The nature of the human psyche is always to try to push frontiers. Give man an inch, and he’ll (or she’ll) be soon looking for a yard, or so a popular adage goes.
When people first get into a long distance relationship, they are likely to try to avoid any conflicts, out of awareness of the fact that a long distance love relationship is sensitive and rather delicate, and attempts to push the borders too far could see it come crumbling. After all, long distance relationships are stripped of the physical intimacy component, the very component one or both of the partners in the relationship could have gotten into it for in the first place.
As people get more and more used to running their relationship on a long distance love relationship format, however, they get more and more used to it, their communication becomes more and more fluent and ‘natural’ - and soon or later, divergent views emerge often precipitating a conflict.
The sources of conflict in long distance relationships vary from serious ones like established suspicions of infidelity, and suspicions of financial impropriety to what can be considered petty ones – like where one partner feels that the other one is neglecting them, in spite of the best efforts on the part of the accused partner.
Proper communication, of course, remains the key to successful conflict resolution in a long distance relationship. Communication, by the way is not just talking and trying to get your point across. Communication is all about listening to what your partner has to say, trying to put yourself in their shoes, and trying to see things from their perspective. When an opposing party in a conflict realizes or gets the feeling that you are seeing things from their point of view, they are more like to find the motivation to see things from your point of view too, and this way, both of you can find a compromise position – and the conflict will have been resolved.
