r/LongDistance

We will have loved each other for 1,441 days (3 years, 11 months, and 11 days). Out of those, we’ve been engaged since 240 days (7 months and 28 days) and married since 138 days (4 months and 16 days).

We didn’t see each other once between the engagement and wedding. You won’t believe how we cried our eyes out having to leave each other that time. We used to see each other 2-4 times a year, usually for only a weekend at a time. Even when we first met was only for one day.

And just like that. Tomorrow will be the last time I ever have to get on a plane to go see him. But the difference is that this time, he’s driving all the way, two days of driving, back with me, with all of his belongings in the car. And his wife. And we never have to say goodbye ever again.

Hi everyone, today my girlfriend leaves from Brisbane, Australia to head to Regina, Canada, about a 16 hour time difference. We met in senior year and have now been together for over 1.5 years. She will be in Canada for 4 years studying and will only be able to come home 2-3 times a year maximum and not for a long time.

Does anyone in a similar time difference relationship have any advice? I said goodbye to her today and now I just feel completely miserable.

I really want to try and get through this with her so any tips and advice would be greatly appreciated. This day has been coming for a while now and I'm sitting here feeling very anxious about what our future holds.

Edit: Can't edit post title, meant to write Girlfriend (19F), she is a female haha.

I am not in a long distance relatioship anymore. I was wondering if this was a good idea for a long distance couple to try, so the stuffed toy would smell like you!

Will try to keep it short and sweet, my boyfriend & I have been long-distance for slightly over a year and were talking about getting married soon. He is in AU and Im in India, there were times when he used to go off the radar for a couple of weeks the comeback put it on him being an "avoidant" and I used to well accept it because I trusted him and gave the benefit of the doubt. We were going thru one off those phases right now and I don't know why I just got some sort of intuition earlier today to check hinge....

Well, i made a profile put his area code while logging in and some filters and BAM THERE HE WAS LITERALLY had to just swipe just 02 profiles.

I am soo heartbroken but there is no way I am going to confront him, I don't want his side; I have removed him from my socials and whenever he decides that its time for "avoidant" phase to get over he can just do that with someone else cause I'm done. Cheating is a big NO.

All I keep wondering is was any of it real? Was I too trusting? Was he on that stupid app the whole time?

Irony of it, we met via hinge and all his prompts today were 90% the same and all the pictures were the ones that I used to love 🤡

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My girlfriend and I are in a long-distance relationship. I recently noticed that she changed how she called me " Sweetheart ❤️ in her phone from my actual name to just my initials.

I asked her about it, and she said it’s nothing and that I shouldn’t read too much into it. But honestly, it bothers me more than I expected.

I know it might seem like a small or stupid thing, but because we’re long-distance, little things like this can make me overthink. I’m wondering if there’s some meaning behind the change, especially since she used to have my actual name saved.

I don’t want to accuse her of anything or make a big deal out of something that could genuinely mean nothing. But at the same time, I can’t seem to shake the feeling that something has changed.

Am I overthinking this, or would this bother other people too?

Hi guys first of all I am not a native English speaker, sorry for mistakes. I have a LD relationship for 2 months with a man. We live in the same country. He is not bad though, he cares about me, when I am ill or having a bad day, he talks to me for hours and tries to solve my problems, and he buys me everything, but he has strict beauty&behavioral standards that he forces me to fit in. Me (F23) boyfriend (M29). He always asks me to be well-groomed. He doesn't like my physical appearance when I don't have makeup on my face or I wear regular home clothes. He says a woman must be good-looking all the time. When I say I don't put on makeup because I have work to do, he says "you are at home all the day, you have nothing to do but to be beautiful" I feel so exhausted because I put on makeup for every video call. I have tanned skin and he says he loves white women more, he asks me to use whitening creams. Funny thing is here, he took the first step when he met with me. I saw him as a friend at first. From the beginning he knew I have tanned skin. Plus, he asked me to lose weight. I am 5'8" (172 cm) and 165 lbs (75 kg). I don't think I am overweight. He is 6'3" and 300 pounds (I think he is heavier than that because I can see it on video call) Also he criticizes my behaviours a lot. He says a woman must be like that bla bla bla. I am have been planning to meet with him end of this month, but now I am on the brink of breakup. What do you think?

If you are in a long-distance relationship and you recently noticed that your boyfriend followed a woman whose social-media content is sexually provocative and geared toward adult audiences, how would you feel about it?

Would you consider this harmless social-media activity, or would it cross a relationship boundary for you?

