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1. Don't be in a long-distance relationship if you're not committed to making your relationship a permanent one. It's not worth it unless you're in it for the long haul. 2. As previously mentioned, don't be in a long-distance relationship indefinitely. Have a specific end date. 3. Communicate every day, even if it's just a text or an email saying "Thinking of you, no need for a reply, love you" or telling an anecdote about your day. Doesn't have to be a forced, awkward phone conversation or Skype session all the time, just keep them part of your everyday routine. 4. See each other in person as frequently as possible. 5. Any decisions you make about sex (whether opening up the sexual part of the relationship or committing to regular phone/Skype sex or deciding that sex is going to be off the table while you're apart) should be made with full self-knowledge after careful and honest examination of your needs and priorities. Source: my spouse and I were in a long-distance relationship for about a year and a half, all-told, before we were married. It wasn't great but we got through it.
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Nov 11, 2016 21:43
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 12:48 |
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Obviously nobody in their right mind thinks that someone in her early 20s should be making plans after three months of "dating" for her overseas internet girlfriend whom she met writing fanfiction to move to another country to be with her, but assuming that we're going to proceed from there... Canada's working holiday visa program is really excellent and it's incredibly easy to get a working holiday visa to the UK. My cousin did this last year, and I lived in the Netherlands for a year on a working holiday visa about ten years ago. It's not particularly expensive or complicated to do, and you can spend some time with your girlfriend while you have a summer job in the UK. I'm also not sure why regular visits aren't feasible while you're studying. You have like twice the free time in university as you do when you're working, and that's while school is in session. She could visit you and hang out with you when you're not in class, or you could visit her on one of the many extended breaks university students have. It's expensive to do, but there are lots of workarounds, like take a $60 bus trip from Vancouver (where I assume you are, since flights from Calgary or Edmonton are like $700) to Seattle and then get a $600 round-trip flight instead of paying $1200 round-trip. Most people don't stay with the person they were dating in their early 20s, and you have to know that everything else about your relationship makes it less likely, not more likely, that you'll succeed. But if you're really committed to making it work, you have to spend a lot more time together in person, and ideally that should happen before one of you uproots her life and moves permanently to a foreign country in several years.
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Nov 22, 2016 02:56
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She didn't ask if she should get into this relationship, she asked how to improve her chances of succeeding. I mean, of course I think this is a recipe for disaster but I also think the worst-case scenario is that she's sad because of it, so I don't feel a particularly strong obligation to talk her out of it. Part of your early 20s is learning to evaluate what is and isn't a good idea, and one of the ways you do that is by doing stuff that's a bad idea. I put that sentence in at the beginning so she can contextualize the advice I gave.
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Nov 22, 2016 22:07
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I guess my view is that you can't actually lose time out of your life. You can let time go by and not take full advantage of its opportunities, and you can regret that, but you still live that time. If in five years OP regrets spending time waiting for her internet girlfriend instead of going to karaoke or joining the volleyball team or attending meetings of the physics club or having casual sex at house parties or whatever, well, she'll be sad about it, and those opportunities will be gone, and she'll have learned something about herself and hopefully that will help her inform how she organizes her life in the future. Still sounds like the worst-case scenario is "feeling sad about stuff" to me. Or who knows, maybe she'll enjoy missing out on a bunch of stuff because it allows her to imagine herself as a self-sacrificing Victorian heroine in an epistolary novel and she'd enjoy that much more than playing Ultimate Frisbee. People are weird.
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Nov 23, 2016 02:27
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