

A successful marriage between the two is a healthier way to respond to our emotions than suppression and a better way to use the tools in our psychological toolset to engage the world and live a good life.

Adjusting Expectations When Living in Abroad

Over our lives, we develop expectations for how our needs will be met based on the culture(s) we live in. This includes our physical needs but also our emotional needs, social needs, and all our other needs. There’s nothing wrong with this; expectations help keep us sane and allow us to determine how to make choices in our daily lives.

However, in new cultures, these expectations tend to break down. The most difficult yet most important aspect of long term cross-cultural adjustment is to learn how to develop new expectations and use those to determine how to meet our needs.

Every culture can meet people’s needs. If it did not, people would not survive there. But a new culture may have vastly different methods or tools to meet those needs. In another culture, you must learn how their ways of doing things can and do meet people’s needs in life. And you must not only understand this consciously but internalize subconsciously.

Internalizing that is not always easy, and it’s okay if it takes time. All humans have built a set of expectations over the course of their lives based on how we are used to things happening. This helps produce the (generally subconscious) filters we use to assess the world around us: to determine, for example, what people mean when they communicate things, what they want from us, whether we are safe or secure, and what to expect from another in any given interaction. Without these things, we couldn’t function or handle daily interactions.

But in a new culture, all of this has to be rebuilt. It’s easier said than done, but much of the difficulties one feels in another culture – including culture shock, frustration or anger at local practices, sadness, etc. – deep down stem from the difficulty of experiencing a mismatch from your expectations and subconsciously sensing that you will fail to have your needs met. If so, it’s okay to pause and know that you are doing a complex psychological reset.