When I first started my bachelor, I worked three nights a week at a club in the city, generally from 8pm to about 4am. My partner worked from 6pm to about 3am five nights a week, and we spent our days sleeping and our nights off skipping into the sunset and making scrap books of our love and commitment.

Cut to one semester later, I worked from 3pm to 10pm five nights per week and had opposite days off to my beloved. Cut to one year later, I worked from 6am to 3pm on the days I didn’t have class. Cut to today, and our work life is finally synced again, and our relationship is built like a brick shithouse.

Make A Point To Go Outdoors When You’re Together

So, yeah, you should be venturing outside the lounge room regularly, but when you work so much and see each other so little, it is pretty tempting to snuggle on the couch with a pizza or lay in bed together until 2pm when you do get some time together.

It’s so important to do things as a couple to avoid feeling like a sex doll or a close flat mate, and to maintain a social, as well as romantic, relationship with your bum chum, and it’s hard to do that at home.

Financial and time restricting barriers can crop up, but going for a walk in the park is free, and no person celebrating their 50^th wedding anniversary will tell you relationships are effortless.

Call Each Other On Your Breaks

When I sat down to my lonely dinner of a fistful of raw puff pastry, my honeybee would be sitting down for his equally sad break at the bar. He’d call me, we’d debrief our days, I’d complain about Gemma at work, and we’d have a flirt and a giggle. I’d tell him I loved him, to be safe, and he’d tell me to check out whatever he’d tagged me in on Facebook.

It was kinda similar to a long-distance relationship, in that I never fucking saw him ever, but it maintained an actual relationship. Those calls were the break in the five days between kisses, and made us both feel loved and involved every day.

Try Not To Discuss Fight-Triggering Stuff When In Person

For a while, when we had our two-hour window of Being Together™, I would be able to have a solid bitch about laundry or how much fucking money he spent on 7Eleven pies. And then he could take the opportunity to ask why I had left a bucket of vomit in our room for three days and we’d yell at each other, make up and have sex. That’s not a whole relationship. Don’t do that.

Think Of The Bigger Picture

So yeah, it does suck. It fucking sucks so hard. But it won’t be forever. You’ll probably only work odd shifts in bars, call centres and cafes for a limited amount of years. You’ll graduate, spend a year trying to find a job you’re qualified for, find one, buy a white picket fence and scrap book the evenings away while you wonder if any relationship has ever been this sincere and loving. Your partner will get their big boy job and spent all their time rotating wallet photos of their beloved. Like smart man Anonymous said, “If you want to live together, you have to learn to live apart”.

You can do it. You both gotta eat, and the real world is terrible.

(Lead image: Going The Distance/New Line Cinema)