The Greatest Love Story of All Time

what long-distance friendship taught me about love

In my mid-twenties, I went on a cross country road trip I never came home from. I didn't think twice about it either. I just started driving, unaware of the distance I was creating. Nothing could ever separate me from the people I loved, I thought. Not even the whole damn country.

How could it?

I met Becky when I was nine years old. We only became friends after her mom insisted she invite me to her birthday party in the fourth grade. I was the new girl in school, but receiving that invitation made me feel like I belonged.

In college, we met Kierstyn and Rachel. The four of us still refer to each other as "7106," a nod to the number on our freshman dorm. The following year, I met Erin. We got paired as “big and little” in sorority, but over the years, our relationship grew into something much deeper.

The five us went to class, got waitressing jobs, and spent our free time taking road trips down the Sonoma coast, having picnics on Mt. Tamalpais and climbing rocks at Bodega Bay. We went to the Santa Rosa mall and purchased “going out” tops at Forever 21, raged until all hours of the night, and spent countless Sunday mornings sipping Starbucks out of little green straws, wildly hungover, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, sometimes both. On occasion, I’d convince them to go to Shari’s on Rohnert Park Expressway to order pie shakes and play hearts at 2 in the morning.

Then they got boyfriends. One by one, they fell into love. And our lives would never be the same.

I’m doomed, I thought. From that point on, I was the third wheel, or the fifth wheel, or the seventh wheel, depending on which day you asked me. And these weren't just any boyfriends either, these were the kinds of boyfriends you marry.

I like to think I had a good attitude about the whole thing. I didn't let myself miss out on the fun just because I didn't have a partner to share it with. Eventually though, I grew tired of waiting. I felt like I had given it a good run, tried my best, and now it was time to move on from the Bay Area. I was ready to meet my person.

So, I left.

When I arrived to Boston, it was Autumn, and I loved it so much I decided to live there permanently. I hadn’t met anyone yet, but I was hopeful. That spring, I returned to California for the first time after five months away, excited to share my newfound love for the place I called home.

My friends and I sat around the dinner table, sipped white wine and ate homemade sushi rolls. As I stared into their eyes, it hit me. They would have moments that belonged only to them, and memories I would not be a part of. There would be birthday parties, picnics, and gatherings I would not be able to attend. No drop-ins or spontaneous day trips would happen at the drop of a hat. As long as I lived on the other end of the country, our time together would be highly planned, highly intentional, and meticulously thought out.

Regularly seeing each other would not be easy, and that was the price I'd pay for leaving.

I wish I could say it felt worth the cost. But in my first year away, I didn’t do a good job at maintaining my friendships. I went weeks, sometimes months, without speaking to them.

"Sometimes, it feels like you just don't care,” one of them told me.

Another said, “I feel like you have no consideration for what's going on in my life.”

They were right.

I wasn't paying enough attention to the big things that were happening in their lives. I missed Becky's graduation day. I didn't acknowledge Kierstyn's achievement of getting her masters. I had no idea what was going on in Rachel's life because I never bothered to ask her. I got swept up in my own selfishness of that year, focused only on me and the life I was building in Boston, that I had failed to see how badly I was neglecting my friendships until I was confronted by the possibility of losing them.

I knew something needed to change and that I was only focusing on what was right in front of me.

Friendship used to come so naturally because it was literally right in front of me. I met people at school, at work, at youth group—community was embedded into the structure of my everyday life. Then, it wasn’t. My friendships became much harder to access. It was hard to nurture something that feels so distant and far away. Yet I realized that this didn’t matter. I had to make the time, extend the effort, and invest my energy into my friendships if I wanted to keep them.

And I knew for certain I wanted to keep them.

The reason why became more clear after meeting my fiancé, Trevor. Meeting him was like taking a giant gulp of fresh air; it was life-giving and intoxicating. He was the man I had always dreamed of meeting: safe, steady, always on time, like the ticking of a clock or the first day of Spring when it finally comes.

This was it, I thought.

Yet no matter how wonderful our relationship was, or how much joy and happiness he brought into my life, I began to understand that romance would never satisfy, compete with, or fill me up in the same way my female friendships had. He would never love me the way they loved me. He wasn’t supposed to. That was my lesson.

I would do whatever it took to keep my friendships close. Every time I took the 6-hour flight across the country, landed in San Francisco, and savored those precious, all-too-short weekends together, I knew I had struck gold and I would spend the rest of my life working to love them, aiming to do better, striving to be there and keeping us together.

It took me leaving to understand this. It took me falling in love to realize that love had been there all along. It was right in front of me. They had loved me first.

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