Communication in a Long Distance Relationship

Stories abound of love relationships that were going on well till the partners had to be separated by distance – either for career, education, health or other valid ‘reasons’, after which the relationships are said to have started cooling off before gradually grinding to a break-up.
In almost all the stories of long distance relationships that didn’t work, it turns out that there was a communication problem between the partners which is what (in essence) brought about the death of the relationship. Faced with this kind of stories, many people who find themselves having to go on a long distance love relationship wonder how to handle the communication factor – lest their long distance relationship go the same way as others before it.
The key to successful communication in a long distance relationship, as many relationship experts aver, lies in the optimization of the available communication channels (and time) to an extent that the partners are able to communicate to the same extend that they would have been communicating if they were together (or to as much a degree of that as possible). This is not as hard an ideal as it first sounds. As it turns out, talking doesn’t always amount to communicating – especially in a love relationship setting. In any given day, the portion of speech between an average couple that can be counted as real communication geared towards enriching their relationship is a very small percentage of the total words spoken. Now it is this (real) communication geared towards the success of a relationship that a couple should work real hard to keep at the same level as they would have kept it if they were close together. For many couples, one good intimate e-mail combined with a quarter an hour of really friendly chat over the phone should do the trick – because luckily, this kind of communication tends to be focused towards building the relationship – unlike face to face communication which tends to be filled with lots of 'other issues' that add no real value to the relationship – with only a few elements that add real value to the relationships (things like affirmations of love) only occurring a few times in the conversation.