You need open communication and trust in a relationship. If you’re struggling to trust your partner, the best way to handle that is by having a conversation with them. However, when you wonder how to check loyalty in a long distance relationship, it’s scary to talk about it.
While there may be perfectly valid reasons to question your partner’s loyalty, this could also just be a sign that you two need to open up a conversation about your needs. You may get answers that you don’t want to hear or responses that hurt your relationship.
These 10 signs of loyalty in a long-term relationship can give you a better idea if you and your partner have the foundation for a healthy relationship.
Remember, as you read through these signs, that they won’t tell you for sure whether your partner is loyal or not. But, they will help you approach the conversation about loyalty with a clear idea of what you want and need in a relationship.
This post is all about how to check loyalty in long distance relationship.
CHECK LOYALTY IN LONG DISTANCE:
1. You feel like you are allowed to make mistakes
Long-distance relationships can feel disconnected as it is. When you don’t spend time in the same space as your partner, it can be challenging to gauge how comfortable you and your partner are around each other.
It’s normal to be scared of having tough conversations or opening up effective communication. Maybe you don’t to spend your only form of communication, whether it’s video calls or phone calls, complaining or asking for reassurance.
That’s completely understandable and it’s an issue that is unique to long-distance couples and couples who don’t live together. But, it’s still crucial to the health of your relationship that you feel comfortable expressing your needs and making mistakes.
Becoming a Better Partner
You need to have the chance to learn in your relationship and become a better partner. No one enters a relationship perfect and ready to meet every one of their partner’s needs. So, you should not expect that of you or your partner.
What you should expect is that you can open up a dialogue about any issues you notice, anything you want to apologize for, and anything you want to try getting better at. Maybe something isn’t working and you want to brainstorm with your partner about ways to improve it.
That’s okay and your partner should be open to that. It can be difficult to bring up mistakes or requests to your partner because it may feel like a personal attack.
However, the strongest relationships come with enough emotional support that you can help each other through the vulnerability of this conversation.
2. You feel like your emotional needs are being met
The idea of emotional needs is likely scary and vague to you. Maybe you’ve heard this term and never known how to apply it to yourself. Or maybe you’ve never heard it before at all. Most of the time, you only notice your emotional needs when as the feeling of comfort or discomfort.
While it can be difficult to pinpoint those needs, you can identify when you feel safe in a relationship and when negative feelings are coming up for you. For instance, you might video chat with your partner as you fall asleep and you feel safe, warm, and comfortable.
This would indicate that you value physical connection. On the other hand, if you felt angry when your partner was at work all day and came home to sleep right away without calling you, you may value quality time and reassurance.
Identifying Unmet Needs
Notice feelings of discomfort with your partner and consider the events that happened before and after. You want to ask yourself why you felt discomfort, unsafe, or angry. Then, you want to follow up by asking how you and your partner dealt with those negative feelings.
Ask yourself if you communicated your feelings to your partner and, if you did, how they responded. In the best case scenario, you communicated these feelings as needs like, “Can you call me for a few minutes so we can spend time together?”
To which they would have responded in the affirmative and those negative feelings would’ve gone away. In other words, you would’ve communicated your emotional needs and they would have met them because they care about you.
3. You and your partner find creative ways to increase your physical intimacy
When you’re in a long-distance relationship, you two likely struggle with physical intimacy. It’s normal and expected. But, that doesn’t mean you have to accept it.
Instead, you and your partner should be communicating about your physical connection to find ways that work for both of you. In most relationships, one partner values physical touch more than the other.
In these cases, the great way to figure out what works for you two is good communication. Check in with your partner about your physical intimacy. Ask them if they’re missing something in your relationship and if they have fun, creative ideas on how to change that.
The more creative you two are, the more fun your physical intimacy can be. You can’t cuddle with each other before you sleep or wrap your arms around each other on the couch.
But, just because your physical intimacy will look different than couples in the same home doesn’t mean it’s impossible. The best part about getting creative is that it will bring you two closer together. Your physical intimacy may increase by discussing fun ways of increasing it.
4. You notice your partner making thoughtful gestures
We all have lives and this is even more true when you and your partner are in long-distance love. It will require more effort and work from both of you to make the other person feel seen and loved.
This also means that you can’t expect yourself or your long-distance partner to constantly come up with thoughtful gestures. It’s the little things that count and make the biggest impact.
Maybe they remember to text you good night or they wish you good luck the morning before a major exam or project. The goal is to notice when they put effort and thought into their action for one reason and one reason only: they love you.
With that love comes the desire to make you feel seen and to make you feel valued. When no one else remembers the small details in your life, your partner will and they will remember how you feel.
The main difference between someone invested in your life and their relationship with you and someone who isn’t comes down to how much they care about your emotions.
Some men may struggle to show that they care because of social standards demanding men be emotionless and “tough.” So, keep that in mind as you approach this question.
However, it’s still worth asking yourself if your partner goes out of their way to show you that they’re thinking of you, especially since you have so much physical distance between you.
5. You share a common vision of the world
You can date someone who has a different view of the world. However, when their values are different from yours, that connection will become harder to maintain.
At first, the two of you may either not notice these differences or you might ignore them because you can afford to do that as a new couple.
However, as your close relationship continues and you both are in it for the long haul, you will start to notice how these value differences come between you two. So, ask yourself if the two of you share a common vision of the world.
This is especially important if you feel the need to question your partner’s loyalty. Even if they’re not cheating on you, they may be pulling away because they realize your differences are too big to fix.
In this case, the best course of action would likely be to, as always, start with open conversations about your values and this feeling of them pulling away.
However, when you enter these conversations, you have to prepare yourself to end the relationship if that seems best for both of you. Whether it’s true love or not, neither of you will be happy with someone who asks you to compromise on your values to stay with them.
