I have been in a long-distance relationship (LDR) for four years. I live in the UK, he lives in Ireland, so overall, it’s the most convenient out of all inconveniences. When discussions in our respective countries started about lockdowns (or the delay thereof in my country), closing national borders except for essential travel, and the closing of universities, we had to make a lot of difficult decisions.

At time of writing, I have not seen my boyfriend in person for over eight months with no clear view of when I will see him again. I have watched a lot of relationships suffer or end altogether because of the strains that isolation and social distancing can put on friendships and romantic relationships. But in a lot of ways, my LDR has prepared me for extraordinary times which have helped our relationship grow and improve in ways that I didn’t expect. So, here are 5 ways that an LDR equipped me for a pandemic:

1. Open Communication

Communication is the buzzword that starts off most articles to do with relationships. But this isn’t just about romantic partnerships, the lockdowns across the world have made it crystal clear how important it is to be open and communicative with other people. Living with family, friends, or your significant other is extremely difficult when the way you would go about your lives are brought to a halt and you must be near each other for months on end.

The first thing an article on LDRs will tell you is that the relationship will fall apart quickly if communication isn’t open, clear, and reciprocal, and that’s true. There’s no use concealing your concerns because they aren’t around to figure it out for themselves. LDRs are a quick route to the realisation that people can’t read your mind. Jealousy, low self-esteem, and worries about the distance are all exacerbated when they are bottled up and left to fester. The same idea applies to everyone else in your life.

During the coronavirus pandemic, I have seen friends and family bicker, fight, or even just fall out of touch because they didn’t know how to (or didn’t care to) take the steps towards clear and concise communication. A lot of people have lost loved ones that they didn’t need to during the lockdown, and not just because of the virus.

Your mother cannot know that you need alone time if you don’t tell her. Your lecturers at college cannot know that you’re struggling with the workload unless you tell them. Your best friend cannot fully understand the toll that quarantine has had on you unless you express it. Communication is hard, and it makes you vulnerable. You have to tell people things that you would often rather keep to yourself; you might feel silly or embarrassed that something small can bother you so much; it can also be upsetting for someone you love to tell you that you’ve done something to hurt them. But we’ve all been in an argument where we’ve bottled up our frustrations for weeks, months, or even years, and it’s all coming out now, but not calmly, or constructively, or amicably.

Obviously, some relationships are toxic and if these efforts aren’t reciprocal, it can do you more harm than good to fix something beyond repair. But for the people that are worth keeping around, one honest conversation can save a lot of heartache in the long run.

2. Learning to like yourself

Another cliché: you can’t love somebody else unless you love yourself. I don’t think this is true. I think that there are plenty of people with a poor self-image that love the people around them ardently and as best as they can. I think the distinction here is that if you don’t love yourself, the relationships you build with others can often be unhealthy.

However, liking yourself is necessary for an LDR because with high self-esteem comes several of the pillars that keep a long-term relationship going. When you think you are worthy of a healthy and nurturing relationship, you are more comfortable to trust your partner (because infidelity inherently has nothing to do with you), you are more able to communicate because you see that your needs are valid, and you do not rely so much on your partner for security and entertainment because you can give those things to yourself.

We were all high school students who hung out with and dated people who were not the best for us simply because we didn’t want to be lonely. A lot of people stick around in unhealthy relationships because they don’t believe that they deserve something better, or that they’ll just be alone with themselves.

Personally, I have always loved alone time, no matter where my self-esteem has been. So, when the lockdown in Britain began in March, the three months that I spent mostly in a spare room in my sister’s house (for a long time without my sister), I was fairly steady. Of course, those few weeks without proper social interaction started to make me go a bit loopy, overall, I was able to keep myself entertained and productive. I was able to speak with my friends and family online, and sometimes I was lonely, but I got along with myself well enough that I could sail through the lockdown relatively smoothly.

3. Patience

Waiting is the name of the game with LDRs, and the worst part of it is that you don’t always have a clear image of what you’re waiting for in your head. When you’re low on travel money, when one of you is going through a transformative period, or even if you’re just not in the right mental space for the emotional rollercoaster of short-term visits, patience is the godsend to an LDR.

I’m not patient by nature, in fact, I can be very uptight about getting places on-time and in terms of a career, I’m a 20-year-old who is upset about not already having a PhD. But throughout my relationship, I had to decide whether I love my partner or my own impatience more. Sometimes, I could feel it becoming a wrench in our relationship because I just wanted to see him, and I just wanted to have a ten-year plan laid out in front of me. Now, the idea of having a step-by-step guide to the rest of my life is more terrifying and waiting in uncertainty is the lesser of two evils.

Throughout this pandemic, we haven’t known what is appropriate and when we can expect life to resemble normality. In my country, we neglected the virus months before it arrived because it was too inconvenient, and we are paying for it with over 40,000 deaths. We cannot wait to reopen the economy and enforce the wearing of masks, and we are paying for it in the looming second wave that is starting to haunt parts of the country now. We are currently sending our children back to school when it is practically impossible to maintain social distancing, and we will pay for that. In my country, impatience and lack of forethought has been the death of thousands.

During the lockdown, I saw people breaking the rules of lockdown and posting it on social media. Since the lockdown ended, I have seen people go on holiday and then complain that they would have to quarantine for 2 weeks upon returning. Due to our impatience, we are not only jeopardising the recovery of our own country, but we are also an obstacle to the progress of other countries. Patience is such an important skill to develop, but it has possibly been the most neglected throughout this pandemic.

4. Respect for boundaries

As I said before, I love alone time. In fact, I need a lot of alone time in order to feel like I can socialise with people passionately and energetically. When people stand in the way of my beloved solitude, I feel very threatened indeed. It makes me feel I’m not being listened to and that my personal boundaries aren’t being respected. While this intertwines with communication and patience, it does deserve its own category.

Even when you make your reasonable boundaries clear, sometimes they are not taken seriously or need to be further consolidated. When people deliberately ignore your boundaries or actively act against them, that is a problem and it is worth considering how far you should trust someone who does not respect your needs as an individual. In an LDR, it is very clear when boundaries are being transgressed as it is often in writing, whereas in person these things can go unnoticed for a while.

But within the realm of friends and family, this is also extremely important. In the last few months, I have seen tweets from people expressing their doubts about their friendship circle when they were not taking the restrictions of the lockdown seriously. Masks, social distancing, and non-essential travel were the basis of many breakdowns between friends, families, and relationships. Some thought the people around them were too lenient with the restrictions, some thought the people around them were too strict. This is how important boundaries are to people.

5. Making it up as you go along

Life is a mixed bag, 2020 has made that abundantly clear, but one thing that I have learned is that you can’t plan too far ahead without something backfiring. A vague, ever-changing idea of what life will look like in a year’s time is by far preferable to the ten-year plan that confines you, especially when one-month plans are out of the question right now, let alone ten years.

There is a pressure in LDRs to know exactly what’s down the road. When are you going to close the distance? Are you going to live together straight away? Which country are we going to settle down in? Are you going to keep the relationship going after university? And to all those answers: Possibly, but who knows?! I’m not going to tabulate every aspect of my career and family life just to reach a goal that I made when I was 16. A little bit of uncertainty and improvisation never hurt!

It is not easy to live in a limbo for most of the year, trust me, I was supposed to have moved to Spain by now, but hey! You have to roll with the punches, and maybe, just maybe, everything won’t go back to normal, but things will work out one way or another! Both an LDR and a pandemic require hope, fortitude, and a whole lot of patience!