A 13-hour flight and 9,724 kilometers separated SFU psychology researcher and honours student Brittany Lasanen from her partner Jakub Mscichowski while he resided in Taiwan in 2016 for seven months.

Lasanen and Mscichowski, who both will be separated again this summer, are two of the 4.4 million university students currently in a long-distance relationship.  

Lasanen, a psychology honours student, wondered whether long-distance relationships are doomed to fail or whether absence does make the heart grow fonder. She teamed up with psychology professor Rebecca Cobb to study couples in a long-distance relationship as part of her honours thesis.

Their goal is to understand why some couples go the distance while others don’t. They plan to develop tools that could one day help the two million couples in Canada who are currently in a long-distance relationship.

Read more...