So he tells you he’s going out to a party, and suddenly it’s like he punched you in the stomach. You want to say something like, “No, don’t go …stay here and talk to me.” Once it’s into the wee hours of the morning the green-eyed monster makes his attack. You begin to become over-wrought with jealousy. You begin to wonder what he’s doing, who he’s with, and why he isn’t back just yet.

It’s completely normal. As Dr. James Koval, a professor at California State University and a licensed marriage and family therapist, says of long-distance relationships, “Absence makes room for only ignorance and fantasy. The space distance creates can be filled in many ways …as they [couples] create fantasies about the relationship, or horrors of what they think is happening, or the jealousies of themselves or their partner.”

Rachael Bolen, a junior at The College of New Jersey, admits that the green-eyed monster has made its attack several times throughout her year and a half long-distance relationship with her boyfriend, Chris Moriarty. Sometimes she just gets jealous when he tells her he’s going to a party or out to the bar. “It sucks,” she said. “I definitely get jealous at times.”

“It’s hard,” said Bolen, “There’s been nights where I’ve been like, ‘Oh my God, where is he?’ but, you know, he always comes home. You just really have to trust him.”

Though she trusts Moriarty, Bolen admits she still occasionally gets jealous. It’s just something to be expected. He is at a different school. He is essentially having all these new experiences without her. He is meeting all kinds of new people. Who wouldn’t be slightly jealous at times? Bolen says the key to relieving jealousy is simply reassurance.

She elaborated, “Say I went to dinner with my friend, Tom, then I’ll tell Chris that I really wish I could have had dinner with him instead. Or I’ll be like, you know it wasn’t as fun as when we went to dinner at the beach or something like that.”