We Loved Each Other on Wi-Fi

Love from far away doesn’t arrive in grand gestures. It shows up in tiny vibrations on your nightstand at 2:14 a.m. when your phone lights up and you already know who it is before you look. It feels less like romance and more like muscle memory.

Some days, it was easy.

We’d laugh on FaceTime about nothing. About the way his hair never listened to him. About how I always forgot where I put my keys, even though he had never seen my apartment in real life. There’s something oddly intimate about being known in fragments. He knew my voice when I was tired. I knew the exact pause he made before saying something serious. We learned each other in pieces, like assembling a person from clues.

Other days, it felt unbearable.

Not dramatic-unbearable. Quietly unbearable. The kind that settles into your chest while you’re standing in line at the grocery store and you suddenly realize no one is going to text you to ask what you’re making for dinner. The kind that makes ordinary moments feel lonelier than big, obvious absences ever could.

People assume distance is the hard part.

But distance is just geography. The real weight comes from timing. From mismatched energy. From loving someone who exists in a different rhythm of life. I was waking up when he was ending his day. We were always arriving and leaving at the wrong moments, like two people missing each other in a revolving door.

We tried to make it feel normal.

We pretended the screen wasn’t there. We said things like “Come sit with me” as if proximity could be summoned through Wi-Fi. Sometimes it almost worked. Sometimes I’d reach for my coffee and forget, for half a second, that he couldn’t do the same.

The truth is, long-distance love amplifies everything.

Affection feels louder. Silence feels heavier. Small misunderstandings turn into long conversations because there’s nowhere else to put them. You can’t soften tension with touch. You can’t fix a bad day with presence. You have words. And sometimes words are enough. Sometimes they are painfully not.

I became very good at waiting.

Waiting for replies. Waiting for plans to solidify. Waiting for the future to stop being a concept and become a place we could actually stand in together. I told myself that patience was a virtue. I didn’t always admit that sometimes patience felt like putting my life on hold for a love that existed in another time zone.

There’s a specific loneliness to being loved from afar.

You are chosen, but you are alone. You have someone, but you still go to bed by yourself. You are in a relationship, but you move through your days as a singular person. It’s a strange duality. You learn to hold two truths at once: I am loved and I am lonely.

Eventually, the question changes.

It stops being “Do we love each other?” and becomes “Is this the shape we want our lives to take?” Love can survive distance. Life, however, demands logistics. It asks for shared space, shared mornings, shared boredom. It wants proof in the form of presence.

Ours never quite crossed that bridge.

I don’t think of it as a failure.

I think of it as a season of becoming. I learned how to say what I feel instead of assuming it would be understood. I learned that emotional closeness without physical closeness can be real, and also incomplete. I learned that wanting someone doesn’t always mean wanting the life required to keep them.

Sometimes I still catch myself checking my phone in quiet moments. Not for him exactly. For the version of me that believed love could be sustained by intention alone. She was hopeful. She was earnest. She wasn’t wrong. She just didn’t yet know how much love asks for when it wants to stay.