The hardest part of this is that you may never actually ask them and, yet, it will only be a matter of time before you end up in this situation because you two think too differently.
6. You notice the moments when they put in a little extra effort
The two keys to noticing your partner putting in extra effort are that your partner is putting in that extra effort and that you notice it. It’s easy to forget that your perspective might skew what you notice.
If you’re looking for reasons to doubt how much loyalty your partner has shown recently, you will find them. Your partner isn’t perfect and they’ll make mistakes that hurt you just like you’ll make mistakes to hurt them.
However, your job is to keep these mistakes from defining their ability to be a good partner to you. Instead, you want them to feel comfortable about making mistakes as long as they take accountability and show a commitment to be a better partner to you.
So, start cultivating a positive mindset. Look for the reasons to be grateful and happy because, once you do, you will find it easier and easier to identify them. Our brains are miraculous and they learn what we want them to learn.
If we start focusing on the positives in our lives, our brains will strengthen those neural pathways so it becomes easier to do that. This also works in the reverse way, which is part of what makes this process so crucial to our positive mindset.
The more you focus on the negative aspects of your life, the more you train your brain to focus on them. So, you can choose the way your brain grows and make it easier on yourself in the long run by doing the work now.
7. You and your partner find time for each other despite a busy schedule
You’re only as busy as you make yourself. This might be controversial, but all it means is that you choose what deserves your time. If your partner deserves your time, you will give them your time.
However, if you think your work and friends deserve your time, you may find that you don’t have much time left for your partner. The question is: do you and your partner prioritize each other despite your busy schedules?
In a long-distance relationship, you have to prioritize each other to get any time with each other. You won’t happen to run into each other when you eat dinner or sleep in the same bed. So, when you don’t have the time for each other, it will be obvious.
Letting Your Partner Be Human
This is why, when you’re questioning if your partner is a loyal partner, you have to ask yourself if your partner makes time for you more often than they make excuses. Some days, they might not be the partner you deserve.
No one can always be the partner they should be. We’re human and we will have off-days when we’re working so hard to pay the bills that everything else comes second.
If your partner makes less money than you, it might be fair to ask if that plays a role in how much they work instead of spending time with you. Overall, it’s up to you to decide what’s acceptable and what’s not.
8. You spend time quality time with each other
Quality time means something a little bit different to everyone. It’s based on which needs our parents fulfilled when we were younger and which ones they didn’t. It’s based on the societal expectations we’ve been exposed to since we were born.
Our definitions of quality time look different, so we have to ask our partner what they define as quality time. You can’t ask yourself if you spend quality time with your partner without asking if you two define it differently.
For all you know, you may feel like you spend no quality time together because your version of quality time is far more intimate than your partner’s, who feels content with your current amount of quality time.
Defining Quality Time
Maybe you enjoy the calls you have and that’s enough for you. But, your partner feels increasingly disconnected from you, which is part of why you’re starting to question their loyalty.
Their response to this lack of quality time is to withdraw from the relationship and inadvertently punish you. This response is not healthy, though it does indicate that this issue can be solved with regular communication and honest communication.
You can discuss what you two need from a long-distance relationship that might be different from a typical relationship.
There’s no doubt that the long-distance relationship work you have to do is more than if you were in a typical relationship. But, that doesn’t make any less doable or any less worth it.
9. You include each other in your future plans
Listen to the way they talk about you and their future. It’s clear when someone already considers you a part of their life or when you consider someone a part of your life. It’ll be natural to include you in their future plans.
Instead of getting nervous and stressed out, they’ll find it easy to loop you in as their partner. They understand what this relationship means to them and they enjoy your strong bond enough to want it in the long term.
Unfortunately, it’s common for people to get scared of this level of certainty. People can get too scared to want to commit to someone for a long time, so they use different language altogether.
This type of person will likely want to avoid talking about the future because that, on its own, implies too much commitment. If your partner struggles to include you in their plans, it may have nothing to do with you and, often, it’s not intentional.
Developing a Mutual Understanding
They are just as scared as you, but that fear looks different. For you, the fear comes out in the form of asking whether your partner is loyal to you and your relationship. In a way, this line of questioning is also about a fear of commitment.
Your partner, on the other hand, demonstrates their fear by refusing to talk about the future. If this is the case, a good way of knowing for sure what is driving this fear is by asking them.
When you’re asking questions about your partner’s loyalty, you have to ask these questions in the context of compassion.
What comes off as cold and uncaring may be a terrified person who doesn’t know how to act in a healthy relationship. The only way to identify this, if that’s what’s happening, and act on it, is to talk to them and give them a chance to open up about your feelings.
10. You practice open communication with each other
There is no substitute for open communication in your romantic relationship. Questions like “Is my partner loyal?” come from a lack of communication that leaves space for fear and uncertainty.
It’s not an immediate red flag if the thought of bringing up a sensitive topic makes you nervous. It shows that you care about the other person’s feelings and indicates there may be a lack of safety in your relationship.
However, you can feel nervous about a conversation and still have a healthy relationship with your partner. The question is, when you two experience difficult times and live in different time zones, how do you cope with that?
Assessing Your Connection
Ask yourself if you maintain a strong connection by talking about the important things. Open communication can take practice and effort, which is why it’s a good idea to ask that question now.
Figure out if you two have weakened your emotional connection by not communicating as openly as you need to. Whether you’re in a long-distance relationship or not, you need to learn how to communicate with your partner openly.
But, when you’re in a long-distance relationship, your communication might be all you have. You have to work on building trust that has the level of open communication that it needs to keep you two comfortable and safe.
Long distance makes it easy to withdraw and avoid being honest. So, talk to your partner and figure out if that’s contributing to your questions about their loyalty.
