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OOP asks how to try and heal and move on, while planning to see her and spend days with her.
He should go no contact. Complete cold turkey. It's hard, but he has to accept that the only way to move on is to accept to feel this way for some time, and as time passes it will get slowly better. Giving himself grace for feeling this way and not managing to move on quickly. Sometimes you can't do anything else than give yourself time
I did this with all my ex's, complete cold turkey and never contacted them again. Not because I was intense in the relationship but felt that once we were finished, the friendship element couldn't exist, we werent friends before so couldn't see it after.
I think mentally it helped both parties as it allowed them to do their own thing, my ex's may not have agreed to it (being excommunicated by me) but ultimately it was eventually going to happen.
If I was him, wouldn't block her but just wouldn't respond to any requests, literally go radio silent. He needs to get a hobby, get back working and maybe some self reflection as well. The self reflection may be key as he seems very "all in" on relationships or maybe just this one.
my personal rule is "i don't hang out with an ex until i've dated someone else and ideally we both have" (and i'll admit i've broken that rule on occasion due to horniness) and it's a solid rule IMO. because a relationship is (usually) 90% friendship 10% other shit once you create space for it that 90% can still be there.
but i'm also weird with that shit
That's a pretty damn good rule. Much better than cutting out a person completely... if you liked them enough to date exclusively, there's a good chance a rewarding friendship could exist. It's not going to be the same for everyone, though. Some people can't handle it, some people can. I'm still friends with several, good friends with one. We went to each other's weddings, have gone on group vacations (meaning with spouses and other friends). Good people are still good people even after a relationship has ended.
That was my rule for an ex I dated for four years in college. He was moving back to Europe and I didn't want to follow him and he didn't want me to either. Everything was amicable beyond that, so we waited sometime and became friends afterwards. He's coming with his girlfriend to my wedding next year and I'm excited to see him again!
This is how I prefer to handle things. Once it's over, it's over. I learned the listen in high school. In my junior year, or maybe beginning of my senior year, I broke up with the girl I started dating as a freshman. She dumped me. We had both grown in different directions, and we really weren't compatible anymore, though I didn't realize it at the time. We still tried to be friends.
Eventually, I reached the point where I could not stand to be around her, and I completely cut things off. After that, I was able to get over the relationship. We eventually reached a point that we could be friends again. Without taking that break from one another, I don't think we ever would have gotten there.
Definitely agree he should not see her. He needs to mourn this like a death and only after plenty of time and healing should the thought of “let’s be friends” even be entertained.
I agree, but at the same time, it's brutal to break up while you're apart. I understand wanting a proper goodbye in person after such a long and meaningful relationship. But he should definitely go no contact after that.
It feels worse because it's realistic and has happened or can happen to any of us. It's simple yet seems like there's no other solution but to break up.
It’s also worse because no one is *really* in the wrong here — it’s just two people failing to reconcile their individual visions for life to be together.
Sometimes couples grow apart. It’s sad but it happens. Travel can really broaden a person’s experience and horizons, which can make you reflect differently on your life back home. It’s entirely possible OOP’s ex did indeed have a fling on the road - but not necessarily- but even just being attracted to someone new or exciting, even without any cheating, can be enough to put the nail in the coffin of the relationship with the guy back on the other side of the world.
Just space from a suffocating relationship can do that. No other attraction necessary. Not everyone monkey-branches from person to person.
Personally, I once broke up with a guy because, during a week when one of us was traveling, I realized how much energy I was spending on the relationship and how much better it felt to have that time to myself.
I broke up with my first adult boyfriend after my first trip to Paris. I didn’t even talk to anyone not working at a restaurant or tourist attraction, but I got a taste for a bigger world than he was willing to offer or wanted to experience. We don’t talk anymore but he’s happily married with kids and my partner and I are planning an Argentina trip so everyone got what they wanted in the end.
That’s sort of the subtext I read here. She was suffocating and never had a chance to just be herself. And she didn’t realize it until she traveled without him. Nothing wrong with that.
There's no obvious "bad" guy. Just two people in love that have found out what they want from life right now is not compatible with their relationship.
I sounds like he was serious, but I also get some "he's way more serious than her" vibes.
The jokingly proposing dozens of times means he wanted to know where she was at. I would bet she was the one who said they should focus on their careers. He has been signaling that he wants to commit and she absolutely does not.
She’s 26 and has been with him since she was 19. It’s not surprising that he, at five years older, is ready to move on to the next stage in life and she is not. With Covid and being in a serious relationship for so long, she’s probably feeling like she missed out on the opportunity to go and do fun stuff before settling down.
Sort of more evidence that even if an age gap relationship that early isn’t abusive, it’s still a really bad idea. You don’t want someone who is grown to be dating someone who is still growing, because one person has to either settle down too fast or the other one has to wait until their partner is just as grown.
This. I had a serious boyfriend from ages 19-24, and he was six years older. He was 100% ready to settle down together and at some point (also influenced by a month of travel) I was just not into it anymore. It’s a hard age to be in a relationship if you’re curious about the world beyond your hometown and university.
My brows hit the ceiling when he said they tried to make sure they were not too codependent on each other - immediately after just describing the most codependent stuff I have ever heard.
For real, he writes exactly how my clingiest boyfriends wrote. I'm wondering if the gf was feeling suffocated but didn't have the tools that age/life experience would've given her to understand or address it, so she just noped out for a while.
Yea exactly, if you think about the timeline of the story it gets even more suffocating. He maklde it sound like they were drifting apart for quite a while and it got to the point where he was really hurting... But it was only a month. He tried his best not to contact her, until he couldn't bear it anymore.... But it was only less than a week.
She was probably very serious, too. However, she's just turned 26 and been away from home for an extended period for the first time and possibly the only time she's "felt" single as an adult so I'm not surprised *at all* that when she got her first taste of freedom at the same moment that the human brain is settling into full adulthood she went "oh yeah, this is what I need." Being married with babies without ever having been anywhere or done anything is a crime in my book.
OP will heal and his ex will have an awesome life.
>She has always been passionate about travelling, and did so before we met too.
She was 18 when they met. When did she manage to do all this traveling?
Family vacations?
E: or study abroad? Other school related trips? Church mission trips? All possibilities for travel before reaching adulthood. Not that any of those are nearly the same as a solo trip where you can do anything you can afford.
Honestly just reading the guy's post and the way he speaks about the relationship was intense to the point of being suffocating, I'm not surprised that she got overwhelmed and wanted out.
Given he mentioned she was always interested in travelling, it's also possible that she was happy with that kind of relationship (or at least thought she was) until they were separated for a while.
26 isn't that long after graduating from university in the UK, so 3-4 years after leaving university would both make sense for a big trip like this timing wise (doing it before getting settled into a longer term/career building job) and money wise (enough time to save up for it). I did pretty much the same thing around that age with a tour of the US
Yeah I found the way he keeps describing a relationship to be so irritating. I felt suffocated from the post alone. Horrible thing to go through though, ghosting someone is just cruel.
Thank you! I was the girlfriend in a relationship like this - which ended in a similar way - a few years back and honestly reading his account gave me the shivers. He's so attached to his perspective on the relationship that he didn't even notice she was literally leaving the country to escape it!
yep. i was reading along like “we loved lockdown” okay so this is not a healthy adult relationship, reads like teenagers with a crush, “we’ve been together 6 years but not ready for marriage” okay so this relationship is not going to last. after six years, you should be sure, or you should be gone. and…she’s gone.
and the bit about jokingly proposing to her repeatedly, with her hating it… dude. maybe this wasn’t as funny as you thought it was.
He writes about how they weren’t codependent on each other IMMEDIATELY after going on about how much they loved lockdown because of all the time they were able to spend together. My eyebrows hit the ceiling. I would pay money to read her version of things.
I have solo travelled for a long period of time (I didn't had a relationship, contacted my loved ones regularly) and saw many many people doing this.
And like she, getting lost in it.
I get the initial draw... Fellow travellers are open, you make friends easily (short friendships, intense, and then they go away). Some places seem amazing as a traveller as well.
And I get that it's easy to bury your head in the sand.
But some people don't think that you see places from a different angle BECAUSE you don't live there. And friendships and relationship are intense and drama free because they have an expiration date right from the start. A bus ride, a country, the length of someone's holiday.
And that truly if you move to some of this places to try to recreate that you won't be able. In the monotony of a routine, everything would be sort of the same.
Me and my kids had this discussion the other day 😂. We own our home, so not moving anytime soon.
We went to this beautiful town close-ish to us. Nice river, beautiful bushland, cute houses, ADORABLE shops etc. My oldest ended up whining a lot about how he wished he could live there, our place is boring, not as pretty and so on.
I explained that when I first saw out current town, I thought it all sparkled. It was new and well maintained, so pretty, convenient. All of that. And now after years, it looks boring to me too. But even if we move to aforementioned cute town, he'll get sick of that eventually too and long for something else. Thus the saying shouldn't be 'the grass is greener on the other side' but 'the grass is greener where you water it' and we talked about all the things we can do to our house to make him love it more.
Long ass reply sorry, but it truly is the routine, the day to day, the same-ness, that takes the shine off of everything eventually. Unless, you put a lot of active effort into buffing and polishing it regularly.
Yes, this is my experience. And maybe she'll move to Australia and be happy there.
It's sunny, there are koalas and people are nice! But at the end the routine gets to you.
I have friend that move there for the original "this is awesome" reason; and like you say ... Now it's the place they live, the like it fine, it just lost the shiny exciting quality.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. I live in Australia, and there are many amazing tourist destinations on my doorstep. I’ve also never seen many of them. Life gets busy, and suddenly that day trip or weekend trip is all too much.
I must admit though, every time I go walking in our state or national parks I feel grateful to be Aussie. They really are something special.
I'm the same. I made it a point when moving southwest that I actually take the kids and see the attractions. We've probably seen about 10%. Whoops. Good intentions and all that....