Would you bring it up with your partner, or would you let it go because you don't want to police who they follow?

I'm genuinely curious how other people in LDRs view this kind of situation.

We've been talking foe about two months now, and while I know he's actually the guy in the photos he's sent me (we've videocalled a couple of times), I have no way of verifying everyhing else. He claims he doesn't have any social media so I don't have a window into his life and all I know is what he tells me. Do I just have to take his word that everything he's saying is true? I may be overthinking, but I can't help but think that he could very easily be lying about everything he tells me. He could have a partner over there and just using me as fun internet side piece. I have no way of knowing and it's making me anxious. It's my first time talking to someone long distance so this all very new to me.

Been together with my absolute soulmate for 4 years. We met on a holiday. I’m a city girl from the UK and he’s a country boy from Germany. It didn’t feel like a LDR because we’re together so much it’s only a 1 hour flight. Our families love the other.

We are absolutely built for each other to the core. Cannot imagine life without each other. We thought we could figure out a third location or one of our home countries to live in after a few years so we can start out life, get married and have a family.

Sadly, I tried living in his home town and it was just a major clash for me and I was not happy I felt crippled in a village. And him, well his job is the major obstacle that wherever else he goes he will ruin his career streak and be financially worse off. I get that yes he could take a pay cut or career downgrade if it means we’ll be together but also he is worried about being able to provide for our family in the future and it makes him concerned.

Also, where he lives he has a huge bunch of friends, family and can do all his favorite hobbies like hiking and cycling which other places don’t really offer, especially not London…

I know he loves me so much and any time we have even mentioned the possibility of not being together he breaks into tears and sounds devastated. I feel the same.

We’re both in our early 30s too so all friends are getting married and having kids and now I really am starting to feel I want that too. Even my parents are getting concerned that time is passing and they fear I won’t be able to have a family etc.

Anytime we have this conversation there doesn’t seem to be any solution at the end of it. Just a lot of I don’t knows and only time can tell etc. I’m so sad and just don’t want to be with anyone else. The thought of other men and dating makes me sick.

He can’t give me a timeline by which he will have a plan in place or an answer. He just says he’s working on seeing what can be the way forward. On our last call he said it’s definitely not going to be in the next year, could even be 5 years and still I haven’t found a solution.

What do I do now? Leave him and just be alone and miserable and not even have him in my life at all (sounds like hell to me) or stay and take the risk that even if in a few years he still has not found a solution we walk away and at least I had more time with him but I’ll be 35 and almost certainly will be a lonely cat lady.

Real, honest advice and opinions only, please!

I (24F) have been dating my boyfriend (28M) for nearly five years. We’re long-distance and have always talked about closing the gap.

This year, we agreed to save towards our plans and goals. Recently, I suggested we have a check-in to make sure we were both saving and still on track.

That’s when he opened up and told me he hadn’t actually been saving. Instead, some of the money we’d agreed would go towards important things — like getting a place together and visa costs — had gone towards wants rather than needs, such as gaming, material things and trying to get into trading. He’s not the best at budgeting or planning, and I sometimes support him financially.

I’m genuinely supportive of his aspirations. I don’t want him to give up his goals for me. But at the same time, I feel blindsided and somewhat pushed to the sidelines.

I’m at a point where I feel ready to settle down and start building with a partner. He seems like he’s still figuring himself out…

What confuses me even more is that he constantly tells me how tired he is of working and he’s “getting old.” I keep saying that this is exactly why we need to make the most of our time now and actively work towards the future we say we want. But I don’t feel like his actions reflect that.

Do my words mean much to him if there’s no action behind them? How long am I supposed to keep encouraging or pushing someone towards a future that they may not actually be ready to commit to?

I feel like I haven’t received the same level of effort that I’ve put into this relationship. It’s starting to feel massively one-sided, to the point where I sometimes don’t even feel comfortable reaching out or talking about my own needs and wants.

How would you communicate this to your partner?

The title says it all. I don’t even know if LDR are harder to maintain or if the regular ones where people live together or see each other every day are harder?

My bf and I are having video calls multiple times a day and text a lot we both can get a bit anxious but also clingy. We trust each other but talking to him a lot makes me feel like we’re closer and I know he’s safe (hope it doesn’t sound crazy). Although we’re not feeling tired of each other at all or anything of the sort we had a conversation about couples being constantly together and asked ourselves “how do they not get tired?”.

