Of all the people from my freshman year of college who had long distance relationships at the start of the year, none of them were still in those relationships at the end of the year. That’s an incredibly hard / bordering on impossible time to maintain a distant relationship while you’re going through such an exciting time in your life. I’d say set yourselves free.

Well, it depends. Will you be commuting home for the weekends or only visit a couple times a year?

In any case, leaving for uni is long term and without plans for moving together i don't think it can work.

It’s going to be hard. I’ve tried it once when I had been with someone for eight months, and it didn’t work. But, I’ll give you some of the things that did seem to help at least:

• If your relationship is physical yet, try finding ways to explore that over Zoom/FaceTime while away
• Do things together at the same time. Like watch the same tv show/movie at the exact same time and text back and forth during it to comment on what is going on. I think Apple has some feature like that that I haven’t tried, but you don’t need that, you just need to start the show at the same time.
• Same thing for books or video games.
• Communicate. You or your partner will need space at times. Let that be okay and let it be okay to communicate that need.

Good luck to you.