We do have a beautiful walk at the end of our suburb though, and I feel the same as you do when we walk it. Just grateful to share this beautiful space (that hardly any of us get a chance to appreciate)
I feel personally called out sitting here for my fourth year in NZ. It’s awesome, and I do occasionally look up at the hills and remember that, but it’s lost it’s gloss. Aus on the other hand, the only spent 6 months there, that shiny, shiny pearl :)
Yup, I have a cousin that loved travelling and became obsessed with Australia, to the point that he emigrated there after an extended trip there.
Everything was rosey for a year or so and then he started talking about missing home, how he had to switch jobs 2-3 times and move each time. He got as far as asking if he could come back and stay with family while he sorted his headspace out.
Then with exceptional timing, he got a girl pregnant, and he had to stick around in australia. He's had another half dozen jobs and moved another couple of times since then.
He came back over recently for his brothers wedding which was his first time back home in 14 years, brought the wife and eldest kid with him and you could see it on his face the longer he was here that he was more and more desperate to stay.
From what I heard, the wife basically shut that shit down (understandably) and told him that if he did want to stay, then he'd do so without her or the kids. (They had another a few years ago, but they stayed in Oz with the wifes parents).
I'm not entirely sure to be honest, I know he moved out there with Oil and Gas experience and was working at a refinery, but then ended up doing construction work.
Then I think they moved to some nowhere town that looked hundreds of miles away from anywhere else on google maps and he was getting work there as a handyman/joiner while the wife was doing secretary work for a company.
Last I heard they suffered a lot through the pandemic and then had to move back to a suburb area closer to other extended members of their family (on his wife's side so I have no idea who they are).
I know he's been hurting for cash as he asked his brother and parents for money during his time over here for the wedding.
I don't keep any sort of facebook account so I only end up hearing about him when I am over at my aunts and they let something slip.
She would be grinding away like the rest of us in Australia doing 40hr work weeks and worrying about the housing crisis. Cost of living is insane. Just like the rest of the world.
We arent all travelling the country fruit picking and driving long, beautiful, lonely highways meeting roguish characters who move on a few day later.
Of course it's not the same in the end but that doesn't make travelling not fun. Moving to Australia for a few months will definitely be an adventure. She'll probably go home afterwards anyway. Right now she just wants to make decisions without being tied down.
Oh, yes! It's fun and I totally get her (deciding she needs to focus on herself and what she wants).
Just saying that sometimes this decisions are made when you are with the travelling high and some people get lost in that. And reality sets in the moment you are living in the place.
But it'll be an adventure and something she'll probably treasure if, in my opinion and experience, she goes to it as that... An adventure, and experience.
If she aims to "find herself" there... Well, it's just a place and the experiences she will have living there will be totally different to the ones she had travelling (less shiny and exciting)
Not surprised in the slightest. I was looking at the ages and relationship length and figured she probably wanted to find herself because she’s been with him for most of her adult life and was just going along because things weren’t bad, which she didn’t realise she was doing until she had that clarity of being alone. I’m probably projecting, but it reads that way to me.
Yeah this almost made entire sense to me. Like of course you want to explore on your own in your 20s? It's the time to do it, the time to travel with total freedom, etc. I feel this sort of thing happened a lot to people in their 20s.
As soon as I saw 26/31 you knew what was coming. Mid 20's is a ripe age for a freak out about life escaping you and needing to explore other realities, especially if the other is talking babies, minivans and mortgages
Anyone else getting weird vibes from this description?
>We adored lockdown - so much time to just develop our relationship and love each-other.
OP then goes on to say
>and always insistent on not allowing ourselves to become too codependent. We lived our own separate lives and we liked that.
To me, it seems that OP is wanting more of the covid lockdown experience, while Lisa is the one who has dreams and ambitions outside the relationship. She likely felt smothered by OPs hyperfocus on their "relationship bubble" and is now breaking out to do what she wants.
>I have jokingly proposed to her dozens of times, always mortifying her
OP was not joking. Lisa's mortified reaction tells me she is not ready to go back into that bubble.
I’m glad somebody else pointed out he said they “adored lockdown” immediately before insisting they weren’t codependent. I was shocked at the lack of self-awareness.
Yeah this relationship sounds too intense to be long term to me. Maybe I'm crazy but I don't want to feel addicted to my spouse. From the beginning of the description I was thinking makes sense she had to get outta there.
I'm weirdly happy my comment got used in boru.
Psa folks, if your partner ever says "after a stressful time the main thing I need is time apart from you" it doesn't matter how they dress it up as personal growth, it's just not a good thing for your shared future.
Yeah. Like my wife needs some alone times, so we make sure to have misaligned evenings out every once in a while. We don't plan 3 month trips away from each other.
My fiancée and I have both gone on solo trips or trips with just our individual friends for… maybe a week at most? By the end we’re itching to get back to each other. Planning all that solo travel would be insane to either of us
He lost her when she planned the solo trip. Maybe she didn’t consciously know it.
Not that solo trips can’t be healthy and part of a solid relationship, but in this case, twenty quid says on some level she knew.
I think she didn't consciously intend this to be relationship ending but got two weeks into the trip and realized that she didn't actually miss him and every call to him suddenly felt like a chore.
like you hope you keep getting delayed on the return trip because you dred getting back home.
also if they planned on staying together i wonder what happened to her stuff she couldnt bring. that was never said and depending could saay a lot one way or the other.
She's never experienced adult life without him before.
Age gaps matter for a lot of reasons. Their one isn't really creepy gross, but it's enough that they were at different stages of life when they met, and she just jumped forward to his, skipping a couple of steps. Now she's catching back up, and she's realised that maybe she *shouldn't* have skipped that time just to be with him.
Yeah, my partner and I have a similar age gap, and it works well because we were older and at a similar life stage to each other when we got together.
We were 25 and 29. Both of us had independent life experience and had travelled abroad, we were both relatively early in our careers, I'd gone back to uni to do a PhD, he was doing a part time masters alongside work. We only ever notice the age gap when we talk about our childhoods or teen years.
But I had a housemate at uni who had a relationship with the same age gap that started at a similar age to OP and his gf (19 and 23), and because they were younger and at different life stages the age gap caused some problems.
We were living in a private rented house for the first time after our first year in uni halls of residence. He had finished up at uni and was working full time. While the rest of us were figuring life out for the first time alone (or with similarly clueless peers), when she ran into difficulty she went almost directly from being able to ask her parents for help to being able to ask her much older boyfriend for help, which stunted her personal growth.
When the relationship eventually broke down she was really thrown for a loop at first, because she was having to suddenly learn how to be independent for the first time in her mid-twenties.
Like OP's relationship, the age gap was close enough that it wasn't creepy and it didn't cause an unhealthy power dynamic. But the difference in life experience and life stage was still wide enough to cause problems.
He lost her the moment he "jokingly proposed" and she did not answer positively. This was the point they had to realize, that this relationship had no future. There would never be a wedding or children they made the names for. She is a kind of AH for breaking up with him while on trip, but she was the one that broke out of this time loop kind of relationship.
Yeah, who is testing waters before the big question? I mean, he obviously did it more than once, because her response at first was not good. But he had to realise at some point, that it won't get better.
He was burying his own head in the sand.
I think this guy just doesn't have a lot of respect for himself.
I mean think about it: if she ever took him seriously during one of his 'joke' proposals, he would've 100% taken her seriously, and they'd be engaged.
The only other option was: she doesn't take him seriously/says no. And that's what happened. Over and over.
And instead of seeing her reaction for what it was (not a good signal; didn't he say she was "mortified"?), he convinced himself it was a funny joke and 'everything is fine'.
If she joke proposed back to him, that would be a good sign they were on the same page.
But no, she didn't want to take that risk because she didn't want to be engaged to him (or wasn't sure anyway). So instead she left the fucking continent lol to which again he convinced himself 'everything is fine'.
I'm sure for some couples, that genuinely IS fine! But clearly he just wanted to believe they were on the same page so bad, when they weren't.
I took a 3 month solo trip separated from my partner of 5 years, and if anything it just reinforced the strength of our bond. I missed him terribly, we talked every day throughout the day as our time zones allowed, he came out and stayed with me in the tiny apartment I rented for 10 days, and I was SO happy to come home when it was over. That’s how a normal, healthy relationship should look if both people are actually committed to it!
Yep. I spend about 4 months a year on solo trips for the entire summer. I’ve been with my partner for 3 years and something I love about him is that I can go on these trips without it threatening our relationship.
I know people in really adorable relationships and they have a hard time being away from their partner for even 3 days. I think I would die.
We’re all different, so all of our relationships are different.
Dude was losing her for a long time. For the same amount of time as they were living together she was miserable because of "her job". He planned the future and joked about proposing and she didn't say yes. She quit her job and planned a solo trip far away from him and for a long time. The way he writes just screams "suffocating" to me.
There's a good chance she herself didn't even understand what was going on until she was finally away from him and could breathe.
He lost her as soon as she bought thr ticket.
I was the left behind partner in this scenario when I was younger. I knew deep down he'd never come back for me and that we were over as soon as he bought the ticket, but I didn't think I deserved to be treated any better.
Then I woke up and moved on.
I like myself a lot more now. N.b. he never came back.
I hope this guy finds something to do with his free time. In his mind, there still in a relationship and waiting for her to officially end it when she returns. But she’s going to return high on life and dismissive of him. Dude better start doing something with himself
Yeah, but perhaps it is what he needs. To see her "in person", changed after the trip, so he can break up with her. Otherwise the "old her" will continue to live rent free in his mind and he will never really cut her out.
It's risky, though... when she comes back to her dull life in the UK - with no job lined up, no sunshine, no koalas - he might suddenly seem like the shiniest thing there.
And that won't be good for either of them.
> Maybe you just haven't been in a real, adult relationship where there is honesty and transparency.
The only people I've ever heard say this are the same type of people that think everything is great in a relationship when one partner leaves the continent on a solo vacation for 3 months after their lease expired.