The truth is that in a healthy relationship people need space and as ironic as it might sound, with all the distance, talking non stop isn’t really giving each other space but I guess sometimes we do it to compensate that we’re not physically there especially because he lives across the world from me. We for example see each other once every few months or sometimes monthly and have longer visits where we spend as much time together as possible (like living together for weeks and prioritizing each other as much as possible when we’re physically together). It’s been almost 2 years and I was thinking that I don’t wants us to feel like we have to constantly be stuck to each other in order to feel close because that might become exhausting but also we miss each other so much if we don’t talk. Also in case anyone is wondering we are not controlling we are just clingy and I think this is a very healthy relationship overall that I’m happy with.

Anyway how do you keep the spark going and manage not to drift away but also not suffocate each other? I’d love to hear your opinions

I’ve (31F) recently started getting to know a man (36) I met on Reddit. I looked him up on LinkedIn without asking him first. His profile is public and I was simply doing some basic due diligence because I’m getting to know someone online and wanted to establish that he is who he says he is. I was shared with him afterwards that I had looked him up.

He was upset and his specific issue is that I didn’t ask his permission first. I understand that he can feel uncomfortable with it but I don’t personally feel that viewing someone’s publicly available LinkedIn profile requires permission. To me, there’s a difference between looking at information someone has deliberately made public and accessing someone’s private information.

We seem to have different philosophies about privacy. I see boundaries as things you communicate about what you’re comfortable with whereas he seems to feel that certain things involving him require the other person to ask permission first. For context, he also asked me whether I would answer his phone if it were ringing and unlocked. I said that if it were someone close to him and who I had a relationship with, such as his mother, I might answer and let her know he was in the shower, otherwise I’d leave it and tell him someone had called. He wasn’t happy with my answer and said he would ask for permission first before answering the call. I’m curious what others think about that as well.

Does this sound like a normal difference in privacy preferences or would you see it as a potential compatibility/red-flag issue? If it further contextualises things, this man has not been in a relationship before.

I, 24F and my husband, 23M have been together for 3 years.

He started an unpaid internship in his hometown and has been away from me for a month. We were living together for the last year so it has been really hard on both of us.

Since it is an unpaid internship, his boss let's him do whatever he needs to do. Which means he can take days off for any reason, including working a job that pays.

I am going on my first cruise this weekend, it will be 7 days, and I am a bit anxious as I have never been before.

He keeps pushing his date back for when he will be coming back home, first its after August ends, then now its when fall ends so now its late November. I am trying to be supportive but

1. Its been hard to be the only one financially support us and

2. I don't know why the date keeps getting pushed back.

I got upset at him because I am leaving on sunday for the cruise and he refuses to take saturday off because he states he already took it off last week and it will look unprofessional.

He claims he is worried and would like to see me before I leave, yet he refuses to take a day off from his unpaid internship to see me off.

What should I do in this situation?

tl;dr :

My husband does not want to take a day off to see me before I get on my first cruise because he feels it is unprofessional after take 1 day last week off

I (25f) studied abroad in Spain, and about a month before I was supposed to leave in December 2025, I matched with a guy (24m) on Tinder. We had a one-night stand, and I thought that was going to be it.
But the next day, he texted me asking to see me again. We kept seeing each other regularly for the rest of my time there, and somewhere along the way, it stopped being casual. We developed feelings and, before I left, decided to try long distance.

I went home in February and we kept the relationship going. It wasn't always easy, but we made it work. I was able to visit him for two weeks in April while I was finishing my master's thesis. I met his family and friends and got to see more of his life.

After that, we started talking about him visiting me. By then, I'd finished my degree, found an apartment and started my first job. I was so excited for him to finally see my life here. We also had this kind of fantasy idea that maybe one day he could move to me, or I could move to him. But honestly, we never seriously discussed the future. Those conversations were difficult to have over the phone, so I think we were both avoiding them and saving them for when we were together.

Now he's here, and we have about a week left together.

As the visit got closer, we both became more anxious because the question of what happens after this? became impossible to ignore.
We don't know when we'll see each other again. It would probably be at least four months, which would be our longest time apart so far. And more importantly, we don't have a realistic plan for closing the distance.

So we talked about it in person and decided to end things.

And I'm struggling so much with it. I feel completely split between my heart and my brain.
My heart wants to fight for us. I honestly feel like I could do another few years of long distance if I knew there was eventually a way for us to be together.
But my brain knows that continuing without a plan could just mean postponing the inevitable and causing ourselves even more pain.

