Closer Apart

I used to think relationship problems could be fixed by adding more—more communication, more effort, more tools. Then I got into my dream PhD program 2,000 miles away from my partner’s dream job, and learned that sometimes maintaining love requires just the opposite: the courage to let go.

The Impossible Choice

Devon and I met in our 20s. She was living in a Vajrayana center. I was living in a Zen monastery. We had a romantic courtship in the mountains, spent six months in Asia studying with Tibetan monks, and then returned to the United States ready to build a life together.

In quick succession, we bought a house in Ashland, Oregon—devon’s hometown. She landed her dream job teaching at the high school where she’d been valedictorian. I started my master’s program in counseling psychology. We were establishing ourselves, putting down roots. Devon spent two years building her curriculum from scratch, teaching all new classes, finally getting settled into the rhythm of the work she had always wanted to do.

But just as she was getting comfortable, I got into my dream PhD program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Two thousand miles away. I needed to go. She didn’t want to leave. Both needs were legitimate, both dreams mattered. And yet they were incompatible. And so we went into couples therapy.

For months, we sat with the impossible geometry of our situation. Either devon would have to leave her dream job, leave her hometown, leave the house we’d just bought. Or I would have to give up the PhD program I’d been working toward for years. Every session circled back to the same question: Who gives up their dream?

The difficulty wasn’t in the distance or the logistics. The difficulty was in the letting go. Devon’s identity was wrapped up in being a teacher in the town where she’d grown up. My identity was wrapped up in becoming a psychologist, in this particular program, with these particular mentors. We each knew, intellectually, that these were just identities—just stories we told ourselves about who we were. But knowing that didn’t make the prospect of releasing them simple.

What helped was recognizing that our relationship pointed us both toward something truer than those identities—a deeper calling in each of us that wasn’t tied to geography or job titles. Being together brought forward qualities we valued more than the narratives we’d built around ourselves: honesty, steadiness, wakefulness. That gave us the courage to loosen our grip.

What we eventually arrived at—slowly, painstakingly, through many long walks and careful conversations—was a solution that required both of us to let go. Devon would quit her job. We would leave Ashland. I would start my PhD program in Madison. And I would support her to pursue another dream she’d held just as deeply: two years of intensive meditation retreat. She would go into retreat for three months, come out for a month, go back in for six months, come out for a couple months, go in for another six months. 

Those two years became the doorway into her life’s work as a dharma teacher. As I stepped into academic training, she stepped into contemplative training—two parallel apprenticeships unfolding in different languages.

We each released something we believed defined us. And so we stepped into the unknown—curious, uncertain, and quietly hopeful.

The Paradox of Presence

Stepping into our new paths was one thing; living inside them was another. The first retreat was three months of complete silence. No letters. No phone calls. No contact.

That first year of my PhD program was packed full—clinic work, teaching responsibilities, 600 pages of reading every week, papers to write. Yet anytime I had a quiet moment, I would wonder: What is devon doing right now?

And I knew the answer. She was either sitting or she was walking.

That was it. Sitting or walking.

I’d be crossing campus in the Wisconsin winter, backpack heavy with books. And I’d feel her sitting. I’d be at my desk in the evening, surrounded by research articles, and I’d sense the quality of her practice—the depth, the stillness, the way she was meeting her own mind with such fierce tenderness. Sometimes it felt as if her silence stretched across the miles and settled around me, too, a quiet I could lean into when everything in my own life felt too loud. In letting go of my need for her presence in my life, she became an even deeper presence in my life.

This is the paradox at the heart of nonattachment: that releasing our grip on what we love can actually deepen our connection to it. Not despite the distance but because of the space created by letting go.

When devon emerged from that first three-month retreat, we were closer than ever. Not in spite of the separation but because we’d both released the need to control how our relationship should look, who we should be, what supporting each other had to mean. We started practicing a different kind of support: listening instead of fixing, asking better questions instead of offering quick reassurance, letting the other have their experience without collapsing into it. The relationship felt less like a project to manage and more like a field we could meet in—spacious, steady, and surprisingly simple.

The Paramis of Release

What we discovered in that experiment became one of the central lessons of our teaching life—that what looks like loss on the surface can, in truth, be the path of love itself.

In Buddhist psychology, these moments of letting go aren’t failures of willpower—they’re acts of mastery. The perfections of the heart (Pali: paramis) describe the inner strengths that make transformation possible.