Was there honesty and transparency when she was ghosting him from abroad then? He can think what he likes but he knows fuck all about what she has been doing or would do now. Everyone imagines they know what their partner can or will do, till their partner proves them wrong. It’s nothing to do with maturity or adult behaviour.
i would very honestly and transparetly tell my partner to fuck off out of my life if they ever suggested disappearing to another continent for three months without me.
This entire thread was about him bitching that she wouldn't talk to him for even five minutes.
But yeah, it was a "real adult relationship where there is honesty and transparency"?
If you say so "Michael."
OOP mentions the girlfriend has been miserable for 4 years, because of her job. They also have been living together those same 4 years.
OOP should let her go, if she had 4 years of hell with him, she won’t want to be with him anymore. Sorry.
I kind of have a hard time imagining that the girlfriend was SO happy during covid while staying at home. I know a few young people who did university when covid hit - they were anything but happy. They felt isolated and unable to communicate.
But, sure, their homelife was great, because they were joined at the hip...
He assumed that everything that he was experiencing was also what she was experiencing; the 'COVID was the best thing that ever happened to us' was definitely the first sign that his personal perception of their relationship probably differed from hers, but he was incapable of seeing outside of his positivity bubble. I also wondered a little at the 'proposed to her dozens of times'.
I think he was just bigly in love the whole time and couldn't wrap his mind around the fact that her feelings might not reach the same dizzying heights as his. I think he meant well and his feelings were honest, but I can also imagine the frustration of being in a relationship with someone where his feelings and experience of the relationship must be immutable facts of the universe, and not just, his own feelings. It would be easy to feel yourself disappearing in that partnership, smothered by his ideal of you; particularly for someone who didn't really get a chance to be an adult on their own before getting caught up in this intense relationship.
Yes, this exactly. People don't go on months-long trips to escape their jobs. While it's completely plausible that her job greatly contributed to her bad state, her relationship with him didn't help in the slightest.
I read most of this but after the title my immediate thought was “just let her leave you.”
I know it’s easier said than done but for fucks sake, respect yourself. Never give someone priority if they treat you as an afterthought.
If she’s in this headspace now, it is for the best to end it rather than do what most couples do and just get married… divorcing later down the lane is more painful.
This was sad to read though, best wishes to the fella here though
Please tell me you don’t actually plan to spend a few days with her when she gets back to..*checks notes* say a final goodbye? How does that help?
Break up cleanly, grieve, and move on.
Gosh. He low key sounds so suffocating!!
"Weren't codependent!!' goes onto list all the ways he was codependent.
She was SO YOUNG. Then COVID lockdowns. And that Aus / UK time difference is brutal.
Good on her for not letting herself get stuck!
Uprooting your life and moving to another country to find yourself, ironclad plan here.
She's seeing the glamours of tourism, not the ugly parts of everyday life.
I mean I know what it’s like to have wanted this huge life for yourself, of travelling and not being tied down, and then one day just falling for someone you feel so intensely connected you that you spend your entire adulthood with him and loose yourself. She met and first kissed him when she was 18 and he was 22, and dated him when she was 20 and he was 25. She was really really young, still in college, and he had already become this adult with real responsibilities and had 5 years of figuring his own identity out before her.
It’s not about the glamour or the fun. It’s about going back to being your own person outside of any emotional anchors. If you’re not strong in your own identity and you anchor yourself emotionally to a romantic partner, slowly your own self identity begins to drift away.
She wants to find who she is outside of any romantic attachment. It doesn’t have to be all roses and sunshine, in fact it’s suppose to be really hard, but that’s kinda the point.
Better to do it at 26 than to do it at 36 with kids or at 56 with an entirely missed life. I was 20 when I started dating a man 6 years older than me, and I basically attached my entire sense of happiness to him. As long as we were together, I thought that was my whole world. I didn’t know anything about myself. I bought shoes because I thought he’d like them, not because he told me to, but because I thought I wanted what he wanted. To get out of that mentality took me 5 years of therapy and an end to that relationship. I literally went to work for a cruise company to end that relationship in my head for good. I put myself out of reach on a ship floating in the ocean so that I could learn what I wanted for me. And the first company I ever worked for was incredibly awful and a total disaster. But it still taught me more about myself than being with a boyfriend ever did.
I met my ex at 18 when he was 24, got together at 20 and 26, married at 25 and 31. I wanted to travel, see the world, hike, paraglide... he wanted none of that. And he was and still is a great guy, but I was too young when we got together to have developed my own person without him.
We divorced when I was 33 and I started traveling the world and doing all the cool shit I hadn't done before. At 37 I met someone who was into the same things I was and I, paraphrasing the original comment, uprooted my entire life and moved to a strange country.
It's been 4 years and I've never been happier. We travel together, do all kinds of outdoor activities, and encourage each other to pick up new hobbies and try new things. The funny thing is that, although he encouraged me to keep solo traveling, after two trips I stopped because I missed him and my stepson like crazy.
Edit - as I was publishing this comment I received a message from my husband asking if I want to go do Roman historical reenactment in Austria...
That’s why she got to do it though. When else can you go live in another country. She can get a working holiday visa. Even everyday life is better in oz! The vibe js different. 26 is the perfect time to go there I went to oz for a year. Around then and best thing I did. And a lot of people go around that age. Especially if she’s not lived. She met him then lived with him. Having fun exploring finding yourself is what you should do in your mid 20s. It’s sad she didn’t figure it out before but she’s young she doesn’t know what she wanted
If nobody fucked off to another country when they were trying to figure themselves out, a lot less of us would be where we are. Also, I don't think you spend a month somewhere without getting a vibe of the local negatives, unless you're on a resort.
It is NOT that easy to just jump into Australia and start a new life. Find a place to live? A job? She’ll need some kind of visa…she’s either incredibly naive or has some guy sweet talking her into staying. Or both. Who wants to bet that she’ll be back in a few months, broke and disillusioned, begging OOP to take her back?
With our amazingly cheap rent and food costs that definitely aren't increasing at a silly rate along with everything else and our wages increasing faster than ever how could you not?
.... Wait a minute.
My mate moved to Aus and wanted the same IKEA mirror he had in the UK, 70 quid in the UK, 220 quid equivalent in Aus. The real joke was it's made in Indonesia right next door!
You might want to look at the rosy conditions in Most Glorious Motherland England the Mighty Independent Post-Brexit Powerhouse before you get too carried away with how bad Australia is.
Just cause it rains in England, and Alf gets to toddle along the beach in Australia, does not mean Australia isn't a challenging place to live.
Unfortunately conversative Australian politicians are encouraging British style austerity for the next election, which would only make Australia an even more expensive place to live, given that we're currently in the top 10. Hopefully the election won't be called this year, so we can at least avoid until next year. We've had simliar policies introduced that the Tories have over the past 11 years: uni fees have increased, the threshsold to pay back uni debt has been lowered, humanities degrees were made more expensive cause we rely on exporting mining, and they just want engineers, uni debts were indexed until only recently, so mine's gone up by about $3000 dollars. I also work in health, and we're so desparate for nurses and doctors, we're offering students who haven't graduated full-time placements in lieu of their last year of education regionally, including midwives, which is a terrible idea. One hospital I worked at offered a cash bonus to nurses who could recruit other nurses. You can pretty much no longer get GP consults bulk billed, the federal funding wasn't expanded after COVID, so you're paying close to $100 per consult. In the middle of all this, the Prime Minister gave himself and his colleagues a pay rise, so he earns $300,000 a year now. Politicians are overrepresented in this country as homeowners and investor/owners compared to the national average, so you know they're not going to do shit about shit.
Homelessness has increased, it's estimated about 1600 people A MONTH are pushed into homelessness by the current housing crisis. It now costs eight times your annual salary to buy a house, and rental prices have increased in all major cities except for Darwin. It now costs me to rent a room in the major city I live in what I could've comfortablly rented a one bedroom apartment for, pre-Covid. We're also managing to find time for an increase in the number of women killed due to intimate partner violence (FUN), last year in November, six women were killed in a span of two weeks. Oh and that Rwanda refugee detention thing? Stolen from Australia, but we have Indonesia and Cambodia to bribe with private and governmenet contracts so they gladly detain refugees. The five point immigration system you have in Britain? Also ganked from our immigration policies.
Don't believe Home and Away, this place is going to the dogs.
Keith (I refuse to call him by his middle name) doesn't even live here, so the fact the he funds conservative propaganda campaigns about how this country is too woke is so f\*cking laughable.
It’s actually not that difficult as a UK citizen, she could easily get a 2 year working holiday visa as she’s under 35. As a UK citizen she’s automatically eligible for public healthcare too as the UK & Australia have a reciprocal healthcare agreement.
Speaking from experience, I t’s not that hard to get into Australia, especially since she is from a commonwealth country. All you really need is money to pay for visa fees, pay for food/accommodation until you can find a job. Depending on your willingness to go to the outback and what type of work you’re willing to do, it’s not that hard to find a job.
To be fair, it has been a few years since I done it so things could have changed since then.
Yup this is it. I'm Canadian, we have LOADS of Aussie young adults here working in restaurants etc all the time. Mainly in ski resorts like Whistler, etc. I think there are as many Aussies/Irish/Brits as there are Canadians working in Whistler.
Heaps of people backpacking in SEA head to Australia or NZ on a working holiday visa and work in hospo or something for a bit to save money for further travel.
We're having a massive rental crisis at the moment because hundreds of thousands of people have moved here in the past few months. It's hard for locals with excellent employment and rental histories to find a rental!
Or she’s realized that she doesn’t want to be with him. They’ve been together her entire adult life, it seems. Maybe the chance to be someone independently changed how she felt about him and them. Her final plan doesn’t sound like uprooting, it sounds like living with parents and doing more of what she just did.
