A Letter on Love, Without Fragility
My Dearest Friend,
Experience hasn’t made separation easier.
It has made loving steadier.
In the early years, distance made love feel fragile—like a small flame cupped carefully between our hands, bright and eager and in need of tending. Every absence arrived with questions I did not yet know how to quiet. Would we speak often enough? Stay connected deeply enough? Be enough for one another across the stretch of days and miles?
Now, love no longer carries that tremor of fear. Whether we are side by side or separated by schedules or miles, I no longer measure our connection by constant closeness or perfect communication. Silence does not alarm me. Distance does not threaten me. I trust him. I trust us.
This is what love looks like now: trusted, comforting, comfortable.
The Reality
That does not mean the harder parts dissolve.
I have lived this in different seasons—years when separation meant months at a time, and seasons like this one, shaped more by early mornings, late nights, and days that begin and end without overlap. The outline changes, but the weight has a familiar contour.
Even when absence is only occasional, there are stretches when I am functionally alone in the work of our life—holding the logistics, the parenting, the decisions—without a partner there to exchange the load or simply share the quiet inside of it. There are evenings when I would give anything for another adult to take over for ten minutes so I might breathe, or cook without children underfoot, or sit at the end of a long day beside someone who understands the exhaustion without requiring it explained.
Loneliness still visits—not because I spend all my days alone, but because I miss the particular companionship of the one who knows me best. Whether absence is measured in months or in mismatched schedules, the ache is recognizable. Love is present. Proximity is not always.
I joke about star-fishing across the bed when he is gone, about claiming all the blankets for myself. Yet the truth is quieter. After years of sharing breath and warmth and the unspoken comfort of another body nearby, the empty space is unmistakable. Even in competence, even in steadiness, I feel the outline of where he should be.
The Shift
What has changed is not the existence of loneliness, but the posture of love.
Once, it felt like that young flame—brilliant and exhilarating, but dependent on constant tending. Distance made that vulnerability terrifying. Silence felt like neglect. Missed calls felt like small fractures. Each separation carried the subtle fear that if we did not actively feed the connection, it might diminish.
Now, love resembles embers—steady, enduring, quietly radiant. It does not flare with every gust, nor does it dim at the first sign of stillness. Years of shared life—joy and sorrow, birth and exhaustion, stress and tenderness—have deepened it. We have seen one another at our weakest and our most unguarded. We have stood together in moments that stripped us bare. And through all of it, we remained.
Because of that, love no longer feels endangered by the quiet. I can acknowledge loneliness without granting it authority. I can let silence rest without interrogating it. Love does not require proof at every turn. It abides.
The Lesson
Getting used to this is not the same as liking it.
Experience does not erase the strain of time apart, nor does it lighten the practical weight of carrying more on one’s own. What it does is alter the character of love within it. Love becomes less fragile. Less reactive. Less dependent upon constant reassurance.
Separation does not become easier with experience.
Love does.
It becomes certain.
To the Spouse Learning to Live With Distance
If you find yourself in the early years of this—when every silence feels charged and every absence feels like a test—know that your loneliness does not signal failure. It does not mean your love is lacking. It means you are human, and distance is not a natural state for two people who have chosen one another.
You are allowed to dislike this part. You are allowed to feel weary of carrying more, of closing the day alone, of sleeping beside an empty space. None of that contradicts devotion.
Experience may not make it easier. But, in time, it may make it steadier. One day you may notice that the sharpest fear has quietly departed—the fear that love itself will not endure the stretch.
And when that fear is gone, you will discover that love is no longer something you are trying to protect.
It is something you are simply living.
