At a Healthy Distance
Physical space can transform your relationships: is this good?
Occasionally, I call my dad to check how he is doing. (Also, he might ask me to help him pay his bills online or aid him with other internet-relate tasks, and in turn, I might ask him for a favor too, like sending me my birth certificate or a book I left at home). These calls are nice: I get to hear what he is working on, how his job is going, about his farm and about our relatives in Mexico and California. He asks me how my life is going and wishes me luck.
After I end the call, however, I can’t help but recall how when I lived with him I often argued with him and felt profoundly guilty about staying at home while I figured out if I was going to go to grad school or attempt getting a job elsewhere. My mom and him reassured me frequently that they were happy to have me there, but I still felt uncomfortable living under their terms as an adult sometimes.
Sometimes, being away from someone — a family member, a friend, a significant other — can transform the ways in which you interact with them. When I talk to my parents on the phone, they don’t usually confront me on what they consider to be mistakes I am making as a young adult. When I visit for the holidays, on the other hand, they tell me I must be more careful with my finances, I must learn to cook healthy food, and sometimes suggest it’s about time I get a partner. All of this is true, of course, but I am trying to decipher why my physical presence makes this advice easier to express for them.
My hypothesis is that, whether we want it or not, the incompleteness of long-distance communication (that is, the inability to fully perceive body language, movement, or even touch) makes people wary of revealing the whole extent of their thoughts. This, of course, might not be the case for everybody — definitely not, for example, for long-time partners who for some reason just moved away from each other temporarily — but I have noticed that my friends and family are ‘nicer’ if they are interacting with me from afar.
I have used quotation marks with the word ‘nicer’ because I am not sure I enjoy perceiving someone’s demeanor only partially. I want people to be able to express how they truly feel towards me no matter if they are 10 feet or 700 miles away from me. In a world where it is so easy to cut off contact with others, however, maybe people are trying not to burn any bridges.
Sometimes I wish I was not so distant from so many of my friends and relatives. Ultimately, distance erodes relationships. It is not my adulthood that marked a new stage in my relationship with my siblings and parents, with my friends abroad and in South Carolina — rather, it’s the hundreds of miles, the Appalachian mountains and highways between us, that are slowly transforming once deep friendships into casual, cordial encounters.