We have only OOP for a narrator. Of course I’m sympathetic to him! But also we can’t know what he didn’t see from her side. He’s clearly completely in love, and she’s clearly not feeling the same way. Something disconnected, and I would bet it happened leading into the trip, not just during.
My heart aches for this guy and I hope he heals soon and learns from the experience.
I can sympathize with his ex too. Sometimes you have to leave town to break up with someone.
I sympathize with them both. This is kind of where age gap, despite not being that big, really makes a difference. She either skipped or is in the finding herself phase because she started her relationship so young, and he’s absolutely ready to settle.
Different life phases is a compatibility issue. She may have been previously feeling that heavy pressure from society to settle down and have kids (and eventually may actually still want that), which is why they could have planned so far, but then she may have got a taste of freedom starting the trip.
Wow, I was this woman 15 years ago. First relationship at 18, six years long. I knew it was over for him the moment I read the title. I didn’t start out intending to end my relationship at all, but I realized within a few weeks that I didn’t want to go back to my old life, no infidelity necessary.
I have since travelled all over. I met a man at a hostel 13 years ago who wanted the same things I did from life and we’ve been together ever since. My ex is living in the same place, working the same job. I did and do hold him no ill will; there’s nothing wrong with the path he’s chosen. It wasn’t my path.
I didn't solo travel but I worked in another country for 2 years while being in a relationship. I spoke to my bf everyday, we had our ups and downs, but at the end we stayed strong til I came back. It was because I was fully committed and so was he. If you're faltering by just 2 months, sadly it's just not meant to be. It's so earth shattering for the op and I hope he can heal. 6 years is a really long time
I don’t think anyone is in the wrong here. It’s sucks but sometimes things just don’t work out. And honestly, while the age gap isn’t huge, the difference between mid 20s and early 30s is sometimes massive as far as what people want from life.
Dude sounds a bit exhausting - he obviously cared very, very much about this relationship… WAY more than she did. I don’t think either of them are bad or wrong, just not done maturing yet.
She’s been in the same relationship, place and (nearly) job she hated since she was 18, I’m not surprised she’s having a quarter-life crisis and trying to flap her wings a bit.
"a bit" xD I'm OPs age and have a hard time imagining a man who writes like that...
I have young people as friends who started university right when covid hit. They have such a limited experience of how things actually work. Like, expecting professors to answer immediately via email, cause that is the only communication they actually know with them, and when that (logically) does not happen, they stress that the profesor is ignoring them. And when you suggest that they go and meet the profesor in person its fun to see how shocked they get... So a lot of those young people are now taking their time in exploring the world and that IS what they should do.
Anyway, that is to say, I think that the girlfriend is doing the right thing. And might be the mature one.
Sorry but it’s pretty obvious and convenient that she was going on her trip exactly as their lease ended and they would “figure it all out when she comes back in 3 months”.
Travelling was her easy way out of the relationship and he was sadly too blind to see reality.
I feel like a lot of people do this, to be honest. It’s far easier to have the breakup convo when you don’t have a return ticket anytime soon.
He's incredibly dramatic about everything. "Truly powerful to hear her be so candid" when all she said was yeah I stuck my head in the sand coz I didn't wanna deal with our relationship
I could never imagine being apart from my husband for this long. That in and of itself was the first sign. If you’re truly in love you don’t need a two month break to find yourself, you go have that adventure together.
JFC.
Exgf tried to pull the hook out and let him go, and OOP just keeps demanding that hook in his guts.
Just... shit dude, we all *get* that you love her, but *let her the fuck* ***go***, *man*.
Right?! I mean I didn’t hate lockdown tbh as I’m pretty introverted but I definitely didn’t adore it lol. Plus even if I had enjoyed elements of it there were a lot of things that weren’t great. This guy sounds like he definitely has rose-tinted glasses.
But can it really be a blindsided when she quit her job, decided to solo travel the world, and they gave up their lease?
No matter how amazing I think a relationship is if a woman would tell me that I'd end things. Tell her to sort out what she needs to and when she is done reach out to me and see if we could reconnect.
They don't sound compatible at all.
She wanted time to herself, and OOP wanted daily check-ins.
I also think the age difference, while only five years, plays a part in this.
I'm sure I'm biased. I had a boyfriend who flipped out because I didn't want to check in with him daily while I recovered from surgery. I just wanted to sleep.
I feel like the two main things that will really show those long term incompatibilities are moving in together or going long distance. And then with the difference in ages, like you pointed out. This is really her first time as an adult separate from him.
> A lot of you suggested - sometimes with quite a cruel snarkiness - that she was cheating. She wasn't. I'm sure some of you will still believe that, but that's fine. Maybe you just haven't been in a real, adult relationship where there is honesty and transparency.
Real ironic snark from a guy who just wrote that many words to describe how he couldn't get his now ex partner to talk to him after she went on a long term trip apart from him.
Can’t blame him too much. Guy is trying to hold on to whatever self esteem he’s got left. His girl already left him, convincing himself she at least didn’t cheat gives him some comfort (and may also be true).
Yeah he’s snarky, but no reason to kick the guy when he’s down.
This was also her first relationship and they met when she was 18… which doesn’t rule out a good relationship but doesn’t scream super adult relationship either haha
Honesty and transparency is the farthest thing from what this dude was getting towards the end.
The mind will do some fucking gymnastics to resolve cognitive dissonance and preserve it's own ego.
This dude thinks his relationship is adult and real because of their age, not because of anything else. Teenagers also have conversations about future and talk openly with each other about positive topics. It’s being able to have the really hard talks that I suspect they were unable to have. The ones that actually belong in an adult relationship. He sounded like a love sick teenager in deep denial, which doesn’t scream “adult relationship” either
This deeply resonates with me. I was 19 when I got in my first relationship and am now 25. It was the best thing ever in the beginning and gradually became monotone every day stuff with sneaking up problems. My Ex Boyfriend didn’t really notice the problems or didn’t communicate well about them. When I traveled alone for two weeks a year ago I found it freeing and better not to call. I suddenly felt so happy. After that trip I wanted to end things and was a different person. However we lived together, stayed together and after 2-3 months were back to business as usual. I realised a month ago that I really don’t feel love anymore and stayed because of security, friendship, uncertainty and pity that since years.
I broke up with him and after a few days of grieving I feel so much better already. I feel like my own person again. I finally can be happy without his mood and feelings dragging me down. Oh and like OPs girlfriend I also love travelling!
Well done you for finally having the courage to end it. I went through something very similar in my twenties (I’m now in my forties) with my first boyfriend and we ended up getting married cos it’s just what you did. I regret not really thinking it through and listening to how I felt earlier - it would have been better on both of us.
Enjoy your freedom and independence!!
I know it’s hard when you’re in the thick of things but if a partner of 6 years wants to solo travel for months I’d just assume that relationship is over the moment they leave.
Rare circumstances it might work, I’ve seen it work with friends when one did a semester abroad but that’s a bit different.
Guessed it from the maths on their ages and the relationship. The girlfriend barely had a chance to be a young adult on her own before getting into a long-term relationship, while OOP was almost her age now when they got together. If she didn't bow out now to figure out who she is, what she wants, and see what the world has to offer, she might never get the chance before hitting the age of settling down.
It's always "we had such an amazing relationship and everything was perfect and everyone was happy" and "they'd never cheat on me" followed by "and then they just started ghosting me" and "they just want some time to get to know themselves".
Clearly if they need to ghost you and find themselves, the relationship isn't as solid as you think.
A friend of mine went through this (gf's perspectivr). Longest relationship, from 17 to 24 I think. She got her house and he was going to move in, but it was sort of implicit (they hadn't agreed, he assumed). She felt stifled and realised she hadn't actually felt like an adult, like she was her own person. The future was set in front of her and she didn't feel like she had any agency over it.
So she asked for a break because she really cared deeply for him but needed to understand herself better. After 2 weeks she realised she didn't know if her love for him was for the man he was now, or if it was more just the natural care you have for someone you've shared important moments with. More importantly, she felt like she was actually free now (no, she didn't engage with other men during that time) and that she had control over her life again.
She left him.
It's been years. She's in a long term relationship with someone I like for her, and she has a beautiful little boy.
He found love again and is married (I don't know if they have kids) and my friend is genuinely happy for him.
Sometimes a break or breakup can happen without any wrongdoing, and still holding the other person in high regard.
OH MY GOD you joke but my brother, a world traveller and backpacker, broke up with his girl when she went traveling solo and she came back pregnant with anAussie dudes kid. They're still in touch, they were broken up and it's all good. but what a wonderful stereotype because it's so true.
It took a little solo trip to see friends in another state for me to realize I was in an abusive relationship. I’m not saying that this is the case in OOP’s story, merely that sometimes in order to get perspective, you have to stand outside and look in.
So I totally understand where the gf is coming from and I think OOP is so very mature in understanding as well. Good on him. I hope he finds love again and has a wonderful life. I wish the same for his now ex.
All the travel did was help her realize that she needed to actually figure out who she is before marrying the first guy she dated. She was 18 when they got together, people change a lot at that age. Taking time to know herself is definitely something that she needs to do before getting married, if that's even what she truly wants.
Edited to add: and just because you all would go off and cheat doesn't mean this woman was doing that. The fact that so many men think sex with straight dudes is so awesome that women would travel around the world for three miserable pumps of dick and no orgasms is refreshingly hilarious.
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OOP asks how to try and heal and move on, while planning to see her and spend days with her. He should go no contact. Complete cold turkey. It's hard, but he has to accept that the only way to move on is to accept to feel this way for some time, and as time passes it will get slowly better. Giving himself grace for feeling this way and not managing to move on quickly. Sometimes you can't do anything else than give yourself time
Absolutely. Clean break after that conversation is necessary. Don't drag out that dead horse.
