Long distance relationship becomes more common these days. Some couples got to know each other in the same city, but they were forced to live miles apart due to various reasons such as job relocation, study abroad and etc.
Although we can talk to each other every day by phone or skype, it is still different from seeing each other in person and being able to hold hands.
I have seen a lot of couples get married after years of long distance relationship. However, I have also seen couples who couldn’t make long distance relationship work and broke up eventually. There are a few common problems:
1. Fear Of Being Cheated On
“I am worried that he’ll fall for another girl!” Or “I am scared that she’ll cheat on me, and I can’t stop it!”
It is totally normal to feel this way when you and your boyfriend/girlfriend are staying far away from each other. Just like the old saying “out of sight, out of mind”.
It is not enough to keep the spark alive in a relationship by just calling/emailing each other. Each party in the long distance relationship has his/her own social circle. Most of the time, they hang out with their respective friends and friend’s friends and colleagues without their girlfriend/boyfriend around.
This increases the chances of your boyfriend / girlfriend falling for other people. This is also one of the top reasons why long distance relationships fail.
There are a few ways to reduce the possibility of infidelity.
Let your boyfriend/girlfriend know that you trust him/her and give them complete freedom to do whatever they like to do.
One of my friends used to be in a long distance relationship. She demanded her boyfriend to stay at home after school to Skype with her and not go out drinking and partying with his buddies.
Because of this, her boyfriend tried to think of all kinds of excuse to go out partying. We humans have a tendency to fight back when we feel being controlled and restricted.
So, controlling your partner will eventually backfire. That is why we do the opposite, we give our partner space and freedom. Now, the responsibility and choice is in your boyfriend/girlfriend’s hands.
It is not you trying to prevent them from cheating, but it is them who decide whether they want to risk their relationship by being unfaithful.
It also helps to have regular communication with your boyfriend/girlfriend, so you know what is going on in their life and show that you care about them.
This way, you will always be on your partner’s mind. It is also important to have transparency in your relationship. You share with each other how your day is and what you do during the day. It builds trust and strengthens the bond between couples.
It also means that other people will not have much opportunity to get in between you and your boyfriend/girlfriend.
Make sure that both of you change your Facebook relationship status to in a relationship and make it visible to everyone. It not only gives your partner a sense of security, but also reduce the possibility of other interested party to hit on you or your partner.
On top of that, the risk of being caught cheating by mutual friends can stop either party to think twice about cheating.
2. Not Sure About The Future
Sometimes, when you and your boyfriend/girlfriend are living apart without knowing exactly when you two will reunite in the same city. This uncertainty breeds insecurity and hopelessness. It is easy for either of you to feel like giving up on the relationship.
If you have been in a long distance relationship, you must understand how much more efforts you need to put in to keep the relationship alive. It is not just phone calls. It is not just driving hours across cities to see her/him. It is much more than that.
If there is no certainty about when you two will be together again, it just makes you feel discouraged to want to work so hard for the relationship.
I know one couple who just got married after 8 years of long distance relationship. They broke up many times in those 8 years, but they finally made it.
The boyfriend showed us thousands of flight ticket stubs on their Facebook. It is evidence of how hard they worked for what they believed is real and worth fighting for.
Another one of my readers told me her story. She got to know her boyfriend through a mutual friend. Her boyfriend lives in another country.
Her boyfriend has been asking her to move over to be with him for years. She also wanted to be with her boyfriend very badly and tried very hard to find a job there but to no avail. So, she had no choice but to stay where she is.
Over the years, she grew less and less enthusiastic about moving over because her life is here and all her friends are here. If she moves over to his country, she has to start all over again. The same goes for the guy. It became very clear to her that there is no future with him. They broke up in the end.
For a long distance relationship to work, we need to have a plan to get back together in the same place. Without it, it is just a matter of time that either party will give up on trying.
3. Uninteresting Conversation Between Couples
You find it impossible for you and your partner to run out of topics to talk about because you two could talk to each other all night long when you just started dating each other.
However, when all you do with your partner is talking on Skype or on the phone( which is typical of a long distance relationship), you will find very soon that you two will have less things to say to each other. It is always the same topics every day. The conversation gets shorter and shorter, from hours on the first few days to less than 10 minutes months later.
Don’t worry. It is normal that conversations get boring. But, the good news is that you can do something about it. Boredom is a choice.
You can choose to continue the boring conversation day after day. You can also choose to spice things up, such as joking with your boyfriend/girlfriend, flirting with them, teaching them something over the phone or Skype and etc.
4. Longing For Boyfriend/Girlfriend To Be Here With You
Even though you try to talk to your boyfriend/girlfriend every day, it cannot replace physical touch. We yearn the feeling that we get when we actually hug and kiss each other.
Especially if we are going through some tough times, we need more than just words of comfort and hope. We need our loved ones by our side and hold our hands and tell us that everything will be okay.
Do you ever miss your partner when you have no one to dine with after work or come home to an empty room or see other loving couples around you?
It is this loneliness that makes long distance relationship more challenging. If we can find ways to pass time faster, we won’t be able to have so much time getting caught up in this loneliness feeling.
