Hey all,

I have been reviewing some of the advice on this page and felt the urge to ask a question. My boyfriend and I have been together for over a year and we are very much in love but we have a major hurdle in front of us. He wants to relocate overseas permanently and I have no idea what to do. I don't want to relocate overseas and I have a good career here. My issue is I don't know what to do. I have asked him to take some time to make a decision and it has been decided that he will give me an answer by the end of the year. I am very anxious about the wait and the very nervous that our relationship will end. I guess I am hoping for some guidance.

Thanks in advance

J

Hey all,

I need some advice. My boyfriend and I have been together for over a year and a half and very much in love but have a major issue. He wants to move overseas permanently in 6 months or so. He wants me to go with him but knows that I will be unhappy if I go with him. I love where I live at the moment. I have a good career, a loving family and amazing friends and I don't want to be away from them. We have discussed breaking up and moving our own way but we cannot seem to walk away from each other and he cannot seem to give up moving overseas. We have finally decided that he needs to make a decision by the end of the year. Either he goes or he stays and whatever the outcome, we will deal with it. The wait is making me more and more anxious by the day and I am not coping very well. I am so worried that I am going to lose the only man that I have really loved. I don't know what to do.

Has anyone gone through something similar?

J

The world is chock full of miserable people who followed love and left careers behind, and are miserable. Stay with your career. Love can keep going, can be renewed after an absence, but careers almost always cannot. Take turns using vacation time to go see each other 3 or 4 times a year. Get those cheap airfares way in advance. It can be done. You can evaluate your relationship after some time of doing that. Or keep doing it - there are couples who maintain LD marriages quite happily, while others get lonely and fall out of love and find someone else. But make this decision AFTER he goes, like a year later.

Besides (although this is really beside the point), he is the one who wants to go, and wants you to go with him. That puts you in the position of the follower, the one who gives up what she wants, for the man's career. Archaic thinking. I watched my mother do that right after WW2. Think of sitting in an apartment in a new country all day, waiting for him to come home, wondering if you can find a job or not... awful.