My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
How I Stayed Intimate in a Long Distance Relationship
By Mei, 28 — Boston, MA
When people ask how I stayed intimate in a long distance relationship, they usually expect me to talk about late-night video calls or handwritten letters. And sure, we did those things. But the honest answer is stranger and quieter than that: I learned how to be intimate with myself first. The year my partner moved to Seattle and I stayed in Boston for grad school, I thought the hardest part would be missing him. It turned out the hardest part was sitting alone in my apartment and realizing I had no idea what to do with my own body when no one else was there to tell me I was wanted.
We had been together for three years before the distance started. Three years of falling asleep tangled up, of lazy Sunday mornings, of knowing exactly how the other person breathed when they were almost asleep. Then suddenly it was September, and I was standing in a one-bedroom in Somerville with too many textbooks and a silence that felt physical.
The Night I Realized I Was Lonely in My Own Skin
It happened about six weeks in. We had just hung up from a video call — a good one, actually, where we laughed about his terrible coworker and I showed him the monstera I was somehow keeping alive. But after I closed my laptop, the quiet hit me like a wall. Not just the missing-him kind of quiet. A deeper one. The kind where you realize you have been pouring all your sense of touch, comfort, and closeness into one person, and now that person is 2,500 miles away.
I sat on my bed and genuinely did not know what to do with myself. Not in a dramatic way. In a very plain, very real way. I didn’t know how to comfort my own body. I didn’t know what made me feel safe when I was alone. I had spent my twenties building intimacy with another person and had somehow skipped the step where I built it with myself.
That night I took a bath. Not a Pinterest bath with candles and a face mask — just hot water and the bathroom door closed. I lay there and tried to notice what my body actually felt like without anyone watching. It was awkward. I kept reaching for my phone. I made myself put it on the floor. After a while, the water started to cool and I realized I had been holding my shoulders up near my ears for what was probably weeks. I let them drop. Something loosened in my chest.
It was not a revelation. It was a beginning.
Learning Intimacy with Myself First
I started small. A friend — the kind of friend who says things you need to hear whether you asked or not — told me that self-care during long distance was not optional, it was structural. She said it the way you would say “eat vegetables” or “drink water.” Like it was just maintenance. She was right.
I bought better sheets. I started stretching before bed instead of scrolling. I let myself lie in the dark without immediately reaching for a podcast to fill the silence. These sound like nothing, and in a way they were nothing. But they were teaching me something I had never practiced: how to be alone in my body without treating it like a waiting room for someone else’s attention.
The bigger shift came one night in November. I had been reading — actually reading, not just staring at a page — and I noticed I felt good. Not happy exactly, but settled. Warm. Present. And I thought, very quietly, that I wanted to keep feeling that. I wanted to explore what my body actually responded to when the only person in the room was me.
I ordered something from HiMoment that week. It arrived in a small, plain box that fit in my nightstand drawer. I mention this not because the product is the point, but because the act of choosing it was. It was the first time I had done something deliberately, specifically for my own physical comfort without framing it as something I was doing for us, or for him, or for our relationship. It was mine. That mattered more than I expected.
What Long Distance Taught Me About My Body
Here is what nobody tells you about long distance: it does not just test your relationship. It tests your relationship with yourself. When your partner is not there to hold you, kiss your neck, run their thumb along your wrist while you watch a movie — you either learn to give yourself that tenderness, or you go without it. I had been going without it for weeks and calling it strength.
Once I started paying attention, I noticed things. I noticed that I liked pressure on the back of my neck when I was stressed. That slow breathing before bed actually calmed me down, and not in a woo-woo way — in a tangible, muscle-releasing way. I noticed that my body carried an entire emotional weather system that I had been outsourcing to someone else to read. I had let my partner be my interpreter. Now I was learning the language myself.
Some of this was physical. Some of it was embarrassingly simple, like learning that I slept better on my left side, or that I liked my bedroom cold with heavy blankets rather than warm with thin ones. Some of it was more private than that. I learned what I liked when I was alone — not just what I liked when someone else was involved. The difference was larger than I thought it would be.
I started feeling more confident in my own body. Not in a loud way. Not in a way I could point to. But when Ethan and I would talk on the phone and he would ask how I was, I stopped saying “fine” or “I miss you” as a reflex. I started saying real things. “I had a really good night last night. Just me. I’m figuring things out.” He would get quiet for a moment, and then he would say, “Good. I’m glad.” And I could hear that he meant it.
How We Both Grew Closer by Growing Apart
The strange alchemy of that year is that the more I learned to be alone, the better we became together. When we visited each other — once in October, once in December, a long stretch over winter break — I showed up differently. I was not arriving empty, hoping he would fill me back up. I was arriving already held. Already settled in my own skin. Which meant that when we touched, it was not out of desperation. It was out of genuine want.
He noticed. Of course he noticed. “You seem different,” he said one night in December, his hand on my hip in his tiny Seattle apartment. “Like you’re more here.” I laughed and said, “I’ve been practicing being here.” He did not ask what I meant, exactly. He just pulled me closer.
Ethan had his own version of that year. He started running. He started cooking actual meals instead of eating cereal over the sink. He told me once, on a Tuesday night call, that he had spent an entire evening just sitting on his balcony watching the rain and that it was the most peaceful he had felt in months. We were both learning the same thing from opposite ends of the country: that you cannot be good to someone else if you have abandoned yourself.
I think about that year all the time now. We are back in the same city — he moved to Boston last August — and we are better than we were before. Not because distance made the heart grow fonder, or whatever people say. But because distance made me grow a self. A whole, embodied, physically literate self who knows what she needs and is not ashamed to ask for it.
Sometimes at night, after Ethan has fallen asleep, I lie there and feel the specific weight of my own body in the bed. The warmth of my own skin. The rhythm of my own breathing. And I think: I know you now. I did not know you before. I am glad I took the time.
The long distance year was not the year I almost lost my relationship. It was the year I finally found mine — the one I have with myself. That is the love story I did not expect to write.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: How to Actually Relax When You’re Alone and At 32, I Learned How to Date Myself. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
