JACKIE: Long-Distance Love & Other Thoughts

It's honestly ironic that I'm writing this post from my family's living room in San Diego, while my husband is currently on a road trip in Mobile, Alabama. This is the first time we've spent more than a day apart since our wedding in November! It's actually pretty funny to think about that because for 4 1/2 years, Trevor and I didn’t live within 1,000 miles of each other and I would be rolling my eyes at myself right now for complaining about being apart for a few weeks this month! 

Anyway, I thought now would be a good opportunity to talk about my long-distance relationship with my husband before we were married. More often than not through minor league baseball, couples live apart for most of the year. As we explained in our previous post about life in the minor leagues, living together during the season is not always possible or feasible. 

So here's a little snippet of our story and some of my thoughts about long-distance relationships and love in general based on my own experiences and faith. 

I was a freshman in college and Trev was a senior in high school when we first met; it was winter break and we both attended a bible study at our hometown church in San Diego--St. Michaels, where we would actually be married almost 5 years later. We knew of each other through mutual friends, but this was the first time we had really interacted; I was drawn to his goofy sense of humor and the ease with which he went through life. We instantly felt a connection from that first time we met, and we kind of entered the whole long-distance thing without really knowing what we were getting ourselves into.

We spent a lot of time that first spring semester developing a deep friendship--talking on the phone, texting, and Skyping whenever we were able to. It's pretty remarkable to me how well you can get to know a person from far away, when all you can really have with them is talking. We spent that first summer together in San Diego before I headed back to Gonzaga and he began his college career at Arizona State, and it really wasn't a difficult decision for us to continue our relationship long-distance when the summer ended and we left for college. It seemed like a natural thing, and we both recognized that the connection we shared was special, and it was worth the effort to make it work, even from 1,389 miles away (but who's counting?).  

We were able to get into a pretty good routine through college and managed to plan visits at least once a semester—he would come see me in the fall when he wasn’t in season, and I would plan trips to see him in the spring. We were very lucky that we are both from San Diego, so we were able to spend Thanksgiving and Winter Break together every year when we went home.  This of course changed after Trev was drafted by the Marlins and we had to find a “new normal” per say, since he was a lot farther away on the east coast and a three-hour time difference was thrown into the mix. But truthfully, even though it’s incredibly difficult sometimes, you just learn to find a way to make it work for the person you love. Our relationship was never easy and never convenient, but we knew that what we shared was special and we decided to treat it that way.

I'd say one of the toughest parts of being in a long-distance relationship is living apart during the ups and downs of life. There were plenty of happy events that were difficult for us to miss – birthdays, anniversaries, big games, my college graduation. But truly, the hardest part of our relationship was being apart for the more difficult parts of life.

His freshman year, when one of Trev’s closest friends and roommate Cory suffered a career-ending and life-changing spinal cord injury during their opening series, it completely rocked the world of every one of his friends and every player on the team.  You’d generally think of baseball as an overall safe sport—you don’t often hear about players suffering serious injuries. I think that is one of the things that made Cory’s injury even more heartbreaking and difficult for me personally at first, knowing that this was such an uncommon and freak accident, and that truly it could have happened to anyone.

It was extremely debilitating watching my boyfriend suffer and hurt for his friend, feeling that my ability to help him through it was very limited from so far away. Keep in mind that this was also only about a year into our relationship, and although we knew each other very well at this point, this was by far the most difficult experience that either of us had lived through since we got together. It’s difficult to know what to do, what to say, or how you can help someone going through one of the most traumatizing experiences of their life without much prior experience of helping them through difficult situations.

It was a lot of sitting on the phone in silence. A lot of simply reminding him that I was there. Not a lot of having the perfect thing to say to make him feel better—that wasn’t a possibility in this situation. I didn’t know what to say to help, and he did not expect me to. It was a mutual understanding that we would just get through it together, walking side by side through the experience.

Through my relationship with Trevor, I have learned that two keys to having a successful long-distance relationship (and really any relationship) are communication and independence. We always made it a point to maintain a level of independence through college--I was very involved at Gonzaga in different aspects of student life and nursing school, while Trevor's time was filled with baseball and involvement with the Newman Center. We encouraged each other to make friends, to stay busy, and to enjoy our separate college experiences. We did not rely on each other exclusively, and that allowed us to be happy and healthy in our lives separately.

In our case, we didn’t consider a relationship living in the same place to be an option in college. We each had our dreams, our aspirations, and our goals that we were actively working towards, and we put those things first and encouraged each other towards success.  In all honestly, I guess I could have transferred and gone to nursing school at ASU--but our value and decision to be independent in college and my love for my community is what kept me at Gonzaga. Love isn’t always convenient, and true love requires sacrifices.

I have a huge admiration and devotion to Mother Teresa, which inspires my passion for nursing but also my sacrificial love for my husband. My favorite quote of hers is:

“Love, to be real, must cost, it must hurt, 

it must empty us of self.” 

Love is sacrifice. This is what has kept me going more times than I could ever tell you when things were hard in my long-distance relationship--from quiet late night phone calls so we wouldn't wake our roommates, to heartfelt emails from other sides of the world, through lonely nights and missing each other so much that it hurt and we cried from the pain. We had to make a commitment to love one another through the toughest of situations, when the marathon of months apart felt like it would never end. 

We're no longer living apart and I can't even express how amazing it is to get to spend every day together! But now that we are married, there are still plenty of sacrifices to be made by us both. When we moved to Florida after our wedding, I knew that depending on this season, I would have to make some sacrifices when it came to my nursing career. It's still extremely difficult for me every day to be missing the fulfillment that I get from nursing. But I also find fulfillment and joy as a wife and as I prepare to be a mother. Our unity as a couple means that his joy is also my joy, and his dreams have become my dreams as well. I have faith that at some point down the road, our roles will be reversed and I will be able to pursue my passion and career as a nurse. I truly believe that our long-distance relationship prepared us for marriage differently that a more conventional relationship would have. There is something to be said about the strength and lessons that come from going through some of life's hardest situations together, and I'm grateful for those struggles and what we have learned from them!

To all you long-distance lovers out there reading this right now: 

"I have found the paradox,

that if you love until it hurts, 

there can be no more hurt, 

only more love."

- Mother Teresa

xoxo,

Jax