Long Distance Relationships
Geography is the antagonist: write the love that has to cross it every single day.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about long distance relationships: imagery, techniques, cliches to avoid, plus exercises and prompts in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
A long distance poem is a poem with a built-in antagonist, and the antagonist is the map. Everything the lovers do, every call, every letter, every countdown scrawled on a calendar, is an act of resistance against kilometres that do not care. This gives the theme natural drama. You are not writing about a feeling suspended in air; you are writing about a feeling that must be carried, scheduled, paid for and delivered, and the effort of carrying it is where the poetry lives.
Distance also changes what love is made of. Without shared rooms, the relationship becomes language: voices, messages, handwriting, the pause before someone answers. A long distance poem can therefore be a poem about words themselves, about how much weight a sentence can bear when it is the only thing two people can touch at the same time. Write the texture of that dependence, its tenderness and its exhaustion, and the theme opens wide.
Why poets return to it
Poets keep returning to distance because it makes love visible. Presence hides devotion inside routine; absence forces devotion to act, and action is what poems can show. There is also a large, quietly desperate readership for this theme, students, migrants, soldiers, night-shift partners, who search for poems that understand the arithmetic of time zones.
It is a rewarding contest theme too. Writory's monthly contest scores creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme, and a distance poem built on one precise ritual, the goodnight call, the airport pillar where you always wait, tends to score far better than a general lament about miles.
Where it comes from
Separation is one of poetry's oldest working conditions. The Tang poets Li Bai and Du Fu sent poems across China to absent friends, and classical Chinese verse made the shared moon its great consolation: two people far apart looking at the same light. Ovid wrote the Tristia as verse letters from exile on the Black Sea, love and longing posted toward Rome. John Donne, leaving for the continent, gave English poetry its most famous image of connected separation in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, two souls joined like the legs of a drawing compass.
Closer to our time, the courtship of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning happened largely on paper, hundreds of letters doing the work that rooms could not, and the wars of the twentieth century filled archives with verse written between trenches and kitchens. The tradition agrees on one thing: distance does not silence poets, it manufactures them.
The elements that carry it
- The shared sky, one moon, one storm front crossing both cities, is the classic bridge image; used precisely, it still works.
- Instruments of contact, envelopes, stamps, the blue glow of a phone at 2 a.m., a voice compressed by a bad connection, ground the theme in its real machinery.
- Thresholds of travel, airports, platforms, arrival boards, security queues, hold the theme's most charged minutes: reunion and departure.
- Time itself becomes imagery, clocks set to another zone, a calendar with days crossed out, the maths of 'it is already tomorrow where you are'.
- Long, stretched line lengths can mimic distance, while sudden short lines land like a message finally arriving.
Techniques that work
- Write in epistolary form: a poem shaped as a letter or an unsent message inherits centuries of tradition and instant intimacy.
- Anchor the poem in one ritual of contact, the Sunday call, the photo of every breakfast, and let that small repetition carry the whole ache.
- Use the present tense across two places at once: 'you are locking your door while I butter toast' makes separation simultaneous and vivid.
- Give an object proxy duties, a jumper that still smells of them, a mug they used, and let the object do the missing on the speaker's behalf.
- Include the unglamorous logistics, visa dates, fare prices, dying batteries; honest inconvenience is what separates a lived poem from a postcard.
Mistakes to avoid
- Rhyming 'apart' with 'heart'. The pairing is so worn it reads as automatic; if you rhyme, find stranger partners or use slant rhyme.
- Writing only sorrow. Distance also produces absurd comedy, frozen video calls, mistimed jokes, and one funny detail makes the sadness believable.
- Keeping the miles abstract. 'So far away' means nothing; name the number, the cities, the layover, and the distance becomes real enough to hurt.
- Ending on the reunion hug. It is the expected resolution; try ending mid-wait instead, on the arrivals board still blank, and trust the reader.
An exercise
Transcribe, from memory, the last ordinary message you sent someone far away. Write a poem that begins with that exact sentence and then reveals everything the sentence was not allowed to say.
A challenge
For seven days, write two lines each evening describing what someone distant might be doing at that exact moment. At the week's end, assemble the fourteen lines and cut them to the ten that ache most precisely.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem set during a video call that keeps freezing, where everything important is said in the gaps while the screen is stuck.
Before you submit
- The distance is concrete: real places, real time zones or real journeys appear in the poem.
- At least one ritual or instrument of contact carries the emotional weight.
- The poem includes some texture of inconvenience or comedy, not only longing.
- No line leans on 'miles apart but close at heart' or its relatives.
- The ending resists the easy reunion and lands somewhere truer.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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