My heart went out to Russell Crowe, when the bad-boy superstar was arrested and charged with second-degree assault and fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon after attacking an employee at the Mercer Hotel in New York. As Crowe later explained to David Letterman, he had repeatedly tried and failed to call his wife in Australia. I'm not condoning the use of a phone as a weapon, of course, but long-distance relationships can be tough enough to make even the calmest person edgy, much less a hard-rocking gladiator with a temper.

When I heard about Crowe's rage, I'd just spent three months apart from my husband, Andy, in Tours, France, attending a language institute and living with an unconventional host couple in their fifties. (By "unconventional," I mean that they had matching red leather pants. He gardened in his Speedo. Their home had leopard- and zebra-print decor and dozens of stuffed—by a taxidermist—animals. I've seen her breasts. Have I said enough?)

My first reaction on the day I arrived, exactly six months after Andy and I were married, was not aggression but something akin to hysteria. Exhausted by 15 hours of travel, I actually cried in my coq au vin when my hosts, who had already revealed their penchant for public displays of affection, asked me how my husband felt about my leaving him for so long. Later that night, despair escalated into a tantrum to rival Crowe's when I discovered I had only one minute's worth of prepaid cell-phone time left.

It's a scenario many know all too well. Despite the teary goodbyes, lonely nights, flight delays, and outrageous phone bills, an estimated 14 million Americans are currently in LDRs, according to the Center for the Study of Long Distance Relationships. That number includes couples of all kinds, from those who fell for each other while living on opposite coasts to those who've been married for years but decided to live apart while she takes that plum international assignment or he goes back to school.

How do they do it? The simple answer is that, barring the occasional attack on a hotel clerk, long-distance relationships can work—and work well. Research suggests that they don't break up at any greater rate than traditional, geographically close ones. Plus, multiple studies have found that LDR couples' levels of relationship satisfaction, intimacy, trust, and commitment are identical to their geographically close counterparts. LDR couples might worry more about infidelity, but they don't actually cheat more.

LDRs are nothing new, of course. Military personnel, academics, truckers, salespeople, athletes, and entertainers have loved across the miles for years. But experts attribute the prevalence of LDRs today to a number of factors. One is that the working world looks a lot different, and requires different training, than in previous generations. "There are more women having careers, and there's more specialization these days," says Seetha Narayan, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Long-Distance Relationships. "Many couples invested a lot in their careers, and now they have to follow through. They usually think of it as temporary—this is for now, I'll put some time into building my résumé and expand my future options."

Second, the world is a smaller place. "Before, people met one another by proximity," explains Greg Guldner, PhD, director of the Center for the Study of Long Distance Relationships. "You married your classmates, you ran into people who lived in the same town. That's really changed now with the types of careers people are taking. There are many, many more conferences—this is a theme that comes up over and over again: People meet someone at conferences that are either national or international."

Technology is also increasing the number of people who are meeting at a distance. Consider the growing popularity of online dating services. People look in the four zip codes around them, and if that doesn't work, they expand their search. "Because of the isolation that is built into our society right now, people are more willing to take a risk with a long-distance relationship," Guldner says. Add it all up, and you've got a lot of people logging a lot of cell-phone minutes.

Unless, of course, it costs your significant other 31 cents a minute to call your international cell phone, in which case you must ask him to call you on a pay phone down the street. When you finally make it to said pay phone—no easy task when you consider that the phrase "yield to pedestrian" doesn't have much resonance with the average French driver—you then obsess over the nasty pay-phone receiver and how many people have breathed all over it or touched it with fingers that have been God-knows-where. In other words, my phone conversations with my husband were not exactly the breathless, romantic calls I'd imagined they'd be, the kind where you whisper sweet nothings into your lover's ear.

Instead, we spent three months communicating through emails, text messages, and, yes, quick phone calls, usually about the most prosaic of things. As it turns out, that's one of the surest ways to a successful LDR.

Here's why: When psychologists talk about intimacy, they're generally referring to two components. The first is the ability to verbalize fairly deep vulnerabilities—for instance, to say "Do you love me?" and "I miss you." The trickier, almost subconscious part is maintaining the feeling of being intermingled in your partner's life, a state the experts often refer to as "interrelatedness." Couples that are geographically close establish this by discussing the mundane details of daily life, whether it's the fact that you had to take a different route to work because of road construction, or that you have a 2 p.m. meeting with a new client, or that you had a turkey sandwich for lunch.

The fact that you had a turkey sandwich for lunch is so trivial that its shelf life is even shorter than that of the sandwich itself—if you don't talk to your partner on the day you ate it, you're probably not going to mention it. "The problem is when you get a couple that is very good at sharing the deep emotional things but doesn't know anything about each other's lives," says Guldner. "You ask them, 'What's going on with your partner today?' and they have no idea. This happens fairly frequently in long-distance relationships, especially in military ones, and it erodes a fundamental part of intimacy—people stop feeling like they're connected. You have to do things to try to create that interrelatedness."

But intimacy has its costs. The closer you are to someone, the more likely you are to miss them. "Missing" involves several different feelings and thoughts, says Ben Le, an assistant professor of psychology at Haverford College in Pennsylvania who studies romantic relationships. These include sexual desire and longing, thoughts about the future and what the partner is doing, and behavioral tendencies such as looking at pictures of your partner or talking to friends about him or her.

For me, there was a defining moment of missing my husband. It was after his first visit, a quick, four-day trip during which we went to several of the Loire Valley chateaux that surround Tours. At one chateau, as we descended a narrow spiral staircase, we both remarked—almost simultaneously—that the staircase sagged inward toward its central support beam. (Actually, I think we both said "Whoa.") Several days later, after Andy had returned to the States, I was walking down the stairs of my language school and was blindsided by an intense pang of missing him. It took me a few minutes to figure out why, but I realized that the steps tilted inward, just like the ones at the chateau. The sagging stairs had been only momentarily interesting when we'd seen them together. But days later, experiencing something similar while I was alone triggered a memory that made me miss Andy acutely.

Missing a loved one actually involves something much deeper than wanting to be around them. Whether you know it or not, your relationship is an important part of your self-concept; when your partner leaves, you might—at least initially—have to redefine your sense of self. This redefining takes many forms, Le says. For example, at the beginning of a relationship, as two people become closer, they shift their language and begin to use "we" statements where they once would have used "I" ones—for instance, "We slept in Saturday morning," or "That's our favorite restaurant." When couples are spending significant amounts of time apart, partners inevitably are using more "I" language, simply because they're alone more.