Dear Miss U,
My boyfriend and I have been together for about 3 years now. He was my first love and we used to be very much in love in school. But when we moved to different continents to pursue college, my feelings for him started to diminish. I think it was because I realized didn’t want to settle down before I’d seen the other guys out there. I told him I needed a break and he was devastated.
We didn’t talk for a few months during which I got into another relationship which turned out to be very bad and crushed me. So I got back with my old boyfriend thinking I would make things right and that being with someone who loved me would make me happy.
But though he’s an amazing guy and he’s doing his very best to make the relationship work, I can’t seem to give him as much as he can give me.
Recently I’ve met this other guy in college and he’s wonderful. I couldn’t stop myself from falling for him and now we’re together.
But I don’t know if and how I must tell my old boyfriend because he’s very much in love with me and also, I’ve already broken his heart once and I can’t get myself to do it again.
And I know things with my new boyfriend won’t last very long but I think that’s what I want. I don’t want commitment. At least not now.
I know I sound very unstable and heartless but I don’t know what to do!
Pleeease tell me,
Double Troubled.
Dear Double Troubled,
You’ve already broken his heart twice and every time you’re with your new boyfriend you hurt your first love a little bit more. Every time you’re with this new guy, you make even more of a fool of the one you’re leaving behind, so don’t be a coward and hide behind the premise of “I don’t want to hurt him” because he’s already shattered; he just doesn’t know it yet.
You don’t have to tell your soon-to-be ex that you were unfaithful, in fact I encourage you not to. Spare him the years of paranoia, save his next girlfriend from having to deal with the insecurity that your cheating will awaken in him. But you do have to let him go. Be honest as far as not wanting a commitment, admit that you were and are too young to give this relationship all it needs; then set him free.
There is no other answer, no other way forward. I can see a hesitancy in your letter, a place where you invite me to say “let this new relationship run its course, stay with your long distance lover and don’t do it again” but I’m not going there and neither should you – because you will do this to him again, losing more respect for him all the while. He deserves better and in a way, so do you. You deserve that person that is so special that committing is a joy rather than a burden.
There’s nothing wrong with not being ready and I don’t believe that you are heartless, but the one thing you must do is be honest with your lovers. Which means you need to tell new guy that you’re not in this for the long haul either. Heck, you can even see other men at the same time if he understands that you’re not seeing him exclusively; if you’re not breaking a promise. If you lay your cards on the table. You don’t need to turn it into some awkward heart-to-heart either but you must own your own shit, Double Troubled, and that starts by being upfront. Maybe taking a year or so to be single would be worth considering also, it will give you the opportunity to remember who you are.
Too much love will kill you.
Dear Miss U,
I am currently in a long distance relationship, I looked on his phone and seen he had been texting a girl. They were flirting on and saying pretty bad stuff. He has shown me messages off her before but none that are a flirty nature. I don’t know if I should confront him because he does not know I was on his phone. Maybe I am over reacting but they aren’t the type of messages you would send to a friend. It is now constantly playing on my mind because he keeps bringing up the topic of cheating up too.
Signed,
Anon UK
Dear UK,
He’s likely bringing it up because he’s cheating. I always like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but this seems pretty clear cut. You can talk to him, leave him or both, but doing nothing will just drive you crazy. Personally, because you’ve only been together such a short period of time, I’d recommend cutting your losses and moving on. This is who he is, there’s no excusing it. You have not been together so long that the relationship has gotten stale, you should both be still in that first rush of love and attraction. For him to be flirting with another so soon tells me that he either doesn’t consider his relationship to be serious and is keeping his options open, or he doesn’t want to commit and doesn’t have the balls to talk to you about that.
Be honest about going through his phone, you can’t expect honesty out of someone else if you don’t have the same standard for yourself.
Dear Miss U,
I did a foreign exchange to Japan not too long ago for a little over a year. While I was there I met an amazing girl and after knowing each other for a little over a month, we started dating. Well, I’m back in America now, and have been for about a month and a half. My problem is, now that I’m back, the only contact we have is through messages and Skype. And while we both speak each other’s languages pretty well, neither of us can reach into too much depth on any subject we get too far into (ie politics, religion, world events, history).
Through messages though, we have fewer problems since we can use a dictionary as needed. But on skype, while we occasionally do stop to look up words, it can put a real halt to a conversation. Sometimes we’ll avoid advanced topics altogether if the subject is too hard, and that’s led into dry conversations between the two of us resulting in repeating topics like “how was your day? What did you eat?”
I really like her and I’ve put in a decent amount of time crawling the web looking for long-distance advice, but a lot of it simply doesn’t help with the language barrier, or the fact that her country doesn’t have a lot of what America has (like netflix) for us to be able to do certain things simultaneously. That’s not true 100% of the time, and in my searching have found some great ideas that should help… for a while, but I’m hoping for some advice specifically targeted to my dilemma. Any ideas?
Signed,
Kenny
Dear Kenny,
The only way for you to get better at each other’s languages is to practice, and that means working and struggling through the awkward language barrier. It’s a challenge many couples do not face and I know that it isn’t easy, but unless you both work at it, you will never be able to have in-depth conversations with each other as equals, and how is that going to work when you one day live together? It won’t. So don’t shy away from it now. Perhaps there is a way to make learning each other’s languages fun? Make a game of it. If you’re sexual together, you could even make that game erotic. For example, each piece of clothing could hide a word relating to a topic, and if you get that word, your partner removes that piece of clothing. You could write up hints or riddles for each other to help the game along.
I too am from a country that does not have Netflix, in fact most of my LDR days happened before Netflix was around to make life easier. Do you know what we did? We’d count down from three and start our own copy of whatever we were watching or listening to at the same time. It works just as well. Listen to comedians on YouTube; I understand Japanese humour is vastly different to American humor, so this would be a wonderful way to bring a deeper understanding of each other’s culture and tastes.
You know what else would help your language skills? Reading. Read to each other. Explore worlds of fantasy and sci-fi together, share your favorite childhood stories, analyze great works of poetry together. Reading aloud has the added bonus of allowing you to hear each other’s voices for long periods of time when you don’t have much to say.
If you have laptops, you can also hang out with each other while one of you cooks. If you have a passion for food this is a good way of sharing recipes and fosters a sense of domestic normalcy that is often missing in long distance relationships.
