Finally, after close to two years, I was ready to come home. The ad agency where I worked had been acquired. The winter was oppressively cold and dank. (Fact: It rains as much in Paris as it does in London.) My smoking habit had gone from reluctant second-hand inhalation to sucking down several Rothman Rouges a day. I craved take-out salad bars and fro-yo and a decent neighborhood gym. And I missed A.

Fifteen years later, we returned to Paris with our three children. We stood on the Pont des Arts (which at the time was covered in locks left there by selfie-snapping couples) and told the kids the story they’d heard many times before, but now at least they could picture the scenery. Then we bought a lock at a nearby store (clearly supplying the touristic habit) and locked one on together.

Sebastian Modak: It's painful, frustrating, totally maddening... but you get to see the world.

The trouble with falling in love in April of your senior year in college is that one month later, everything changes. Suddenly, flung out of your protective four-year bubble, you’re an adult, and have to do adult things, like find gainful employment. That’s the situation that Maggie and I found ourselves in eight years ago, as we queued up to receive our diplomas on a football field in Philadelphia. She was heading to New Orleans; I was making the trek north to the icescape of Boston.

For two years, we kept things going, and it sure wasn’t easy—anyone who says otherwise of long-distance relationships is a liar or just unrealistically good at life. Watching my meager paycheck disappear between rent every month and flights to MSY every other month; the constant phone tag; the endless loop of play-by-play “How was your day?” phone calls, when both of us really just wanted to be able to go for a Sunday walk together. Much of it—perhaps most of it—really, really sucked.

But, with hindsight comes nuance, and I’ve come to realize that the long-distance relationship actually has some serious positives. I spent those years effectively having not one, but two hometowns. I came to love New Orleans, almost as much as I would if I’d been living there. I knew when to go where for live music (the Maple Leaf on Tuesday nights, anywhere Washboard Chaz is performing); I watched the Krewe du Vieux floats and understood inside jokes poking fun at city politicians. I joined a handful of Second Lines, and complained vocally about Bourbon Street just like a local.

Plus, being separated by over a thousand miles, we were able to make our own lives, find our own friends, develop our own interests—do all those typical early-20s things that are often stifled when you move somewhere new with someone you love, and have none of that pressure to get outside and be social. If we weren’t visiting each other, we’d meet somewhere new—let’s do Austin this month, Montreal the next.

Of course, we were both relieved when Maggie moved to the Boston area for graduate school—at least temporarily. When I left for a year in Botswana just six months after Maggie landed in Logan, ready to move into an apartment a bike ride away from me in Cambridge, it wasn’t ideal. And I wouldn’t recommend anyone go through back-to-back long-distance stints, especially when the latter one is about 6,000 miles farther away and made all the worse by shoddy Internet connections and the complete financial infeasibility of regular visits. But, hey, here we are now, not just in the same city, but the same damn apartment. So, take that naysayers. Long distance can work and, if the timing’s right, even make a relationship stronger.