I received my final mixtape in 2005. In those days, receiving a cassette already felt slightly quaint, if not yet anachronistic or performative.
Still, you could hand it over with some confidence that the recipient could find a way to play it, on a compact kitchen stereo or an exhumed walkman.
This romantic mixtape was assembled for me by a woman who lived three hours away from me, during the Golden Age of the Long-Distance Relationship. That is: the itinerant period when a middle-class twentysomething can bounce between addresses at home, university and whatever city offers the greatest professional opportunity thereafter.
I’ve long since lost track of the cassette’s whereabouts and I can scarcely remember the songs it comprised.
In a long-distance relationship, the tension between where you want to be and where you are becomes a constant intrusion
But what goes for a relationship often goes for a mixtape: your most vivid memories are of how it started (‘For Lovers’ by Wolfman ft Pete Doherty) and how it ended (Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Counting Down the Days’).
Imbruglia wrote that song about living in the UK while her husband was in her native Australia. Whatever your opinion of her craft, the record succeeds in encapsulating the sensation of your personal and professional life gradually being consumed by yearning.
In a long-distance relationship – whether romantic or platonic – the tension between where you want to be and where you are becomes a constant intrusion. It’s like a chyron running below your daily experience.
Having also endured a long-distance relationship that crossed several time zones, I could empathise with Imbruglia’s narrator. Things feel even more distant when you no longer share the same circadian rhythms.
In these situations it becomes impossible not to mentally tick off the days, as if fate might reward your attention to detail. Of course, this just makes the process even more interminable.
Commonplace yearning
Those feelings of yearning were a central part of my twenties. Like the awkward growing pains of puberty, they felt uncomfortable and unavoidable.
Then, one day, they were gone.
At some point, that feeling of longing will crest once again
In fact, when I encountered Imbruglia’s song years later, it brought home the extent to which I no longer experienced that kind of longing. A feeling that was pretty commonplace during one decade of my life had vanished altogether.
These days, my greatest loves are under the same roof as me: pandemic lockdowns have allowed me to spend more time with my wife and daughter than ever before.
But it also seems likely that, at some point in the future, that feeling of longing will crest once again.
I can vividly recall my mother’s anxiety during months of familial separation while I was studying abroad two decades ago – albeit in a culture underdoing profound and permanent upheaval.
One day, when my daughter starts to enjoy the freedom of adulthood, something similar will probably be true of me.
I already struggle with melancholic feelings when my daughter has gone to bed. Because I know that, for the remainder of the day, there’s no chance she’ll come wandering through the door with an urgent request for bathroom assistance, or a non-sequitur about the solar system.
One day, we won’t even share the same house. Then I’ll probably turn into my mother, counting down the days until I see my child again.
Plotting on the y axis
So this is how my life will go (and may go for my generation of educated, middle-class westerners): through your late teens and twenties, education, travel and the beginnings of a career can mean longer distances between family, friends and partners.
Then there’s the comfort of settling down. And then the roles are reversed in middle age. You watch and wait, overthinking and overreacting, in the same way as your parents, whom you once teased for having the composure of Chicken Little.
If I wanted to measure my longing on a graph – and after all, who wouldn’t – I could plot the span of my adult life on the x axis and the severity of my longing on the y axis. Right now, I appear to be in the trough: I’m sitting between past and future peaks of melancholic yearning.
I’m ambling through the plateau, largely pain-free, barely cognisant of the emotional discomfort that will return when I have (as Elizabeth Stone so memorably put it) my heart outside of my body all the time, walking around.
Maybe changes in technology will mean that the coming peak won’t be so steep. Maybe my daughter won’t decide to travel very far from me.
But I hope she does use her freedom to escape, to experience new places, and new people. Those personal bonds might even produce whatever the equivalent of a mixtape is, some 15 years from now.
Still, it looks like there are about 5,000 days left in this trough. Let’s not start counting them down just yet.
