Distance creates distance?

My wife and I even slept with FaceTime on so you could hear or see each other through the night.


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We'd do this but would totally get disconnected before waking back up 99% of the time haha

I totally feel you, rdoherty15!

I'm probably ancient in comparison to most of you guys (I'm 47) and I've known my English husband for 30 years when we were pen-pals. We wrote a letter every week to each other for seven years before we met & five minutes after we met, we knew we wanted to be together.

In the 90's, you had no choice but to be in a LDR for a minimum of three years before you could apply for a fiancee visa & it was super easy to marry in the UK. So, the three-year-countdown started from the day we met. This was during the time where there was NO INTERNET! It was all mail and $2/minute phone calls for three long years. In the late 80's & early 90's there was always a blasted postal strike too. It was extremely hard but when you didn't have a choice, you made do with phone cards and waiting for your next visit to spend so little time together.

When we finally qualified for the visa (you got it at the British Consulate General & it took 30 minutes), we were finally together and admittedly, it was very odd to be in each other's space. It was short-lived for me though because a few months after we married, my husband's job based him in Frankfurt with extensive travel in Europe & my four-year-old was settled in school so we made the decision to live apart. We saw each other 6 A MONTH (72 days a year) for seven very long years. We still managed two children together so we made the most of our time together.

We moved to the US in 2004 & once he got his "green card", we were apart again for nine months because his contract was in Chicago & our kids had just started school in Texas. We didn't see the point in moving to Illinois when the job was a contract. We didn't see each other for those nine months at all & we had to be happy to have emails & the occasional photo attachment & back to letters.

In the past 12 years, technology has changed so much. There's skype & FB and a slew of other ways to keep in touch. The husband has traveled extensively for work & even with technology, we only text once a day. I will say that I've learned to be more independent but it freaking sucks that I'm not used to having him home because I've had to learn how to be without him all the time & created a separate life.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel though. He lost his job in June & it's been scary & exciting because he's chosen not to return to his 30-year-profession but start a home-based business where he won't have to leave. Apart from a visit to his parents in Manchester in July, he's been home every single day. It's a weird feeling to look at the family calendar & that he can attend the kid's school events & I don't have to go to concerts/ plays/ symphony's, etc...by myself. I really do appreciate that he's just "around". Ok, him making a crap-load of mess in the kitchen, taking over the TV & shouting when Manchester United is on, making copious amounts of tea & leaving toast crumbs everywhere or making chip butties with a side of pickled onions that stinks up the house or blasting his atrocious '80's mega mix at all hours... It's all good though.

There will be a light at the end of your tunnel too & one day you'll look back at it all & say, I remember when you used to leave...lol, I'm only kidding.

Thank God Skype wasn't invented when I was tricking Mrs. Jimbocz into spending the rest of her life with me.  One night of me snoring over Skype and the deal would have been off.

My husband and I used Skype for phone calls, and we'd often fall asleep on the phone.  The first time he fell asleep and snored, I honestly thought he was fake-snoring. It was comical.  In fact, I laughed and woke him up. 

Years ago, when I was in a long distance relationship (not US/UK), there was no such thing as skype.  But I just remember actually just resenting having to be 'on and have conversations' every single day, which took a lot of time up, and sometimes there wasn't much to say because I had a normal, boring work day and he had a normal, boring grad school day.  I usually had things to be getting on with ,like making dinner, doing chores, zoning out in front of the tv , etc and had to get to bed at some point to get to work at 8am, where he was a grad student without any classes until the afternoon and could be a night owl and order pizza.   So it actually drove me crazy to have to be tied to the phone and to have conversations about mindless nothing.
So I love these ideas of just having skype on.  That probably would have worked much better for the relationship.

When I travel for work, my hubby and I facetime (depending on the timezones) and we run out of things to say after ten minutes.  Hahaha.  Luckily, we know that our relationship doesn't need to have mindless conversations and we're content after ten minutes to say goodbye.   It is funny how much you just hang out in real life without saying much, just getting on with things.

Anyways, I hope you and your hubby are reunited soon.Distance can be so excruciating!!

Distance sucks. It's not easy on either person, and it can make people very irritable. Suddenly, you're this new person, because your other half is missing; you're a total stranger to yourself. Both of you are having to learn to cope and discover what this means. It takes people different amounts of time to go through this. I'd say maybe if you two got an app like Skype, where you can leave messages for each other, or just e-mail each other on a daily basis what you've been up to, how you're doing... this can go a long way to just get that one-on-one back in-touch vibe going. It takes a lot of effort to keep in touch when you're in different time zones and your job schedule is different. I know, my husband just left for Sheffield yesterday, and we have at least 8 months where we are going to be apart until I can hopefully join him. We did the back and forth long-distance thing for years until we could be together, only seeing each other in the summer and at Christmas, if we were lucky. Just hang in there.

My husband and I have been long distance this entire time, so it is different (the hard adjustment will be actually living with another person even though I'll be so happy to be together)

There's been a lot of great advice in this thread already so I won't repeat any of that, but one thing we do is set aside time for "Skype dates". We make a nice meal, have a glass of wine or two, and chat. It's always a nice low key way to reconnect even though we use hangouts throughout the day and skype every weekend.


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Did that rabb.it site ever get mentioned in this thread? I remember seeing it elsewhere and saying it should get posted here (but was on mobile I think so couldn't easily find this thread to references it) but it's apparently a site where you can stream things with somebody else at the same time and have voice/video chat, so might be a good idea in this instance?

Did that rabb.it site ever get mentioned in this thread? I remember seeing it elsewhere and saying it should get posted here (but was on mobile I think so couldn't easily find this thread to references it) but it's apparently a site where you can stream things with somebody else at the same time and have voice/video chat, so might be a good idea in this instance?

You can do that using Viber, which may be what you mean? That's what we've been using to implement all these wonderful suggestions! Skype dates, "having a drink" together, falling asleep (nap for me, actual night for him) "together"....its all been enormously helpful!! Thank you all so much

We've only been married for two years, but we've been together for nearly nine. He traveled with a Nascar team for one year (every thursday-sunday) back in 2010, and that was miserable. Other than that and when I spent six weeks in Romania for my thesis work last summer, we've not been apart for more than a week in the whole of our relationship. I guess the longer this separation goes on, the better we get at managing it, but even if there's a little less desperation, I'm 100% ready for it all to be over!

You can do that using Viber, which may be what you mean? That's what we've been using to implement all these wonderful suggestions! Skype dates, "having a drink" together, falling asleep (nap for me, actual night for him) "together"....its all been enormously helpful!! Thank you all so much

We've only been married for two years, but we've been together for nearly nine. He traveled with a Nascar team for one year (every thursday-sunday) back in 2010, and that was miserable. Other than that and when I spent six weeks in Romania for my thesis work last summer, we've not been apart for more than a week in the whole of our relationship. I guess the longer this separation goes on, the better we get at managing it, but even if there's a little less desperation, I'm 100% ready for it all to be over!

no I literally mean rabb.it (https://www.rabb.it/) but exclusively for streaming things together, not the rest (somebody had mentioned it in another thread and I wasn't sure if it was mentioned on here or not but I couldn't find this thread easily.

Totally get you being 100% over it and hopefully it will all be sorted soon!