r/Emotions

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My boyfriend (24 age) and I (25 age)have been long distance for all most a year because of our careers. We love each other and communicate well overall, but lately the emotional side of the distance has been really difficult.
I think the hardest part is that small relationship moments disappear — no casual hugs, dinners together, or simply existing in the same space. Arguments also feel worse over text because tone gets misunderstood easily.
We still make time for calls and online dates, but sometimes I feel emotionally exhausted from always missing someone instead of actually building a normal life together.
Sometimes I feel guilty for struggling because nothing is technically ‘wrong’ between us. But the distance creates this constant low-level sadness and frustration.
The hardest part is that feeling disconnected during stressful periods because we can’t just sit together and talk naturally.”
For people who’ve been through long distance relationships, how did you manage the emotional fatigue?”

I wanted to ask if anyone else feels this way.

I get attached very fast — not just in relationships, but to people, places, routines, work environments, even small things that become emotionally important to me.

For example, I have a colleague who will be leaving after a few months. We worked together, talked, laughed, discussed things regularly, but I never even considered them my “best friend” or anything extremely close. Still, the thought of them leaving genuinely affects me and makes me feel emotional.

It’s not only people either. I can get emotionally attached to work culture, familiar environments, routines, or things connected to certain memories.

Sometimes I wonder if this is normal emotional attachment, or if I just feel things too deeply compared to others.

Does anyone else experience this?

Emotional wisdom may is recognizing that no one possesses “emotional intelligence” as the perfected faculty our modern culture and pop psychology often imagines. The concept becomes misleading when ordinary emotional life is abstracted into an Idealized psychological achievement, as though empathy, self awareness, regulation, and relational understanding were some discrete, internal capacity to be possessed in measurable degrees like a technical skill. In everyday ordinary life, however, people already participate in shared emotional practices, like how they comfort the distressed, recognize grief, and navigate love, resentment, shame, reciprocity, loyalty, and conflict, often imperfectly, inconsistently, or under competing pressures. What is often described as a lack of emotional intelligence may instead reflect conflicting motives, different forms of life, ambitions, or alternative emotional priorities rather than an absence of emotional understanding and need for learning some skill.

The fantasy of the fully emotionally intelligent person, so highly self-aware, non-defensive, aspiring to Deanna Troi levels of empathy, and purified of inner conflict, mistakes ordinary, situated participation in emotional life for failure to reach an abstract ideal. Emotional life is not primarily a domain where people fail to apply a known rule correctly, but one in which people act from learned and evolving patterns of responsiveness that shape what feels natural, available, or even intelligible in the moment. These patterns are formed over time through one;s individual history, social environment, and broader cultural inheritance, and they constrain but do not eliminate variation in how people respond and even how much people can grow. 

So, to describe a political opponent, a gendered group, or even a spouse, sibling, child, or parent as “emotionally unintelligent” is often less a neutral statement of fact than a move within broader practices of persuasion, blame, shame, coercion, and/or interpersonal negotiation. Unlike stable attributes such as height, weight, or date of birth, emotional intelligence is not directly measurable in a context-free way; it is inferred from behavior against shifting expectations of communication, care, and reciprocity. As such, the label frequently operates within attempts to reshape conduct, expressing frustration, assigning responsibility, or pressuring change, rather than reporting an independent psychological property. Even when sincerely intended, “emotional intelligence” functions less as a detached description of a fact about persons than as part of the shared range of experiences and desired outcomes through which people interpret, evaluate, and try to influence one another’s emotional behavior.

Tl;dr “Emotional intelligence” is best understood not as a measurable inner faculty that some possess and others lack, but as a loose abstraction drawn from ordinary, already existing forms of human emotional participation and then refined into a tool used to judge and shame others into behaving differently, for better or worse. Differences in empathy and regulation are real, but they reflect an inherited and learned, constrained patterns of responsiveness rather than simple deficits of effort or awareness correctable trough learning or adopting sociopolitical driven behaviors. As a social species, there are not tens of millions of antisocial people roaming the plains, emotionally crippled and/or immature. Calling someone “emotionally unintelligent” is usually less a neutral psychological diagnosis than a socially embedded way of interpreting, judging, and trying to shape how others behave within shared emotional life. The people saying others are emotionally unintelligent are usually as emotionally unintelligent compared to the Ideal standard as those they are blaming. 

”Emotional intelligence” is an Ideal nobody truly attains, as such, the nearest approach to it is not possession, but the refusal to mistake one’s own emotional life for mastery or even competency of it. Where this Ideal is concerned, I am the most emotionally intelligent human alive, for I know one thing, and is of this emotionally ideal, I know nothing, while in practice, I am as emotionally competent as most people I have ever met, succeeding, failing, and practicing our shared emotional life. 

Taken as an Idealized standard, “Emotional intelligence” is something no one truly attains. On that view, the closest approach is not possession but the refusal to mistake one’s own emotional life for mastery of it. In this sense, I am “most emotionally intelligent” person I have ever met as I am the only person I know to recognize that, with respect to the Ideal itself, I know nothing. Yet in ordinary life I am no different from most others, neither uniquely competent nor deficient, but simply participating in a shared and imperfect emotional world of successes, failures, and ongoing negotiation.

21F. Lately, I’ve been feeling deeply lonely. I don’t just want a boyfriend for the sake of having one, I want a real emotional connection with someone.

I want the kind of relationship where two people can openly share their thoughts, emotions, fears, and dreams without feeling judged or misunderstood. A safe place where both people feel heard, protected, accepted, and genuinely loved.

But unfortunately, I live in a more traditional society where emotional connection often feels less important than expectations, appearances, or roles. And sometimes that makes me feel even more alone.