Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
It’s a line that we’ve all heard to comfort those who are separated from their loved ones for an extended period of time. This Valentine’s Day, one might grow bitter and cold seeing couples canoodling and pouring out affection while their significant other is away.

Whether it’s across the state or across the world, the “long distance” relationship is a term that fills love birds’ hearts with both dread and terror. Thoughts of cheating and separate lives begin to brew just at the mention, and this time of year only exasperates these ideas.
The only way to nurture thie crippled heart is to do the one thing that wins the heart of any individual: take some action. With a little bit of creativity and charisma, even the longest of distances can be bridged by a cleverly made care package.
Here are some options to help those of the lonely hearts club get through the holiday.

Captivating card

This is the cornerstone of any care package. These are best homemade, too, so dust off that arts and crafts bin and get cracking. With some glue, a clever poem or limerick and maybe some cute drawings of sunsets and roses, you will look like the best boyfriend or girlfriend around. Use this opportunity to pull no punches and let everything fly.
The only thing redder than the construction paper hearts glued to this card should be the person’s face reading it.

Stuffed animal

It’s the perfect touch to any package. Don’t just pick any animal like a bear with a heart, but choose something meaningful to avoid cliché. This gift not only serves as a cute reminder of your affection, but can also be a perfect cushion for any other items that you stash inside of your gift-wrapped box.

Candy – but hold the chocolate

This might seem quite weird, but just picture where this box is going. It is going to be thrown around in a factory for relabeling, then piled up in an overfilled, sweltering truck before being driven and tossed in front of someone’s door.
After all this packing, time, writing and shipping, the last thing you want is for your significant other to open a box filled with melted chocolate coating every single speck of you care package. Non-chocolate candy is a nice treat that will not liquefy and glue itself to your heartfelt mementos.

Flash photography

Get your mind out of the gutter, this is not the intention. Some photos of your dorm room or even your friends will do. The goal of photos is to give little snapshots of your life and what the person has missed.

This is a great tool to really capture where you are when you’re apart and really provide a nice visual that efforts such as Facebook messages and texts really miss. They also act as a perfect tangible resource for your boyfriend or girlfriend to hang up in his or her dorm room and mark your territory.

Caring clothes

The sense most tied to memory is that of smell. This might seem gross to put a t-shirt in a box and ship it over to your loved one for Valentine’s Day, but it might perhaps be the best gift that you can give them. When the person opens it and immediately smells your scent, it will trigger an unstoppable flood of memories and emotions. While you are losing a piece of clothing, it is a sacrifice worth making.

These might seem like very basic ideas that anyone could think of. Perhaps that’s true, but if you overlook a single minute detail and just mail a cardboard box filled with crushed roses covered in melted chocolate, you will ruin your Valentine’s Day and do more damage than if you didn’t send anything at all. You’ve got to think things through.
Being apart is a part of life, but bringing love together across miles of separation is a miracle anyone can make happen.

Jeff Mitchell can be reached at [email protected].