Loneliness is also one of the top reasons for either partner to go stray. To maintain a healthy and lasting long distance relationship,we need to minimize the possibility.
There are a few tips for you:(1) Occupy yourself with enjoyable activities, so you will feel time pass faster;(2) Try to engage in time limited activities. Do you notice that time goes by fast when you are sitting for an exam or you have very little time for a big project?
5.Fights And Arguments
It is normal for couples to have fights and heated arguments. I always have a rule with my husband that we will solve our disagreements and make peace with each other before we go to sleep. For us, we know that if we sweep our problem under the carpet and let it accumulate, it will only come back and haunt us in the future.
For couples in a long distance relationship, it is even harder because one party can just hang up the phone or sign out of Skype without solving the conflict. If you think back for a moment, you can realize that quite a lot of the fights and arguments are useless and meaningless.
Sometimes, it is just one party feeling too frustrated by the long distance. One of my friends used to fight a lot with her boyfriend for no real reasons. When she talks on the phone or text her boyfriend, she doesn’t feel as understood as in a face to face conversation. She was feeling frustrated because her boyfriend didn’t seem to understand what she really meant so they fought a lot.
Communication between couples plays a very important role when it comes to stopping fights and clarifying conflicts.
As soon as problem arises, we should try our best to talk it out and solve it before we end the conversation. A few tips for couples who have fights regularly:
- Your boyfriend/girlfriend is not your enemy.
- No matter whom wins the argument, there is no winner if you both want a healthy and lasting relationship.
- To avoid escalating the conflicts, we should always look at things from your boyfriend/girlfriend’s perspective.
Jess says
my relationship ended over a year ago. it had been a 2-year relationship, most of which was spent in the same place, in my city. my ex moved away for work and a few months later (and days before our next scheduled visit), he broke up with me by phone. he claimed that missing me was unbearable, that he felt that he was failing me, that his work was suffering. he never came out and said he wanted to breakup. he complained miserably for an hour until i gave in and called everything off, and he said okay and offered to pay for my cancelled flight. it was all very agonizing and confusing.
we have not spoken since, except two email exchanges in which he apologized and asked to be in touch (i declined) and when i tried to get money for my plane ticket that he promised and never sent.
i will be moving to his city for work in two months time. should i contact him after a year of silence? (i have him blocked on everything so have no idea if he tried to reach me beyond those few emails.) i have family and friends in his city, as well as new work colleagues, so i can get myself established without him. the relationship had been very loving, and he is a nice man. should i try to be friends? would it disrupt his life too much to hear from me? would he feel disrespected if he heard through the grapevine and not from me that i have moved to town?
samuel says
I recently broke up with my girlfriend of 2 years and im very confused about what to do and feel. I’m 25 and she is 20. This was her first relationship and my first time I was truly in love with someone deeply. Just for backstory, she had physically cheated on me when she was drunk and it was borderline rape what the kid did to her. We broke up before I found this out and she came back to me and I found out by looking on her facebook that she had cheated on me and didnt think she could date me if she had allowed this guy to force herself on her. She asked for my forgiveness and I gave it to her. We were very happy up until recently… I’ll try to keep this as short as possible but I’m really hurting from it. We have been broken up for about three weeks.
My ex and I were dating for 2 years, 1.5 of that was in a long distance relationship where we could only see each other 1 or 2 every couple of months ranging from being together for a week to 4 days. It would have to be this way for another 2 years because of my job and her being in school. we were very happy together and we loved each other very much. she told me this constantly I told her the same. she wrote to me how no time, space or any other person could come in the way of our love and that i was the most amazing guy in her life and that she looked forward to a promising future together.
A few weeks after our 2 year anniversary, i noticed she was in a photo with another guy and i asked about the guy. she was a friend’s friend that came up with them to go skiing and so she spent the weekend with him and a few others. she said he was cute but she didnt think anything of him. she started acting distant and i asked her about the relationship and she started to cry saying she was confused and wasnt sure she loved me as much as she thought she did. i eventually got out of her that she found this kid attractive and that she liked him but was very confused about the situation. I told her if she had feelings for him that the right thing to do was to stop talking to him otherwise it was only going to progress. She said she still wanted to talk to him and hang out with him and I said I told her that we were going to breakup because of it… she started crying and telling me no and we proceeded to talk for about 3 hours where I was crying telling her how much she meant to me and that I loved her and how could she be doing this after all she said and after all of our history. I was heartbroken and hurt… eventually we decided not to breakup on skype since I was coming home in a few weeks… I did the wrong thing and more or less tried persuading her to stay with me by texting and writing to her alot. She felt more strong about breaking up because she was confused, didn’t think the timing would work out, that I was too committed (we talked about marriage and whatnot), and her family/work situation was too stressful. Eventually we stopped talking for about a week and then I came home. I too felt that we should probably breakup because the distance and time was too long and if this kid didnt come along now, it was going to eventually happen because she’s in college, young, and it’s her first relationship.