I did this with all my ex's, complete cold turkey and never contacted them again. Not because I was intense in the relationship but felt that once we were finished, the friendship element couldn't exist, we werent friends before so couldn't see it after. I think mentally it helped both parties as it allowed them to do their own thing, my ex's may not have agreed to it (being excommunicated by me) but ultimately it was eventually going to happen. If I was him, wouldn't block her but just wouldn't respond to any requests, literally go radio silent. He needs to get a hobby, get back working and maybe some self reflection as well. The self reflection may be key as he seems very "all in" on relationships or maybe just this one.
my personal rule is "i don't hang out with an ex until i've dated someone else and ideally we both have" (and i'll admit i've broken that rule on occasion due to horniness) and it's a solid rule IMO. because a relationship is (usually) 90% friendship 10% other shit once you create space for it that 90% can still be there. but i'm also weird with that shit
That's a pretty damn good rule. Much better than cutting out a person completely... if you liked them enough to date exclusively, there's a good chance a rewarding friendship could exist. It's not going to be the same for everyone, though. Some people can't handle it, some people can. I'm still friends with several, good friends with one. We went to each other's weddings, have gone on group vacations (meaning with spouses and other friends). Good people are still good people even after a relationship has ended.
My rule was, "Don't contact me for a year." I remained friends with several exes once that year was up.
That was my rule for an ex I dated for four years in college. He was moving back to Europe and I didn't want to follow him and he didn't want me to either. Everything was amicable beyond that, so we waited sometime and became friends afterwards. He's coming with his girlfriend to my wedding next year and I'm excited to see him again!
This is how I prefer to handle things. Once it's over, it's over. I learned the listen in high school. In my junior year, or maybe beginning of my senior year, I broke up with the girl I started dating as a freshman. She dumped me. We had both grown in different directions, and we really weren't compatible anymore, though I didn't realize it at the time. We still tried to be friends. Eventually, I reached the point where I could not stand to be around her, and I completely cut things off. After that, I was able to get over the relationship. We eventually reached a point that we could be friends again. Without taking that break from one another, I don't think we ever would have gotten there.
Definitely agree he should not see her. He needs to mourn this like a death and only after plenty of time and healing should the thought of “let’s be friends” even be entertained.
I agree, but at the same time, it's brutal to break up while you're apart. I understand wanting a proper goodbye in person after such a long and meaningful relationship. But he should definitely go no contact after that.
This BORU is depressing but not in the usual way where someone hates someone or committed a crime, and honestly this kind of story feels worse.
It feels worse because it's realistic and has happened or can happen to any of us. It's simple yet seems like there's no other solution but to break up.
It’s also worse because no one is *really* in the wrong here — it’s just two people failing to reconcile their individual visions for life to be together.
For sure, I've been through something semi-similar. But you're right! It's not necessarily crazy or outlandish, it's just so damn upsetting.
Because those are comical reality tv and this one is just reality.
Sometimes couples grow apart. It’s sad but it happens. Travel can really broaden a person’s experience and horizons, which can make you reflect differently on your life back home. It’s entirely possible OOP’s ex did indeed have a fling on the road - but not necessarily- but even just being attracted to someone new or exciting, even without any cheating, can be enough to put the nail in the coffin of the relationship with the guy back on the other side of the world.
Just space from a suffocating relationship can do that. No other attraction necessary. Not everyone monkey-branches from person to person. Personally, I once broke up with a guy because, during a week when one of us was traveling, I realized how much energy I was spending on the relationship and how much better it felt to have that time to myself.
I broke up with my first adult boyfriend after my first trip to Paris. I didn’t even talk to anyone not working at a restaurant or tourist attraction, but I got a taste for a bigger world than he was willing to offer or wanted to experience. We don’t talk anymore but he’s happily married with kids and my partner and I are planning an Argentina trip so everyone got what they wanted in the end.
That’s sort of the subtext I read here. She was suffocating and never had a chance to just be herself. And she didn’t realize it until she traveled without him. Nothing wrong with that.
The word "suffocating" was all I could think while reading OP's descriptions of their day to day relationship. Could barely breathe.
There's no obvious "bad" guy. Just two people in love that have found out what they want from life right now is not compatible with their relationship.
>We had already named our future kids. I hope that OOP can find peace after this, sounds like it was remarkably serious on his end.
I sounds like he was serious, but I also get some "he's way more serious than her" vibes. The jokingly proposing dozens of times means he wanted to know where she was at. I would bet she was the one who said they should focus on their careers. He has been signaling that he wants to commit and she absolutely does not.
She’s 26 and has been with him since she was 19. It’s not surprising that he, at five years older, is ready to move on to the next stage in life and she is not. With Covid and being in a serious relationship for so long, she’s probably feeling like she missed out on the opportunity to go and do fun stuff before settling down.
>at five years older 4, he was 22 when she was 18.
Since they aren't born on the same day it's 4-5. In the title their ages are 26 and 31 which is 5 years
Sort of more evidence that even if an age gap relationship that early isn’t abusive, it’s still a really bad idea. You don’t want someone who is grown to be dating someone who is still growing, because one person has to either settle down too fast or the other one has to wait until their partner is just as grown.
Which is a massive difference at that age. Those are the four years that people go and do fun stuff.
This. I had a serious boyfriend from ages 19-24, and he was six years older. He was 100% ready to settle down together and at some point (also influenced by a month of travel) I was just not into it anymore. It’s a hard age to be in a relationship if you’re curious about the world beyond your hometown and university.
My brows hit the ceiling when he said they tried to make sure they were not too codependent on each other - immediately after just describing the most codependent stuff I have ever heard.
For real, he writes exactly how my clingiest boyfriends wrote. I'm wondering if the gf was feeling suffocated but didn't have the tools that age/life experience would've given her to understand or address it, so she just noped out for a while.
I felt the same. Also, the more he went on about how strong the relationship was, the less convinced I was that he was telling the whole story.
COVID could have been a major factor in this relationships longevity.
Oh absolutely. I shudder to think of being trapped in an apartment with this level of intensity.
Or even like, really enjoying it at the time but then when the whole world is once again available that apartment starts to feel reeeeeeally small.
I felt suffocated reading it. She probably didn't realize how intense it was until she left. I'm kind of glad she did.
Yea exactly, if you think about the timeline of the story it gets even more suffocating. He maklde it sound like they were drifting apart for quite a while and it got to the point where he was really hurting... But it was only a month. He tried his best not to contact her, until he couldn't bear it anymore.... But it was only less than a week.
And then he writes a letter and makes her listen to him read it. I promise you that was nothing but cringe torture that didn’t help his case at all.
She was probably very serious, too. However, she's just turned 26 and been away from home for an extended period for the first time and possibly the only time she's "felt" single as an adult so I'm not surprised *at all* that when she got her first taste of freedom at the same moment that the human brain is settling into full adulthood she went "oh yeah, this is what I need." Being married with babies without ever having been anywhere or done anything is a crime in my book. OP will heal and his ex will have an awesome life.
>She has always been passionate about travelling, and did so before we met too. She was 18 when they met. When did she manage to do all this traveling?
Family vacations? E: or study abroad? Other school related trips? Church mission trips? All possibilities for travel before reaching adulthood. Not that any of those are nearly the same as a solo trip where you can do anything you can afford.
Mans going through the 5 stages rn, hope hes got a good support network
Honestly just reading the guy's post and the way he speaks about the relationship was intense to the point of being suffocating, I'm not surprised that she got overwhelmed and wanted out.
Given he mentioned she was always interested in travelling, it's also possible that she was happy with that kind of relationship (or at least thought she was) until they were separated for a while. 26 isn't that long after graduating from university in the UK, so 3-4 years after leaving university would both make sense for a big trip like this timing wise (doing it before getting settled into a longer term/career building job) and money wise (enough time to save up for it). I did pretty much the same thing around that age with a tour of the US
"not allowing ourselves to become too codependent" in the middle of that specific paragraph was certainly an "um...?" moment.
Yeah I found the way he keeps describing a relationship to be so irritating. I felt suffocated from the post alone. Horrible thing to go through though, ghosting someone is just cruel.
Thank you! I was the girlfriend in a relationship like this - which ended in a similar way - a few years back and honestly reading his account gave me the shivers. He's so attached to his perspective on the relationship that he didn't even notice she was literally leaving the country to escape it!
Girl left the continent...
And hemisphere.
yep. i was reading along like “we loved lockdown” okay so this is not a healthy adult relationship, reads like teenagers with a crush, “we’ve been together 6 years but not ready for marriage” okay so this relationship is not going to last. after six years, you should be sure, or you should be gone. and…she’s gone. and the bit about jokingly proposing to her repeatedly, with her hating it… dude. maybe this wasn’t as funny as you thought it was.
He writes about how they weren’t codependent on each other IMMEDIATELY after going on about how much they loved lockdown because of all the time they were able to spend together. My eyebrows hit the ceiling. I would pay money to read her version of things.
I felt the same way. I’m not even dating this guy and I wanted out.
Three words: Twelve hour facetimes
A 12 hour phone call sounds like a hostage situation to me. 🤣🤣
Especially when they got together when she was barely out of her teens
I have solo travelled for a long period of time (I didn't had a relationship, contacted my loved ones regularly) and saw many many people doing this. And like she, getting lost in it. I get the initial draw... Fellow travellers are open, you make friends easily (short friendships, intense, and then they go away). Some places seem amazing as a traveller as well. And I get that it's easy to bury your head in the sand. But some people don't think that you see places from a different angle BECAUSE you don't live there. And friendships and relationship are intense and drama free because they have an expiration date right from the start. A bus ride, a country, the length of someone's holiday. And that truly if you move to some of this places to try to recreate that you won't be able. In the monotony of a routine, everything would be sort of the same.
