Danielle and Brad

“When Brad still lived in Santa Maria, we were lucky to see each other one weekend a month the first year,” Danielle said in an email interview.

Photo by Danielle Applegate

Danielle, 20, and Brad, 21, dated for three months before Danielle moved to Sacramento, Calif., to attend California State University, Sacramento, as a freshman in 2009. At the time, Brad was attending Allan Hancock College, a community college in Santa Maria, Calif.

Danielle and Brad met through a mutual friend and became friends during her freshman year of high school. Brad was a sophomore.

Because Danielle was moving six hours away from Brad to attend college, Danielle and Brad considered ending their short relationship to avoid dating long-distance but decided against it.

Before I moved, we considered breaking up since we had only been together for a short period of time and we both knew that [long-distance relationships] were not easy to manage,” Danielle said. “We realized there was a lot of chemistry between us and neither of us were willing to throw that away so quickly.

Being in a long-distance relationship wasn’t easy for Danielle and Brad. Danielle found that her relationship with Brad became strained as she tried to balance her social life and schoolwork because she had little time to talk to Brad on the phone.

Despite the limited time Danielle and Brad had to talk to each other, they used several different forms of communication to connect with each other.

“We would try and talk on the phone for at least a short time every day. Then about once a week we would Skype together for a while,” Danielle said.

However, Danielle and Brad communicated primarily through text messaging, which she said was difficult because “they are so easy to misread and interpret incorrectly.”

Though technologies like Skype and text messaging were a quick and easy way to communicate with each other, Danielle and Brad cherished the romantic gestures of hand-written letters and care packages the most.

For Danielle, letters meant so much more than text messages because they were “a physical thing that you were able to hold and keep” unlike emails and text messages that can easily be deleted.

He used to write me love letters and send them, or little cards, and one month when I was low on money, he sent me a care box full of cereal,” Danielle said. “The love letters he wrote to me while we were apart are still something that I have and plan to always have.

When text messages, Skype and care packages weren’t enough, Danielle and Brad would close the gap between their distance through monthly visits. Brad would make the six-hour drive to Sacramento to see Danielle for a weekend once a month. Though Danielle could rarely return to Santa Maria to visit Brad due to her school schedule during her first year of college, the last six months that she and Brad were in a long-distance relationship she was able to visit him monthly.

“I would use Amtrak to get home. I would take a train from Sacramento to Hanford, Calif. Once there, I would switch over to a bus and take it the rest of the way to Santa Maria. Then after the eight-hour Amtrak ride, I would arrive in Santa Maria at midnight,” Danielle said.

Photo by Danielle Applegate

Being in a long-distance relationship wasn’t easy for Danielle and Brad. Danielle said making a plan with Brad as to how long their relationship would be long-distance before she moved to Sacramento made living so far away from Brad easier.

After a year and a half, Brad moved to Sacramento to be closer to Danielle. Actually, they’re now living only 3.5 miles apart. Closing the distance on their long-distance relationship has been so positive that the couple is talking about getting engaged.

Being in a long-distance relationship affected their relationship in many ways, Danielle said. The couple’s long-distance relationship demanded a higher level of maturity, she said.

“We all of a sudden had to think about how to accommodate each other and not just about the party Friday night that we wanted to go to,” Danielle said.

Trust was another major factor in Danielle and Brad’s relationship. Because the couple trusted each other, they were able to have a strong long-distance relationship.

However, trust cannot come without communication, Danielle said. Though communication is not always easy when it must come through text messages or Skype rather than face to face interactions, she said that good, clear communication is essential to have in order to sustain a long-distance relationship.

Because Danielle and Brad’s relationship was forced to flourish long-distance, they learned a lot about each other’s personalities and how each other handled different situations, Danielle said.

Essential to a long-distance relationship, Danielle said, is each partner’s respect for the other’s space. Partners must realize and respect the commitments that the other has, Danielle said. Doing so will allow the couple to avoid arguments over the limited amount of time one partner can devote to the other.

For college students currently in long-distance relationships, Danielle recommends one essential quality: patience.

“Being in a long-distance relationship isn’t always easy. It has some amazing moments and some really crappy ones as well. Just be aware of how the other one is feeling about things and know that there are brighter days ahead,” Danielle said.

For college students who will soon be in a long-distance relationship, Danielle recommends making a plan prior to leaving for college.

“Don’t just jump in and expect everything to work. Try and set a time when it can be ‘your time’ and talk about how you are going to handle different situations before they happen,” Danielle said.

Though Danielle experienced moments in her long-distance relationship with Brad when she was unsure that continuing their relationship long-distance was a good idea, now that the couple lives close once again, they are closer and their relationship is stronger than ever, Danielle said.

Danielle offered one final piece of advice for all college students in long-distance relationships,

 If you and your partner are determined to be together, you will find a way.