Two days ago, I drove my fiancé to Heathrow.She had been with me for two months - the culmination of fifteen months not with me. All three of the longest-lasting and most serious relationships in my life have involved long distances. It's not because I enjoy it. I'm not a sucker for punishment and I'm no masochist.

Long distance is pain, though. I learned how it feels when I was seventeen, and I met a girl online who was going to be my "only one". At least then, there was"only" a "one" hour drive between us. Years later, I should have known better than to fall in love with a girl working abroad. When she lost her job to a corporate restructuring programme, I lost my lover to a three thousand mile chasm crossable only by air. We messaged across the chasm - a lot - but air sent across the air is doubly empty.

Perhaps I should have thought twice before meeting another girl when I myself decided to go over(many)seas for work.Inevitably, I had to return home. Not, though, before I had proposed to the poor creature and condemned us both to a life lived on the airwaves, broadcasting to an audience of one. One who's already heard all your tunes, seen all your bits and just wants to reach out and touch your face not made for radio. It's a strange half-loneliness of constant company battling a pipette drip of longing. Most of the time, their airy presence is enough to keep the worst of the longing at bay, but sometimes that drip-drip-drip fills up the aching chasm of x-thousand miles in your chest and no amount of video calls will close the gap.

Four years ago, I would have told you to pack up your feelings into their luggage and forget about trying to make long distance work. I thought it spelt ruin for relationships, especially young ones. I thought it a death knell without reprieve: something you and your partner would promise each other, but only long enough for the distance itself to become an adequate excuse to break up.

Four years later, I'm not here to hand out tips or tell you that it gets easier. It doesn't. What I am here to impart in this pink-and-positive context is that distance does not have to be the thousand-mile coffin for your relationship that you might have thought it to be. It tore an insurmountable rift between two loves and I, but three years since leaving my fiancé in her home country, she and I are as firmly stuck together as internet communication feels detached.

The important point I want to stress is that there is no difference between the day-to-day functioning of this long-distance relationship and the preceding two. It's airy and frustrating:

"I miss you so much."

"I miss you so much, too."

It's that same mixed spice bag of being told you're loved and feeling alone, blowing kisses on camera and suffering with longing. I cried when she left me to cross the walkway bridging car park lifts with the Terminal 2 building. Not because I missed her immediately - life isn'tBridget Jones - but because I knew that before long, I would. We would be missing each other and living life inside that chasm.

But as a couple, we're better than ever. It's not like we do anything particularly different or anything innovative. We haven't taken up online games or bought a bumper book of Questions to Fix Your Long-DistanceLove. There is nothing you can do. Long distance *is *pain. We're torturing ourselves, but until the shared life that we are busily building brings us physically together, long distance continues to be the only walkway capable of connecting our departures with our arrivals.

If he or she or they are worth it - if what you share is worth it - then all you can do is bridge the thousands of miles torn into your heart one flight, one visa application or one lonely drive up the motorway at a time.

Long distance *is *pain, though. Drip, drip, drip.

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