Soon, I’ll finally have spent more time in real-life relationships than in long-distance ones. That’s right – of the seven-ish years I’ve been dating, at time of writing, over 3.5 of them I’ve done long-distance: because of military, school, and life, ranging from a three hour drive to an 18 hour flight apart. I’ve been able to Skype multiple times a day, and I’ve been restricted to snail-mail for three months. I’ve done this within monogamy, open relationships, and polyamory. All of these have had some element of kink.
There are good things about LDRs: care packages, long conversations, the incomparably exciting homecoming, the dual social groups. You learn each other’s minds better than most real-time couples ever do.
But it sucks. Okay? Okay. It sucks. It’s going to suck. It never is going to stop sucking. You can lessen the suck, though. There are ways. I like to think that I’ve learned some of them. There are people who have done this for longer than I have, but in my varied experiences, this is what I’ve learned. I’ll start with some general advice, then a bit about how I did kink long distance, and then some of the really hard stuff.
General LDR Advice
Plan Ahead
To the extent that you can. I have never done an LDR that started LDR, but I have had as little as a month’s warning before a deployment. I’ve also had months and months of preparation. The more you can know together what your expectations will be, the easier of a time you’ll have. This means calculating timezones and figuring out the best times for calls, deciding how often you want to talk and in what ways, if you’ll have ‘date nights’ and how those will look. It means implementing some protocol beforehand, if you’re into that, so you know what to expect (more on this later.)
Prioritize
You cannot spend as much time with someone apart as you can together. Presumably, one or both of you is doing something awesome and that needs time. But, as with any relationship, you should try to prioritize your partner the way you would if they were right there – or decide in advance you aren’t going to. This is something I ran into some issues with regarding polyamory: because in real life, ‘time together’ can be sitting in the same room together texting, or going to a movie, or driving to a party, spending what is really the same amount of time with a LDR CAN appear like favoritism to real life partners when it isn’t. For this, I’d recommend they be included in the above planning process, too.
Have Your Own Life
Make friends. Go to events. Get out. Do things. Stay busy – it will keep you distracted, and it will keep your talks with your partner interesting.
Talk
Whenever you can. Communicate about what you are doing, what you are feeling, what weird food you ate, what terrible thing your boss said. Email, call, write, whatsapp, Skype, snapchat… talk.
Document
Journal. Take photos. Tweet. You aren’t living lives in the same place, but you can still share them. This can be a part of your protocol or it can be something for yourself – while not all my journaling from my time abroad was shared with my Owner, it helped me to remember every cool little detail that happened when we did catch up.
Have Physical Reminders
While I would never recommend collaring before you are ready to do so, knowing I had my collar locked on was huge for me when I felt the weight of the distance. I know my Owner felt similarly about my blanket I left behind, which smelled like me. Pieces of clothing, things to hold on to and return, pictures. All important. Gifts from your separate locations can be great, too, but international mail screwed me over more than once in this regard, so go cheap.
Kinky LDR Advice
Focus
Whether or not you engage in protocol and play, which I’ll talk about below, a big part of remembering the kink in your relationship is simply remembering it. Whether this is an actual meditation mantra, as mine was, or just some focused thinking every day about your role, taking the time to focus on why you do what you do can sometimes be the push to continue.
Protocol
This can get tricky. If you’re someone like me who has a lot of protocol in their life, suddenly not having it in an LDR can be jarring and even fatal to the dynamic. As with any protocol, what’s most important is the significance behind it. Some of these can be daily reminders of the overall dynamic, ways to stay connected. Some can be assigned to things that are important to you in your real-time relationship. While I won’t give you all of mine, here are some things we did:
- Every day, while drinking my coffee, I would be kneeling. The photo of this would be sent to my Owner each night. This helped me to think about my place at the start and end of every day, and the nightly email gave me time to say anything I hadn’t had a chance to while He was awake (we were on a 7-hour time difference.)
- My cooking for Him is a huge part of our service dynamic, as is my taking care of my body and health. To acknowledge this, I wore my plug every time I cooked to represent my role in doing so.