He's very attached to his family. He feels responsible for his parents and aging grandparents, and his entire life is in the same small town: family, friends, everything. He's also never really lived anywhere else for a long period of time.

I'm almost the opposite. I left my very small hometown right after high school to study in another city, and I've been living away from my family ever since. I love the freedom of being able to live somewhere new, and studying abroad made me realize how much I enjoy it.

But my career is currently tied to my country. I studied law and I'm doing my internship so I can take the bar exam, so realistically, I need to stay here for at least a few years and see where my career takes me. Eventually, I might want to move. I might even want to completely change careers or start my own business. But I don't know yet.
And even if I could move to his country eventually, I don't know if I could build a career in his small town. I don't speak the language yet either, although I'd be willing to learn.

So I understand why we ended things. Neither of us knows when we'd realistically be able to live in the same place, or if it would ever be possible.
And still, I'm angry.
The selfish part of me wants him to choose me. I catch myself thinking, "Why can't you just move here? You could find a job. Why isn't our relationship enough?"
And then I immediately feel guilty because I know that's unfair. I can't ask him to abandon his family, friends and entire life just because I want him to.
I don't think he doesn't love me. I don't think I'm more willing to compromise than he is. I think we're just at a point where our lives don't fit together very easily.

We have one week left together, and I'm already dreading the airport. I'm terrified of going back to my apartment afterward and just continuing with my normal life as if he was never here. I will miss his presence on my phone and I hate the idea of him physically disappearing from my life too. It's such a strange feeling.

We've talked about staying in contact and checking in on each other occasionally. I'm okay with that. But another part of me is desperately trying to kill the hope that maybe someday we'll reconnect and things will be different.

I know I will eventually be okay. I know time will help. I'm just scared of going through the part where I have to actually let him go. Because it all felt so possible.

So, how do you let go of someone when the relationship didn't end because you stopped loving each other, but because you couldn't see a realistic way to build a life together?
And is it healthy to leave the door open to reconnecting someday if circumstances change, or does that just keep you emotionally stuck?

I'd really appreciate hearing from people who've been through something similar. ❤️

I’m 38, Italian, having just had a birthday. I’m a year into a relationship with an extraordinary 28-year-old Nepali guy who lives in Lisbon ten years of difference between us.

Our story feels like something out of a romance novel.
I was in Lisbon during the 2025 Europride, and I met him casually (I no longer use apps) during the day, in a restaurant, while my friends were ordering lunch and I just ordered a beer. At first I was pretty rude and didn’t even look at the waiter. It had been a long night, and I hadn’t exactly been an angel at Trump’s the night before - the count doesn’t matter, but I avoided, by sheer luck, anything more than kissing. Strong kissing, let’s use that euphemism. So when he came to bring the orders and I casually met his eyes, I was stunned, by the kindness in them, by how beautiful he was, and ashamed, at the same time, at how I’d treated him. Ashamed, and, I’ll admit, wanting more than just a kiss from him. I’ve never claimed to be a saint.

We finished and left, but by chance my friend had an issue to sort out, so I went back. For a good ten minutes I had to gather all my courage to re-enter the restaurant and ask for his Instagram. To my surprise, he gave it to me and asked if he could hug me. Of course I said yes.
On Instagram we arranged to meet after his working hours, at a pub in Bairro Alto. Long story short: something clicked, and he timidly, after a beer, asked if he could kiss me. I said yes. I still remember the softness of that kiss. There were more, and it was amazing and it has been every time since. I woke up to the softness of his voice, because I was at risk of losing my flight.
After that, nobody else was ever on my mind. I went back to Lisbon just two weeks later - we’d been writing every day since and asked him if he wanted to be my boyfriend. When I asked him, I genuinely wanted a monogamous relationship, though I understand that 2,000 km is quite a distance, and I’d rather compromise than lose him over it. I never placed any restriction on him, just asked for honesty, and offered the same in return. I never had to search for, or even felt the desire for, anybody other than him.

Since then, we’ve tried to meet once a month and video-call twice a day, not always successfully. For three weeks he lived with me in Italy, since our plan to go to Nepal together fell through because of the civil war. Now it’s been more than a year, and I feel that I really want him in my life. I planned it and told him I loved him during sunset at Miradouro da Senhora do Monte, with a symbolic ring, not an engagement, but something that meant, for me, that no one had ever been so important.

