Long distance preventing the emotional support I need

[foottaps]

So my boyfriend and I have been seeing each other since late October after meeting in September of 2021. We are both in college, and early in January of this year he left to study abroad in Spain. He’s going to be there until mid to late May. I’m going there for my spring break in March, but I’m finding long distance to be incredibly difficult. One reason that I want to talk about is that I struggle with pretty bad depression. School, and life in general, is very overwhelming for me, and my boyfriend was one of the few things in my life that made me feel like I finally had the ability to start learning how to enjoy things. With him gone, I feel like I’m back in a place where I was before I met him. I feel like I’m not able to learn how to get better on my own. I know that he’s still there for me, but it’s wildly different than when he’s physically around.

My depression has not gotten better in the last two months, and I’m in a particular bad place right now, emotionally. Something I’ve realized is that I don’t feel the comfort from him that I did when he was here. It’s not that he’s not offering me support, it’s quite the opposite, but it’s that the support he’s capable of giving from Spain just isn’t cutting it for me. A lot of times when I’m having a rough moment, he’ll FaceTime me. A lot of times he’s just calling to be a presence there for me. His presence was very helpful when he was still here, but on FaceTime, I’ve started to really dislike it. It really hurts to see his face and not be able to touch him and feel grounded by him. His quiet company feels empty over a call. When he was here, he’d sometimes talk about unrelated things to help stop me from getting stuck in my own head, but when he does it over FaceTime, I just get annoyed. He isn’t doing anything wrong, and I can’t think of what he should be doing instead. I just don’t think I’m capable of getting the emotional support I need right now without his physical presence.

This really hurts me, because I really need him but I also feel like I can’t rely on him right now. And it’s through no fault of his own, I just am at a place where I have really intense emotional needs. Lately I’ve felt like I need to just not talk to him, because every time I do talk to him it feels like a reminder that it’s emptier and not giving me what I need. I don’t know how to approach this, he wants to be there for me and I love that. I also want him to be there for me. But the limitations of long distance are really getting in the way. I was still learning how to accept help and support and admit that I needed it before he left. I just think that long distance found me at a really, really bad point in my life. I sometimes just want to wait until I see him in person again and pretend I don’t have anyone in the meantime. It’s frustrating, and I don’t know what to do.

[Sam W]

Hi Foottaps,

This sounds like a tough situation, and I completely understand that frustration of feeling like your choices are "no contact with this person" or, "contact that doesn't feel like enough."

Do you feel like you could talk with him about this? Not even a way where the two of your have to reach a decision, but more in a, "this is what I'm feeling lately" kind of way. Can you also give me a sense of what other kinds of supports you have in place, whether those are friends, family, therapists, or even just strategies you use on yourself?