Relationships from far apart

In addition to creating opportunities to give and to receive support, as well as to feel validated and to have a sense of belonging, relationships typically involve affiliative touch. Affiliative touch promotes the release of the social-bonding hormone oxytocin and dampens cardiovascular and endocrine responses to stress (for recent, illustrative reviews, see Jablonski, 2020; Sharma et al., 2020; and Walker et al., 2017).

Affiliative touch likely would be scant or absent in a long-distance relationship.  Does such a relationship nonetheless offer benefits?

Beginning with the stressors faced by medical trainees and the commonness of their being geographically separated from a romantic partner, Guldner (2001) reviews challenges and benefits of maintaining long-distance relationships, as well as strategies for doing so [Goldsmith and Byers (2020) offer additional strategies]. Guldner highlights the reduction in stress that comes as a benefit of the emotional intimacy associated with any healthy romantic relationship. The author also mentions that college students in long-distance relationships tend to get more sleep and have more free time than their peers in more traditional relationships. The physiological toll of insufficient sleep -- from fatigue and mood impairment to cardiovascular and metabolic disease -- is gaining clarity (for example, see review by Grandner, 2020). Thus, although presenting challenges due to geographical separation, long-distance relationships carry some unexpected benefits. 

. . . . . . . .  these soft 

nights hold me like themselves aloft

and I lie without a lover.

Summer, 1909

~Ranier Maria Rilke (1975)