Long Distance Relationships. Worth It?

My instint is to say "no,", but of course that is just me.  "It depends," is the short answer.

The slightly longer answer involves knowing the background leading up to the situation.

If your relationship is strong enough, then the answer could be "yes."  Many of us know that love goes through stages.  Yesterday I wrote about how people need three things to be happy: job, social life and wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/husband.  If you have the first two, and then you get involved with a man or woman from the other side of the World, then you need to think long and hard before changing job and ending na established social life.

Because if you do fall in love with someone from another country, and both people think the relationship is serious, then one or the other of you has to move in order to be with your loved one. 

One question to ask yourself is whether or not your girlfriend or boyfriend speaks the same language as you.  This is a major one.  Because if one or the other emigrates to continue the relationship, you have to be damned sure the relationship can last through the hustle and bustle of relocation stress, language learning, getting a job, building a new social life, handling
funerals, dealing with religious and political differences, dealing with narcissists, learning telecommunications technology in a foreign language.  Do you both want to have a family?

Because you know what? I have been there and done it. And I have come out of it thinking that relationships should be easy.  To borrow an idea from an email I received from Harvard, there should be both cooperation and collaboration.

The University of Maryland did a study on what makes two people compatible.  It has to do with your emotional responses to situations. There are about 50 different things that the study came up with.  Certainky none that I had ever thought of before.

Like I say, a relationship should be easy.  It is hard enough gettting it right with someone from your own culture and background.  I don't believe that you should have to work too hard at it. It should be about having fun.

Once I was having a conversation with two men at a conference lunch. They were good friends and about the same age, late forties or early fifties.  One was telling me how the other was about to leave the UK to be with his girlfriend in Venezuela. I often wonder how he go on.  I think that if you are
considering giving up your lifestyle for love in another country, then you have to think very hard about whether or not you have an established social life in the city where you live.  And are you prepared to lose that social life and potentially lose your friends?