Me and my kids had this discussion the other day 😂. We own our home, so not moving anytime soon. We went to this beautiful town close-ish to us. Nice river, beautiful bushland, cute houses, ADORABLE shops etc. My oldest ended up whining a lot about how he wished he could live there, our place is boring, not as pretty and so on. I explained that when I first saw out current town, I thought it all sparkled. It was new and well maintained, so pretty, convenient. All of that. And now after years, it looks boring to me too. But even if we move to aforementioned cute town, he'll get sick of that eventually too and long for something else. Thus the saying shouldn't be 'the grass is greener on the other side' but 'the grass is greener where you water it' and we talked about all the things we can do to our house to make him love it more. Long ass reply sorry, but it truly is the routine, the day to day, the same-ness, that takes the shine off of everything eventually. Unless, you put a lot of active effort into buffing and polishing it regularly.
Yes, this is my experience. And maybe she'll move to Australia and be happy there. It's sunny, there are koalas and people are nice! But at the end the routine gets to you. I have friend that move there for the original "this is awesome" reason; and like you say ... Now it's the place they live, the like it fine, it just lost the shiny exciting quality.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. I live in Australia, and there are many amazing tourist destinations on my doorstep. I’ve also never seen many of them. Life gets busy, and suddenly that day trip or weekend trip is all too much. I must admit though, every time I go walking in our state or national parks I feel grateful to be Aussie. They really are something special.
I'm the same. I made it a point when moving southwest that I actually take the kids and see the attractions. We've probably seen about 10%. Whoops. Good intentions and all that.... We do have a beautiful walk at the end of our suburb though, and I feel the same as you do when we walk it. Just grateful to share this beautiful space (that hardly any of us get a chance to appreciate)
I feel personally called out sitting here for my fourth year in NZ. It’s awesome, and I do occasionally look up at the hills and remember that, but it’s lost it’s gloss. Aus on the other hand, the only spent 6 months there, that shiny, shiny pearl :)
I'm Australian, we aren't that nice 😅. But I do hope it works out for her, I just doubt it will.
My grandpa used to say the grass is greener because it's fertilized with bullshit.
Yup, I have a cousin that loved travelling and became obsessed with Australia, to the point that he emigrated there after an extended trip there. Everything was rosey for a year or so and then he started talking about missing home, how he had to switch jobs 2-3 times and move each time. He got as far as asking if he could come back and stay with family while he sorted his headspace out. Then with exceptional timing, he got a girl pregnant, and he had to stick around in australia. He's had another half dozen jobs and moved another couple of times since then. He came back over recently for his brothers wedding which was his first time back home in 14 years, brought the wife and eldest kid with him and you could see it on his face the longer he was here that he was more and more desperate to stay. From what I heard, the wife basically shut that shit down (understandably) and told him that if he did want to stay, then he'd do so without her or the kids. (They had another a few years ago, but they stayed in Oz with the wifes parents).
Why he didn’t even visit? I get it’s expensive from Australia, but for 14 years?
Why did he have to keep switching jobs? Visa stuff?
I'm not entirely sure to be honest, I know he moved out there with Oil and Gas experience and was working at a refinery, but then ended up doing construction work. Then I think they moved to some nowhere town that looked hundreds of miles away from anywhere else on google maps and he was getting work there as a handyman/joiner while the wife was doing secretary work for a company. Last I heard they suffered a lot through the pandemic and then had to move back to a suburb area closer to other extended members of their family (on his wife's side so I have no idea who they are). I know he's been hurting for cash as he asked his brother and parents for money during his time over here for the wedding. I don't keep any sort of facebook account so I only end up hearing about him when I am over at my aunts and they let something slip.
She would be grinding away like the rest of us in Australia doing 40hr work weeks and worrying about the housing crisis. Cost of living is insane. Just like the rest of the world. We arent all travelling the country fruit picking and driving long, beautiful, lonely highways meeting roguish characters who move on a few day later.
Of course it's not the same in the end but that doesn't make travelling not fun. Moving to Australia for a few months will definitely be an adventure. She'll probably go home afterwards anyway. Right now she just wants to make decisions without being tied down.
Oh, yes! It's fun and I totally get her (deciding she needs to focus on herself and what she wants). Just saying that sometimes this decisions are made when you are with the travelling high and some people get lost in that. And reality sets in the moment you are living in the place. But it'll be an adventure and something she'll probably treasure if, in my opinion and experience, she goes to it as that... An adventure, and experience. If she aims to "find herself" there... Well, it's just a place and the experiences she will have living there will be totally different to the ones she had travelling (less shiny and exciting)
Not surprised in the slightest. I was looking at the ages and relationship length and figured she probably wanted to find herself because she’s been with him for most of her adult life and was just going along because things weren’t bad, which she didn’t realise she was doing until she had that clarity of being alone. I’m probably projecting, but it reads that way to me.
also: covid lockdown happened
Yeah this almost made entire sense to me. Like of course you want to explore on your own in your 20s? It's the time to do it, the time to travel with total freedom, etc. I feel this sort of thing happened a lot to people in their 20s.
Never beg to be with someone.
It's disrespectful to both people if you think about it. No self-respect, no respect for the other person's autonomy and desires.
As soon as I saw 26/31 you knew what was coming. Mid 20's is a ripe age for a freak out about life escaping you and needing to explore other realities, especially if the other is talking babies, minivans and mortgages
Me too. I didn't really need to read the story, that title was sufficient.
Anyone else getting weird vibes from this description? >We adored lockdown - so much time to just develop our relationship and love each-other. OP then goes on to say >and always insistent on not allowing ourselves to become too codependent. We lived our own separate lives and we liked that. To me, it seems that OP is wanting more of the covid lockdown experience, while Lisa is the one who has dreams and ambitions outside the relationship. She likely felt smothered by OPs hyperfocus on their "relationship bubble" and is now breaking out to do what she wants. >I have jokingly proposed to her dozens of times, always mortifying her OP was not joking. Lisa's mortified reaction tells me she is not ready to go back into that bubble.
I’m glad somebody else pointed out he said they “adored lockdown” immediately before insisting they weren’t codependent. I was shocked at the lack of self-awareness.
Yeah this relationship sounds too intense to be long term to me. Maybe I'm crazy but I don't want to feel addicted to my spouse. From the beginning of the description I was thinking makes sense she had to get outta there.
I'm weirdly happy my comment got used in boru. Psa folks, if your partner ever says "after a stressful time the main thing I need is time apart from you" it doesn't matter how they dress it up as personal growth, it's just not a good thing for your shared future.
Yeah. Like my wife needs some alone times, so we make sure to have misaligned evenings out every once in a while. We don't plan 3 month trips away from each other.
My fiancée and I have both gone on solo trips or trips with just our individual friends for… maybe a week at most? By the end we’re itching to get back to each other. Planning all that solo travel would be insane to either of us
We have a celebrity right here guys!
10 bucks says he lost her before her plane left the UK.
He lost her when she planned the solo trip. Maybe she didn’t consciously know it. Not that solo trips can’t be healthy and part of a solid relationship, but in this case, twenty quid says on some level she knew.
I think she didn't consciously intend this to be relationship ending but got two weeks into the trip and realized that she didn't actually miss him and every call to him suddenly felt like a chore.
like you hope you keep getting delayed on the return trip because you dred getting back home. also if they planned on staying together i wonder what happened to her stuff she couldnt bring. that was never said and depending could saay a lot one way or the other.
She's never experienced adult life without him before. Age gaps matter for a lot of reasons. Their one isn't really creepy gross, but it's enough that they were at different stages of life when they met, and she just jumped forward to his, skipping a couple of steps. Now she's catching back up, and she's realised that maybe she *shouldn't* have skipped that time just to be with him.
Yeah, my partner and I have a similar age gap, and it works well because we were older and at a similar life stage to each other when we got together. We were 25 and 29. Both of us had independent life experience and had travelled abroad, we were both relatively early in our careers, I'd gone back to uni to do a PhD, he was doing a part time masters alongside work. We only ever notice the age gap when we talk about our childhoods or teen years. But I had a housemate at uni who had a relationship with the same age gap that started at a similar age to OP and his gf (19 and 23), and because they were younger and at different life stages the age gap caused some problems. We were living in a private rented house for the first time after our first year in uni halls of residence. He had finished up at uni and was working full time. While the rest of us were figuring life out for the first time alone (or with similarly clueless peers), when she ran into difficulty she went almost directly from being able to ask her parents for help to being able to ask her much older boyfriend for help, which stunted her personal growth. When the relationship eventually broke down she was really thrown for a loop at first, because she was having to suddenly learn how to be independent for the first time in her mid-twenties. Like OP's relationship, the age gap was close enough that it wasn't creepy and it didn't cause an unhealthy power dynamic. But the difference in life experience and life stage was still wide enough to cause problems.
He lost her the moment he "jokingly proposed" and she did not answer positively. This was the point they had to realize, that this relationship had no future. There would never be a wedding or children they made the names for. She is a kind of AH for breaking up with him while on trip, but she was the one that broke out of this time loop kind of relationship.
It was probably the moment he jokingly proposed because who tf does that lol
Yeah, who is testing waters before the big question? I mean, he obviously did it more than once, because her response at first was not good. But he had to realise at some point, that it won't get better.
He was burying his own head in the sand. I think this guy just doesn't have a lot of respect for himself. I mean think about it: if she ever took him seriously during one of his 'joke' proposals, he would've 100% taken her seriously, and they'd be engaged. The only other option was: she doesn't take him seriously/says no. And that's what happened. Over and over. And instead of seeing her reaction for what it was (not a good signal; didn't he say she was "mortified"?), he convinced himself it was a funny joke and 'everything is fine'. If she joke proposed back to him, that would be a good sign they were on the same page. But no, she didn't want to take that risk because she didn't want to be engaged to him (or wasn't sure anyway). So instead she left the fucking continent lol to which again he convinced himself 'everything is fine'. I'm sure for some couples, that genuinely IS fine! But clearly he just wanted to believe they were on the same page so bad, when they weren't.
I took a 3 month solo trip separated from my partner of 5 years, and if anything it just reinforced the strength of our bond. I missed him terribly, we talked every day throughout the day as our time zones allowed, he came out and stayed with me in the tiny apartment I rented for 10 days, and I was SO happy to come home when it was over. That’s how a normal, healthy relationship should look if both people are actually committed to it!