It takes wisdom (Pali: panna) to see clearly what’s causing suffering. In our couples therapy sessions, wisdom looked like finally admitting that our competing dreams weren’t the problem—our clinging to fixed ideas about who we were supposed to be was the problem. Wisdom recognized that what once nourished us (devon’s teaching career, my need for her daily support) had become a cage—not because either was wrong but because everything changes. Roles that fit beautifully for a time can start to pinch when life moves on. Impermanence was doing what it always does: asking us to loosen our grip.

Love becomes less like possession and more like participation in an ever-changing dance between holding and releasing.

It takes generosity (Pali: dana)—not just of money or time but of identity itself or the willingness to release your fixed idea of who you are, or who your partner should be. Devon’s generosity wasn’t just in leaving her job; it was in releasing her identity as “the teacher who came home.” My generosity wasn’t just in supporting her retreats; it was in releasing my need for her to show up in my life the way I’d always imagined a partner should.

And it takes equanimity (Pali: upekkha) to stay balanced as old forms fall away, to keep your heart steady while the ground of “how it’s always been” dissolves beneath your feet. Over those two years, equanimity meant trusting that our connection could survive and even deepen through the uncertainty. It meant not panicking when the old structures fell away. It meant believing that love doesn’t need our micromanagement to survive.

Together, these qualities point toward what the Buddha calls nonattachment. Not cold detachment or indifference but a spaciousness that allows love to move and breathe.

Nonattachment Is Not Indifference

When I tell this story at retreats, someone often asks: “But didn’t you miss her? Didn’t it hurt?”

Of course I missed her. But the missing wasn’t suffering. The missing was actually a form of connection—a way of feeling how much I loved her, how much her practice mattered, how much I trusted what we were doing.

It took time to see it that way. At first the missing felt sharp, like something was being taken away. But the more I stayed with it—actually felt it in my body instead of fighting it—the more it softened. The ache turned into a kind of warmth, a reminder of our shared commitment. Instead of trying to fill the space between us, I let myself feel it. And in that space, something steady began to grow.

Nonattachment doesn’t mean you stop caring. It means you stop confusing love with control.

Before therapy, we were each insisting on a particular outcome. Devon needed to stay in Ashland. I needed to go to Madison. We needed each other to show up in specific ways. The relationship felt tight, airless.

After we let go, there was room to breathe. Room for both dreams. Room for the relationship to take a shape we’d never imagined but that worked better than anything we’d planned.

This is what nonattachment offers: not less love but a love with more room to breathe.

The Practice of Subtraction

If your relationship feels brittle, try this experiment. Instead of asking, What should we add?, ask, What can we release?

Maybe it’s a chronic score-keeping habit. Maybe it’s a self-sacrificing role you’ve outgrown. Maybe it’s a shared fantasy of the life you should be living that has nothing to do with the life you actually want. For one of my students, it was the way she always agreed to weekend plans she secretly dreaded, terrified of disappointing her partner. For another, it was the unspoken rule that he would handle all the emotional heavy lifting in the relationship. And for so many people it’s the quiet expectation that a partner should intuit their needs without ever having to say them out loud.

Notice what contracts in your body when you think about letting it go. That contraction is the edge of your practice. That’s where devon and I lived for months in couples therapy—in that space of contraction, that fear of releasing what felt essential.

Then breathe. Feel your feet on the ground. The paramis aren’t abstract ideals—they’re embodied states. They show up in your actual body: the loosening in your chest when you stop insisting on being right, the softening in your shoulders when you let yourself listen, the steadiness in your belly when you stop bracing against uncertainty. Wisdom recognizes the clinging. Generosity opens the hand. Equanimity steadies the heart.

From this place, love becomes less like possession and more like participation in an ever-changing dance between holding and releasing.

Devon and I still fall into our own patterns of clinging. We still have moments when we want to control how the other shows up, when we grip too tightly to our ideas about how things should be. But we’ve learned that the suffering isn’t in the distance or the difference or the difficulty of our circumstances. The suffering is in the grasping.

In the end, the work of relationship is the work of awakening: trusting what remains when grasping falls away. I learned this walking around the Madison campus in winter, knowing devon was sitting in silence half a world away, and discovering a closeness that didn’t depend on proximity.