And now the questioning part, thanks for the patience and for reading this far. What should I do? I’m planning to move to Portugal, but it’s difficult. I’m a team and tech leader software engineer for a major company, and he’s a waiter. I’ve learned Devanagari/Nepali and Portuguese, both at A2, but I’m also beginning to get fed up with Italy itself, and my kind of job in Portugal and in Europe more generally would pay somewhere between 18% and 50% more than what I earn here. For my kind of work, several other countries offer special detaxation regimes - Portugal, for instance, would cut my taxes to a flat 20% if I moved there.

Since I don’t intend to leave anything rashly, only in a calculated way, I’ve been wondering whether I should first discuss with my company whether they’d let me work remotely, keeping in mind I’d still need the rest of the year in Italy after 183 days to preserve my fiscal residency. I’ve also started wondering whether Portugal is even the only option - I have a solid B2 in Spanish, so Spain comes to mind, and I’ve thought about Holland or Denmark too.

What would you do? I really think he’s my soulmate, and in many ways he’s proven it. But still I’m thinking about the age difference, the cultural background and shock, and anything else I might be blindly ignoring. What would you say?

Edit: paragraphs and grammar

Edit: fiscal residency

I’m 31F and he’s 30M. We met online in January 2026 and started getting close pretty quickly. We finally met in person in June 2026 and spent about three weeks together.

The connection in person was real. We had strong physical attraction, got along well, and I felt very emotionally connected to him. He also introduced me to his mother and very close friends, which made the relationship feel more serious to me. It wasn’t just an online relationship anymore.

The problem is that his life is currently very unstable.
He has been struggling financially and mentally. He has been unemployed and dealing with his own mental health issues, and I know he is going through a difficult period in his life. He is trying to get himself back on his feet, but there doesn’t seem to be a clear timeline for when his situation will improve.

We’re long-distance, and right now we don’t have a specific date for when we’ll see each other again. There is still obvious attraction between us, but the uncertainty is starting to make me question whether I’m investing in something that may not be able to progress anytime soon.

I care about him a lot. At the same time, I’m 31.
I don’t want to fall into the role of just being his emotional support system while his life is falling apart.
At the same time, I don’t want to abandon someone I genuinely care about.

He is at rock bottom financially and mentally but is still a good partner to me overall (e.g. he also provides me emotional support). I still find him very attractive despite his current struggles.

So I’m struggling with where the line is.
For those who have been in relationships that started similarly, did it work out?

Especially interested in stories where:
- One person was financially or mentally unstable at the beginning
- There was no clear timeline for when you’d see each other again (at least, at first)
- But the relationship eventually became stable and successful

I would especially love to hear from people who were in a similar position to us and stayed together successfully.

What did the next 1–3 years look like?
What changed, and what made you realize the relationship was actually going somewhere?

And for those whose relationships didn’t work out, what were the warning signs you wish you’d recognized earlier?

If you are in my position, would you continue this relationship?

Thank u very much for reading.

My husband and I have been married for 9 years. We’ve done long distance twice, once when I was in school, and most recently for the past 1.5 years while he’s been on the East Coast for school. I wasn’t able to move with him because of my job.

About 7 months into our long-distance relationship, he went out drinking with some classmates. Later that night, he messaged me saying he needed to talk to me. When we got on the phone, he told me that while they were out, he and one of his female classmates had gotten into a conversation about sex/intimacy. At some point, she told him that she “likes to be dominated,” and he responded, “Don’t say that, that’s dangerous.”

According to him, the second those words came out of his mouth, he realized the conversation had crossed a line. He said he immediately “sobered up,” left the bar, went home, and called me to tell me what had happened.

I’ve struggled with how to process this ever since. Part of me feels like this falls into the category of microcheating or at the very least, crossing a boundary that shouldn’t have been crossed in our marriage. At the same time, I recognize that he stopped the interaction himself and chose to tell me about it rather than hide it.

I was cheated on in a relationship before my husband, and I still carry a lot of fear and anxiety from that experience. I never imagined being in a situation like this with my husband, especially after being together for so long, and I’m having a hard time separating what happened from the fears it brought back up for me.

I’m curious how other people would view this situation. Would you consider this cheating, microcheating, inappropriate but forgivable, or something else? How would you feel if your spouse told you this happened, and how would you handle it moving forward?

I’m genuinely interested in different perspectives, even if they’re different from mine.

TLDR: While we were long distance, my husband had a sexually suggestive conversation with a female classmate while drinking. He says he immediately realized it crossed a line, left, and called to tell me. Would you consider this microcheating or just an inappropriate conversation?