When a person moves away, there’s the usual barrage of questions.
What are you going to do? Where are you going to live? How are you going to make money? Won’t you miss home?
The questions only become more pointed and quietly judgemental when a person reveals that their significant other is, in fact, not coming with them and that they are about to embark on a long distance relationship.
Suddenly, a panic is introduced; a sense of unease, disbelief, and genuine concern as to how somebody could ever go without spending time with someone they love for an extended period of time.
And although all of the above may be valid worries, they’re also not concerns that are exclusive just to those in romantic relationships.
Over the past couple of years, a significant number of my close friends have decided to emigrate.
The close network of women that I learned to rely on for support, entertainment, and knowing that I will always chose sambuca over tequila started to get significantly smaller. I wasn’t losing my friends, they were just elsewhere.
The most recent person I’ve lost to the bright lights and cityscapes of anywhere that isn’t Ireland is my very close friend and platonic life partner.
Headed to Melbourne like a solid 10 percent of the country, she decided to pack up and move her life half way across the world in search of rent that didn’t consume half of her wages and a sun that shone for more than two weeks of the year.
She has only been gone for two weeks – a period of time that still allows us to pretend that she is merely on holiday, just taking a break, and will be back home soon.
Twice already I’ve been planning my weekend and unconsciously left a gap in my schedule for her, an afternoon or an evening that otherwise would have been filled with long walks and freezing cold coffees or 45 euro worth of Diep.
A friend moving away is a physical loss – a hole in your calendar that would otherwise be filled with long coffee dates, late night pints, and gym classes that neither of you are fit enough for.
It’s an adjustment that I have had months to prepare for, which makes it easier, but it’s also one that I have a lot of experience in, which makes it not.
As with every goodbye there is sadness, disappointment, and a regular enough concern that I should have just said “Fuck it!” and went with them too.
But along with that, there is also the new normal.
There’s consistently active group chats that must remain so lest you do actually lose contact. There’s organised phone calls, penciled in to suit everybody’s schedule so you manage to call at just the right time.
There’s Snapchat Streaks that suddenly become a very real, very measurable gauge of how well you’re keeping in contact. Lose the Streak? Lose your friendship, mate. No other way about it.
In some ways, the new form of hyper-coordinated contact almost makes you closer.
Instead of simply prolonging a friendship because it’s convenient, there’s now a required effort on both parts to maintain a relationship that may or may not be lost to the ether of busyness.
There’s a comfort in knowing that a closeness and loyalty remains there not just by accident, but because both parties want it to – that support wasn’t just offered out of obligation, but out of genuine concern and care.
There are undoubtedly countless friendships that have ended due to long distance.
Just like relationships, they are ruined by the time difference, succumbing to the sudden and very real lack of accessibility that is suddenly the norm.
None of my long distance friendships have bowed to such a fate.
We’ve all remained in constant contact – scheduling in phone calls, sending 27 minute voicenotes about very little, planning expensive holidays to meet each other half way.
In some ways, we’re actually closer now than we were before.
It could be a stroke of luck, but hopefully it’s not.
