Miss You Issues: No Easy Roads - Long Distance Relationship Advice

Dear Miss U,

To make a long story short….My boyfriend and I met on Facebook. He is from Pakistan and I’m from the USA. We have a strong connection. We communicate daily, not just by messaging, but also on phone and via Skype. It’s not a “Maybe he wants to get to America through me” kind of deal. He is a very respected man and successful in his profession. He and I want to meet but we don’t have much understanding about getting him a Visa. There is so much advice on how, but not much that really seems to be the best way. He has strong ties in his home country. And his means of supporting himself here, he has full proof that he is more than capable to do that. Please help us with this. If you know any possible way we can get him here. Being separated from each other is very hard to contend with.

Hannah

Dear Hannah,

I’m not qualified to give legal advice, plus I know very little about American visas as I’ve never been to your country. I can tell you that there is no “best” visa though – they vary so much because people and their situations are all vastly different. All you can do is make yourself deeply acquainted with your government’s immigration website and stay up to date with laws and policies that will affect your relationship. I would think that a regular travel visa will be enough for a first visit, he shouldn’t need to worry about getting a work permit or any of that as a tourist. In my own country, at least, it’s far more difficult to have the government recognize a relationship between people who have not met, so my advice would be to start there. Visit each other, take lots of photos, meet each other’s families and build up your proof for when the time comes to lodge your forms for a more permanent solution.

I’m sorry, I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear and I know how utterly daunting the visa process is, but there isn’t an easy way around it and unless you’re paying for an immigration lawyer, no one can do it for you. There’s no secret back door or a fast track to closing the distance; you will need a ton of patience and no small amount of money to achieve this.

I think of it this way: It builds team skills between you. It proves to you beyond any doubt that this person is worth it. And later when you have rough patches (like we all do) you can look back and say to yourselves, “We overcame the distance, together we can get through this too.”

Dear Miss U,

My boyfriend is a freshman in college at Berkeley and I am a junior in high school in Seattle. We met over the summer (4 months ago) in a Europe tour. He came up to see me for a whole day two weeks ago which was the best day of both of our lives. We have been doing okay, I’d say, as far as dealing with long distance until recently, when he became super busy with school work. He’s been saying he doesn’t want to break up, but how hard this is and he doesn’t know what to do because he doesn’t have much time for me right now. I don’t want to lose him and he’s the one who convinced me to do long distance, so I’m extremely worried now about our relationship. I don’t know what to do to convince him that we will be okay. I’ve tried to tell him we need to Facetime more but he says he doesn’t have much time and that’s not good for us. I’m 100% willing to fight for our relationship and he says he is too, but I barely get to text him each day now because he’s so busy.

What should I do?
Kaelyn

Dear Kaelyn,

Everyone thinks that texting only takes a second and is this super convenient way to communicate, but honestly, it isn’t. I only know one person who can type faster than he talks, and that’s on a keyboard, not a phone. In reality, I find texting slows everything down. I often have messenger conversations only to look up and wonder where my morning has gone. So if he doesn’t have time to text I totally get it.

Phone calls or Facetime should be a no-brainer though. You can do them while you do other things. Surely, he makes food for himself, or shaves, or takes a bus each day. He can put the phone on speaker and talk while he chops veggies or listens to stories about your day while he shaves. A person can talk on the phone while they walk their dog, or when they are getting dressed in the morning. You can talk while doing housework. You can talk for five minutes while climbing into bed at night. There are loads of tiny talkable moments, windows of opportunity that he needs to be ready to take advantage of. A little knowledge of your schedule and he can think to himself, “Ok I’m going to prep my lunches for the week, I should call Kaelyn.”

I feel like I’m always saying this, but we make time for the people and activities that matter to us the most. If he can’t find half an hour a day (broken up into little chunks if necessary) to either talk with you in real-time or (if you’re busy) leave you a decent-length voice message then his time management skills need an overhaul, not just for the sake of this relationship but for his own mental health. Studying so much that there’s time for literally nothing else is neither healthy nor sustainable.

In short: stop wasting time on texts and ask him to capitalize on the time he spends doing mundane tasks.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!

About the Author

Miss U

Miriam Cumming is a writer, witch, and LDR survivor with more than a decade of trans-Pacific experience. She’s currently living in paradise with her one true love and their three little gentlewomen where she indulges in coffee, tattoos, and World of Warcraft. You can learn more about her writing and LDR success from her blog The Wicce Writes.