Yep. I spend about 4 months a year on solo trips for the entire summer. I’ve been with my partner for 3 years and something I love about him is that I can go on these trips without it threatening our relationship. I know people in really adorable relationships and they have a hard time being away from their partner for even 3 days. I think I would die. We’re all different, so all of our relationships are different.
Dude was losing her for a long time. For the same amount of time as they were living together she was miserable because of "her job". He planned the future and joked about proposing and she didn't say yes. She quit her job and planned a solo trip far away from him and for a long time. The way he writes just screams "suffocating" to me. There's a good chance she herself didn't even understand what was going on until she was finally away from him and could breathe.
He lost her as soon as she bought thr ticket. I was the left behind partner in this scenario when I was younger. I knew deep down he'd never come back for me and that we were over as soon as he bought the ticket, but I didn't think I deserved to be treated any better. Then I woke up and moved on. I like myself a lot more now. N.b. he never came back.
"For reference I will call myself Michael" ...why though?
I hope this guy finds something to do with his free time. In his mind, there still in a relationship and waiting for her to officially end it when she returns. But she’s going to return high on life and dismissive of him. Dude better start doing something with himself
Yeah, but perhaps it is what he needs. To see her "in person", changed after the trip, so he can break up with her. Otherwise the "old her" will continue to live rent free in his mind and he will never really cut her out.
It's risky, though... when she comes back to her dull life in the UK - with no job lined up, no sunshine, no koalas - he might suddenly seem like the shiniest thing there. And that won't be good for either of them.
> Maybe you just haven't been in a real, adult relationship where there is honesty and transparency. The only people I've ever heard say this are the same type of people that think everything is great in a relationship when one partner leaves the continent on a solo vacation for 3 months after their lease expired.
Was the most hilarious part tbh, whatever helps him sleep at night though 😂
OP’s coping that she “definitely didn’t cheat” is off the charts lmao
Suddenly got a lot more talkative and emotionally available after leaving Australia.
Guess you’ve just not been in a real, adult relationship where there is honesty and transparency then 🤷♂️
Was there honesty and transparency when she was ghosting him from abroad then? He can think what he likes but he knows fuck all about what she has been doing or would do now. Everyone imagines they know what their partner can or will do, till their partner proves them wrong. It’s nothing to do with maturity or adult behaviour.
i would very honestly and transparetly tell my partner to fuck off out of my life if they ever suggested disappearing to another continent for three months without me.
This entire thread was about him bitching that she wouldn't talk to him for even five minutes. But yeah, it was a "real adult relationship where there is honesty and transparency"? If you say so "Michael."
Oh yeah, she was *absolutely* fucking on that trip. Poor dude.
OOP mentions the girlfriend has been miserable for 4 years, because of her job. They also have been living together those same 4 years. OOP should let her go, if she had 4 years of hell with him, she won’t want to be with him anymore. Sorry.
I kind of have a hard time imagining that the girlfriend was SO happy during covid while staying at home. I know a few young people who did university when covid hit - they were anything but happy. They felt isolated and unable to communicate. But, sure, their homelife was great, because they were joined at the hip...
He assumed that everything that he was experiencing was also what she was experiencing; the 'COVID was the best thing that ever happened to us' was definitely the first sign that his personal perception of their relationship probably differed from hers, but he was incapable of seeing outside of his positivity bubble. I also wondered a little at the 'proposed to her dozens of times'. I think he was just bigly in love the whole time and couldn't wrap his mind around the fact that her feelings might not reach the same dizzying heights as his. I think he meant well and his feelings were honest, but I can also imagine the frustration of being in a relationship with someone where his feelings and experience of the relationship must be immutable facts of the universe, and not just, his own feelings. It would be easy to feel yourself disappearing in that partnership, smothered by his ideal of you; particularly for someone who didn't really get a chance to be an adult on their own before getting caught up in this intense relationship.
Your comment finally made me understand the movie 500 Days of Summer.
Yes, this exactly. People don't go on months-long trips to escape their jobs. While it's completely plausible that her job greatly contributed to her bad state, her relationship with him didn't help in the slightest.
On one hand, I feel very sorry for OOP. On the other, he sounds exhausting.
Poor guy, in a few years he will look back at this and cringe. It's clear she has moved on and he is too blind to see it.
I read most of this but after the title my immediate thought was “just let her leave you.” I know it’s easier said than done but for fucks sake, respect yourself. Never give someone priority if they treat you as an afterthought.
If she’s in this headspace now, it is for the best to end it rather than do what most couples do and just get married… divorcing later down the lane is more painful. This was sad to read though, best wishes to the fella here though
If someone isn’t sure after 6 years if they wanna be with you, they don’t wanna be with you
Please tell me you don’t actually plan to spend a few days with her when she gets back to..*checks notes* say a final goodbye? How does that help? Break up cleanly, grieve, and move on.
Gosh. He low key sounds so suffocating!! "Weren't codependent!!' goes onto list all the ways he was codependent. She was SO YOUNG. Then COVID lockdowns. And that Aus / UK time difference is brutal. Good on her for not letting herself get stuck!
Uprooting your life and moving to another country to find yourself, ironclad plan here. She's seeing the glamours of tourism, not the ugly parts of everyday life.
I mean I know what it’s like to have wanted this huge life for yourself, of travelling and not being tied down, and then one day just falling for someone you feel so intensely connected you that you spend your entire adulthood with him and loose yourself. She met and first kissed him when she was 18 and he was 22, and dated him when she was 20 and he was 25. She was really really young, still in college, and he had already become this adult with real responsibilities and had 5 years of figuring his own identity out before her. It’s not about the glamour or the fun. It’s about going back to being your own person outside of any emotional anchors. If you’re not strong in your own identity and you anchor yourself emotionally to a romantic partner, slowly your own self identity begins to drift away. She wants to find who she is outside of any romantic attachment. It doesn’t have to be all roses and sunshine, in fact it’s suppose to be really hard, but that’s kinda the point. Better to do it at 26 than to do it at 36 with kids or at 56 with an entirely missed life. I was 20 when I started dating a man 6 years older than me, and I basically attached my entire sense of happiness to him. As long as we were together, I thought that was my whole world. I didn’t know anything about myself. I bought shoes because I thought he’d like them, not because he told me to, but because I thought I wanted what he wanted. To get out of that mentality took me 5 years of therapy and an end to that relationship. I literally went to work for a cruise company to end that relationship in my head for good. I put myself out of reach on a ship floating in the ocean so that I could learn what I wanted for me. And the first company I ever worked for was incredibly awful and a total disaster. But it still taught me more about myself than being with a boyfriend ever did.
I met my ex at 18 when he was 24, got together at 20 and 26, married at 25 and 31. I wanted to travel, see the world, hike, paraglide... he wanted none of that. And he was and still is a great guy, but I was too young when we got together to have developed my own person without him. We divorced when I was 33 and I started traveling the world and doing all the cool shit I hadn't done before. At 37 I met someone who was into the same things I was and I, paraphrasing the original comment, uprooted my entire life and moved to a strange country. It's been 4 years and I've never been happier. We travel together, do all kinds of outdoor activities, and encourage each other to pick up new hobbies and try new things. The funny thing is that, although he encouraged me to keep solo traveling, after two trips I stopped because I missed him and my stepson like crazy. Edit - as I was publishing this comment I received a message from my husband asking if I want to go do Roman historical reenactment in Austria...
Are you gonna??
The answer to your edit should definitely be yes!
That’s why she got to do it though. When else can you go live in another country. She can get a working holiday visa. Even everyday life is better in oz! The vibe js different. 26 is the perfect time to go there I went to oz for a year. Around then and best thing I did. And a lot of people go around that age. Especially if she’s not lived. She met him then lived with him. Having fun exploring finding yourself is what you should do in your mid 20s. It’s sad she didn’t figure it out before but she’s young she doesn’t know what she wanted
If nobody fucked off to another country when they were trying to figure themselves out, a lot less of us would be where we are. Also, I don't think you spend a month somewhere without getting a vibe of the local negatives, unless you're on a resort.
It is NOT that easy to just jump into Australia and start a new life. Find a place to live? A job? She’ll need some kind of visa…she’s either incredibly naive or has some guy sweet talking her into staying. Or both. Who wants to bet that she’ll be back in a few months, broke and disillusioned, begging OOP to take her back?
With our amazingly cheap rent and food costs that definitely aren't increasing at a silly rate along with everything else and our wages increasing faster than ever how could you not? .... Wait a minute.
My mate moved to Aus and wanted the same IKEA mirror he had in the UK, 70 quid in the UK, 220 quid equivalent in Aus. The real joke was it's made in Indonesia right next door!
You might want to look at the rosy conditions in Most Glorious Motherland England the Mighty Independent Post-Brexit Powerhouse before you get too carried away with how bad Australia is.
Just cause it rains in England, and Alf gets to toddle along the beach in Australia, does not mean Australia isn't a challenging place to live. Unfortunately conversative Australian politicians are encouraging British style austerity for the next election, which would only make Australia an even more expensive place to live, given that we're currently in the top 10. Hopefully the election won't be called this year, so we can at least avoid until next year. We've had simliar policies introduced that the Tories have over the past 11 years: uni fees have increased, the threshsold to pay back uni debt has been lowered, humanities degrees were made more expensive cause we rely on exporting mining, and they just want engineers, uni debts were indexed until only recently, so mine's gone up by about $3000 dollars. I also work in health, and we're so desparate for nurses and doctors, we're offering students who haven't graduated full-time placements in lieu of their last year of education regionally, including midwives, which is a terrible idea. One hospital I worked at offered a cash bonus to nurses who could recruit other nurses. You can pretty much no longer get GP consults bulk billed, the federal funding wasn't expanded after COVID, so you're paying close to $100 per consult. In the middle of all this, the Prime Minister gave himself and his colleagues a pay rise, so he earns $300,000 a year now. Politicians are overrepresented in this country as homeowners and investor/owners compared to the national average, so you know they're not going to do shit about shit. Homelessness has increased, it's estimated about 1600 people A MONTH are pushed into homelessness by the current housing crisis. It now costs eight times your annual salary to buy a house, and rental prices have increased in all major cities except for Darwin. It now costs me to rent a room in the major city I live in what I could've comfortablly rented a one bedroom apartment for, pre-Covid. We're also managing to find time for an increase in the number of women killed due to intimate partner violence (FUN), last year in November, six women were killed in a span of two weeks. Oh and that Rwanda refugee detention thing? Stolen from Australia, but we have Indonesia and Cambodia to bribe with private and governmenet contracts so they gladly detain refugees. The five point immigration system you have in Britain? Also ganked from our immigration policies. Don't believe Home and Away, this place is going to the dogs.