I came home and felt like she was hiding the extent of what she did with this kid to me. I did the wrong thing and looked through her phone. I saw her texts that she had with her friends basically saying that she liked this kid but was confused saying she didnt think she loved me as much as she thought she did. That this kid was fun and she liked hanging out with him. That he also came onto her quickly saying he was absolutely in love with her and that it sucked that she had a boyfriend because she thinks they are perfect but wouldn’t want to be homewrecker(ya right). I saw a text screenshot that she sent her friend between her and this guy basically asking him if he meant everything he said saying that he has really screwed with her head and that he doesnt think she can hang out with him if he was no serious about the stuff that he was saying. She said she really thinks she likes him but can’t throw her relationship of two years away if this is just a game to him… in which he proceeded to say he was happy she brought this up and that he was very serious. she responded saying she is still confused that she likes him and wants to get to know him more and how i told her if she continued to talk to him that I would break up with her but she still wanted to. she said that it was hard because she knows I love her and that being with her is the safer option. but after this weekend with him she knows she doesnt love me as much as she thought she did. The rest of her messages were from the weeks leading up to me being there where she hung out with him again and was overly concerned about what he thought about her and how she liked him and was asking questions to her friend about whether he really was this great guy… it absolutely killed me reading those messages.
We had a good weekend together. We had one fight when I asked her why she was feeling the way she felt in which she brought up my commitment factor and how she didn’t think she loved me as much… I had already read the messages so I was subtly trying to get her to confess what she had done with this kid. I felt like she had emotionally cheated on me and I was very hurt from it. The very last day she broke out crying in my car saying that she loved me alot but was very confused. She said she did love me more than she thought she did but she couldn’t deal with only seeing me once every few months. That it was too painful to miss me and only be able to physically hold each other those few times. I understood the pain and her reasoning. She’s young, immature when it comes to this stuff, and she doesn’t know what she wants right now. We both felt positive that in time when we could be together that she needed some breathing room.
Right before leaving I told her about reading the messages and that I could not believe that she could do that after being in a committed relationship of two years. That she could play into this kids emotions to see if they had a future… she got very defensive about me looking through her phone and I just stopped pushing it because she wanted to leave on a positive note. I left and went home.
A few days later I broke our no contact and sent her an email which I told her to read on facebook because it finally hit me how hurt I was about what she did with guy while we were going out. I basically told her that I had deceived myself into not thinking about what she did with this kid because I wanted us to have a future. I told her that what she did with this guy behind my back was wrong and hurtful. I said she should have done the right thing by either breaking up with me or telling this guy to wait two weeks until she could sort out her emotions and talk to me before basically trying to start a relationship with him while we were going out. I said that she either did not respect me enough to do what was right or was immature or did not have the moral mindset to know that she was emotionally cheating. I said I was upset that she was not the person I thought she was and that I hoped one day she would realize the extent of the pain she had brought to the guy she said she loved and cared about for over two years.I had to tell her how I felt, I was absolutely destroyed inside that she would be capable of doing what she did. She responded saying she wish I did not send the letter and that she understood talking to him was wrong. But just because I looked through her phone doesn’t mean I knew what was going on. She then said not to pretend like I didnt know the real her and that the distance and the unknown of the future was the reason for us separating. That I use to make her happy because I was always there but now shes sad because shes missing me all the time and that she can’t have anymore stress in her life. That it wasn’t neither our fault. She asked me not to be mean because I’m upset. I told her she was wrong for what she did and that there is no excuse for starting a relationship while you are in one. That she had a disregard for our relationship and she doesn’t care as much as she says she did. She responded saying she understands what I’m saying but she has been honest and she does care and that if i wanted to end this relationship hating her to go ahead. that she felt sorry that I feel that way.
I talked to her once more on skype but she was very aggressive saying she does not intend on being in a relationship with this kid, she just realized that she can’t keep doing the long distance relationship. I kept my cool, but she kept saying that it doesn’t matter because she thinks I hate her. I reassured her numerous times that I didn’t hate her and that I was just hurt from her actions. She was very upset and we ended the call. I wrote her one last message saying I still felt very hurt from it, and i still believed everything in my letter. We haven’t talked since then.
A week has passed since I wrote and talked to her on skype. I’m very hurt from this whole ordeal. I feel betrayed, cheated, and confused. I do not want to be in a relationship with her again anytime soon and if it’s long distance. It just would not work out. What kills me is I understand that something like this was bound to happen because of the distance, and that I would have been fine if we ended it because of these reasons. We both felt positive that there may be a future in it down the line because we both love each other but the circumstances weren’t working out for us. I just can’t get over how she still talked to this kid and talked to her friends about how much she liked him. I’m happy I told her how I felt, but now I feel like I ruined any chance of a possible future a few years down the line when I come home… that I may have pushed her over the edge by making her feel like I hate her. I sit wondering if she’ll contact me again apologizing, or asking how everything is going. Every night I think of her and wonder how she is doing and if things are progressing with this new guy. I want to reach out to her and tell her I’m not mad and subtly let her know that I still want us to workout in 2 years if the chance arises.