- I kept ‘Property’ in His handwriting copied on my body at all times. This meant that any time I was naked, I was reminded of my identity. I also really liked that He’d taken the time to send it to me (in several different handwritings, so that I could choose!)
Play
Time to get down with some mutual masturbation (and by the way, a good place to implement some protocol, too.) Not for you, or impossible? Dirty chat can be just as fun. Dirty snailmail can be even better. Some people do pain play long-distance; I did not, so I can’t speak on that. What we did do was a lot of emotional/fear-based play over the phone or Skype. If you’re comfortable with it, take photos or videos to instruction. In one relationship, we kept our kink alive by maintaining a private Tumblr together with pictures of things we wanted to try. In another, we wrote stories back and forth on a GoogleDoc. Include negotiations for this kind of thing in your planning, if you can or if you need. Otherwise, have some fun exploring the mental and visual parts of your sex drive.
Aftercare
If you are doing the above – especially if you’re working with degradation and fear, as we were – this can be the hardest part. Getting off the phone can be a harsh reminder that you aren’t actually together, and time differences don’t make it any easier. Until you know if you need it, plan to do your play earlier in your “date” time so that you can watch a movie or talk after. What was most important for me was making sure that I didn’t encounter the things that would be hard to handle without Him after we did this. As I’m a little, I kept some fun flash game links for this part, avoided social media or anywhere I could encounter the news, and got an early bedtime.
Fantasize
Together. Separately. Share. You have a unique opportunity in an LDR to do a lot of thinking, a lot of questioning, and a lot of talking. An entirely new dynamic (DD/lg) developed for us while long distance. It gave us the time to say “I think _______ is really hot” and “Could this work here?” before we ever encountered it in real-time. Because of all this discussion, we fell into it immediately and with no problems upon my return home, and it remains a daily part of our relationship.
The Bad Stuff
Forgive Yourself
When you miss the only phone call for three months. When you don’t have good sex the last time you see each other. When you aren’t there for a tragedy in their life. When your bad internet causes a miscommunication that creates a huge fight. Forgive yourself for not being there – life happens, and it isn’t your fault, and most likely, your partner knows this.
Understand
With all your planning and prioritizing, sometimes, real-life things come up. Be they work events, other partners, or a party you wish you could go to, understand that you can’t be included in everything, and look forward to sharing the stories the next time you talk.
If The Worst Should Happen
Sometimes you can predict something may go wrong. Sometimes, you can’t. As much as you can, plan for this. I had a relationship I knew was ending where we specifically decided beforehand that any break-up would be left to happen in person. I had one where we decided the opposite so that nobody wasted their gas money. For what you can’t plan for? Talk. Take time to yourself to figure out what you need. Ask for what you need. Talk. In my case, when we encountered a problem, I doubled-down. I needed to be reminded of what was good about our relationship, and I asked for more protocol. For others, this may be removing the kink from your relationship to figure it out, or imposing different poly rules. If you haven’t planned to wait, don’t wait. Talk. Immediately. Often. Talk.
Coming Home
No matter how exciting the initial moments will seem, every LDR I know has had one or both partners having issues within a few weeks of returning to real-time. There are adjustments to be made. You may feel you’re talking less. Your lives will have changed considerably. Cherish that first kiss, and then be prepared to do some work to get into a new routine. Things will be different. It will not immediately be wonderful.
But it will be wonderful, at times. And it will be confusing. And it will be different. And it will suck. And I don’t know for sure, but hopefully, it will be worth it.
It was for me.
Today, my 75-minute drive to my Owner’s seems short, and I will to the best of my ability refuse to ever be long-distance again. But I’ve done it. I know the beast. I could handle it.
So here’s to finally having as much experience with real relationships as I do with LDRs. Here’s to never doing it again. And here’s to knowing that if by some great unfortune we do have to, we’ll be prepared.
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An update, 2.5 years away from any sort of LDR at time of writing: you forget. You forget how hard it was. How bad it was. The Love pull through. It will all be okay.
Want to join in on the conversation? You can do so in the comments of the original writing on Fetlife here.