My husband and I have had to do long distance a few times since our marriage due to my active duty status in the military. We lived together for about 3 years before our long distance periods began. First was 2 months of basic training, then 4 months of A-School on the other side of the country. After that was about 1.5 years when I was stationed in Detroit and he found a job back home in New Jersey. We've made it through all of that. Now we're facing a possible 4-5 year separation because my dream MPhil/PhD Economics program is at Oxford. His focus is on logging the years at his job to get vested in his pension program. It's hard to do long distance, and that wouldn't be any different for school. I will be honest that the gradually increasing nature of my and my husband's time apart is what makes a school separation something we can consider without too much anxiety. We've been sort of worked up to it.
It's important for you each to have a social network outside of each other. Time that you now spend together will feel empty if you don't develop other people to spend some of that time with. I didn't have that kind of network in Detroit when my husband left for NJ and it made that 1.5 years horrible compared to the training environments where my class was automatically my social network. By the end of my time there, I had started going out with a few other women from work, and it completely changed the feeling of the separation on my end. It wasn't fun, but it was tolerable.
Try to both have common experiences despite separation. See the same movie so you can talk about it later, or read a book together. My husband won our Infinite Jest challenge, but before I had to throw in the towel, we were trading opinions on the book, offering theories back and forth as to what the heck was going on. That felt closer than sitting around saying "I miss you," over and over. We were also both involved with a couple friends in an attempt to write a web series (video production is a hobby for both of us). We ran the sessions via Skype because I was in Michigan, my husband was in central New Jersey, and our friends were in Queens, NYC. We kept our documents in Google Docs that we all had access to. Seeing not just my husband but my friends every week that way was incredibly helpful.
Having an ending in sight is huge. In Detroit "I just have to make it [insert appropriate number here] more months," became my mantra. It was the light at the end of the tunnel. By the time I leave the CG and finish a PhD, my husband will be vested in his pension system and we can reevaluate where I look for work or where he is willing to move to at that point. I'm confident we can survive 4-5 years of separation by making it a point to visit each other once per year for a couple weeks. He is near his large family here in NJ. I will have a class to integrate into at school. That gives us social networks. We're both voracious readers, so we'll keep that up. And if I'm in the UK I'll have incentive to go out and explore in part so we can spend his visits to me doing fun things.
I hope my experience so far in the military is helpful to those of you facing a separation due to school location. It is difficult, but it is doable.