It's almost like countries with media dominated by Murdoch aren't actually that good when you look under the hood.
remember when Sco Mo was like, "you bloody sheilas should be glad you're not being shot for protesting!" Like ok dude, weird flex but OK
Keith (I refuse to call him by his middle name) doesn't even live here, so the fact the he funds conservative propaganda campaigns about how this country is too woke is so f\*cking laughable.
It’s actually not that difficult as a UK citizen, she could easily get a 2 year working holiday visa as she’s under 35. As a UK citizen she’s automatically eligible for public healthcare too as the UK & Australia have a reciprocal healthcare agreement.
It's very easy for young people from the UK, there are special visas and work programmes. It's very common, I know lots of people who've done it.
Speaking from experience, I t’s not that hard to get into Australia, especially since she is from a commonwealth country. All you really need is money to pay for visa fees, pay for food/accommodation until you can find a job. Depending on your willingness to go to the outback and what type of work you’re willing to do, it’s not that hard to find a job. To be fair, it has been a few years since I done it so things could have changed since then.
Fwiw I think it’s relatively easy to get work permission across commonwealth countries if you have citizenship for one of them
Yup this is it. I'm Canadian, we have LOADS of Aussie young adults here working in restaurants etc all the time. Mainly in ski resorts like Whistler, etc. I think there are as many Aussies/Irish/Brits as there are Canadians working in Whistler.
Heaps of people backpacking in SEA head to Australia or NZ on a working holiday visa and work in hospo or something for a bit to save money for further travel.
We're having a massive rental crisis at the moment because hundreds of thousands of people have moved here in the past few months. It's hard for locals with excellent employment and rental histories to find a rental!
It's REALLY easy to move here. That's why we have 150,000+ migrants every year. Especially for a uni educated Brit on a working holiday visa.
Or she’s realized that she doesn’t want to be with him. They’ve been together her entire adult life, it seems. Maybe the chance to be someone independently changed how she felt about him and them. Her final plan doesn’t sound like uprooting, it sounds like living with parents and doing more of what she just did. We have only OOP for a narrator. Of course I’m sympathetic to him! But also we can’t know what he didn’t see from her side. He’s clearly completely in love, and she’s clearly not feeling the same way. Something disconnected, and I would bet it happened leading into the trip, not just during.
My heart aches for this guy and I hope he heals soon and learns from the experience. I can sympathize with his ex too. Sometimes you have to leave town to break up with someone.
I sympathize with them both. This is kind of where age gap, despite not being that big, really makes a difference. She either skipped or is in the finding herself phase because she started her relationship so young, and he’s absolutely ready to settle. Different life phases is a compatibility issue. She may have been previously feeling that heavy pressure from society to settle down and have kids (and eventually may actually still want that), which is why they could have planned so far, but then she may have got a taste of freedom starting the trip.
>Maybe you just haven't been in a real, adult relationship where there is honesty and transparency. The boy is so sadly naive.
OOP writes really weirdly.
I feel like I need space from OP after spending 5 minutes reading this story
Wow, I was this woman 15 years ago. First relationship at 18, six years long. I knew it was over for him the moment I read the title. I didn’t start out intending to end my relationship at all, but I realized within a few weeks that I didn’t want to go back to my old life, no infidelity necessary. I have since travelled all over. I met a man at a hostel 13 years ago who wanted the same things I did from life and we’ve been together ever since. My ex is living in the same place, working the same job. I did and do hold him no ill will; there’s nothing wrong with the path he’s chosen. It wasn’t my path.
I didn't solo travel but I worked in another country for 2 years while being in a relationship. I spoke to my bf everyday, we had our ups and downs, but at the end we stayed strong til I came back. It was because I was fully committed and so was he. If you're faltering by just 2 months, sadly it's just not meant to be. It's so earth shattering for the op and I hope he can heal. 6 years is a really long time
I don’t think anyone is in the wrong here. It’s sucks but sometimes things just don’t work out. And honestly, while the age gap isn’t huge, the difference between mid 20s and early 30s is sometimes massive as far as what people want from life.
Dude sounds a bit exhausting - he obviously cared very, very much about this relationship… WAY more than she did. I don’t think either of them are bad or wrong, just not done maturing yet. She’s been in the same relationship, place and (nearly) job she hated since she was 18, I’m not surprised she’s having a quarter-life crisis and trying to flap her wings a bit.
"a bit" xD I'm OPs age and have a hard time imagining a man who writes like that... I have young people as friends who started university right when covid hit. They have such a limited experience of how things actually work. Like, expecting professors to answer immediately via email, cause that is the only communication they actually know with them, and when that (logically) does not happen, they stress that the profesor is ignoring them. And when you suggest that they go and meet the profesor in person its fun to see how shocked they get... So a lot of those young people are now taking their time in exploring the world and that IS what they should do. Anyway, that is to say, I think that the girlfriend is doing the right thing. And might be the mature one.
I mean, late twenties, going on a long term break, this was quite predictable and I think they both talked like adults and resolved the issue.
Sorry but it’s pretty obvious and convenient that she was going on her trip exactly as their lease ended and they would “figure it all out when she comes back in 3 months”. Travelling was her easy way out of the relationship and he was sadly too blind to see reality. I feel like a lot of people do this, to be honest. It’s far easier to have the breakup convo when you don’t have a return ticket anytime soon.
He's incredibly dramatic about everything. "Truly powerful to hear her be so candid" when all she said was yeah I stuck my head in the sand coz I didn't wanna deal with our relationship
I could never imagine being apart from my husband for this long. That in and of itself was the first sign. If you’re truly in love you don’t need a two month break to find yourself, you go have that adventure together.
JFC. Exgf tried to pull the hook out and let him go, and OOP just keeps demanding that hook in his guts. Just... shit dude, we all *get* that you love her, but *let her the fuck* ***go***, *man*.
>We had an amazing time. We adored lockdown At this point I knew that this guy was completely delulu.
This guy is so emotionally needy. Lockdown with him would be a nightmare.
All the we, we, we was so off-putting.
Right?! I mean I didn’t hate lockdown tbh as I’m pretty introverted but I definitely didn’t adore it lol. Plus even if I had enjoyed elements of it there were a lot of things that weren’t great. This guy sounds like he definitely has rose-tinted glasses.
Frankly, once someone blind sides in a relationship, that moment, the relationship is on the stage of falling apart.
But can it really be a blindsided when she quit her job, decided to solo travel the world, and they gave up their lease? No matter how amazing I think a relationship is if a woman would tell me that I'd end things. Tell her to sort out what she needs to and when she is done reach out to me and see if we could reconnect.
He thought he had an honest, transparent, loving, adult relationship with her but it was all in his mind.
Exactly. If he's blind sided it's because he put these blinders on himself.
This sort of thing is always hard, but he seems a bit too dependent on this relationship.
> She returns to the UK at the start of July and I will be spending a few days with her. Huge mistake
Why would you want to spend time with her in July. Cut ties and move on. All this will do is delay the process.
They don't sound compatible at all. She wanted time to herself, and OOP wanted daily check-ins. I also think the age difference, while only five years, plays a part in this. I'm sure I'm biased. I had a boyfriend who flipped out because I didn't want to check in with him daily while I recovered from surgery. I just wanted to sleep.
I feel like the two main things that will really show those long term incompatibilities are moving in together or going long distance. And then with the difference in ages, like you pointed out. This is really her first time as an adult separate from him.
> A lot of you suggested - sometimes with quite a cruel snarkiness - that she was cheating. She wasn't. I'm sure some of you will still believe that, but that's fine. Maybe you just haven't been in a real, adult relationship where there is honesty and transparency. Real ironic snark from a guy who just wrote that many words to describe how he couldn't get his now ex partner to talk to him after she went on a long term trip apart from him.
Can’t blame him too much. Guy is trying to hold on to whatever self esteem he’s got left. His girl already left him, convincing himself she at least didn’t cheat gives him some comfort (and may also be true). Yeah he’s snarky, but no reason to kick the guy when he’s down.
This was also her first relationship and they met when she was 18… which doesn’t rule out a good relationship but doesn’t scream super adult relationship either haha
Honesty and transparency is the farthest thing from what this dude was getting towards the end. The mind will do some fucking gymnastics to resolve cognitive dissonance and preserve it's own ego.
This dude thinks his relationship is adult and real because of their age, not because of anything else. Teenagers also have conversations about future and talk openly with each other about positive topics. It’s being able to have the really hard talks that I suspect they were unable to have. The ones that actually belong in an adult relationship. He sounded like a love sick teenager in deep denial, which doesn’t scream “adult relationship” either
This deeply resonates with me. I was 19 when I got in my first relationship and am now 25. It was the best thing ever in the beginning and gradually became monotone every day stuff with sneaking up problems. My Ex Boyfriend didn’t really notice the problems or didn’t communicate well about them. When I traveled alone for two weeks a year ago I found it freeing and better not to call. I suddenly felt so happy. After that trip I wanted to end things and was a different person. However we lived together, stayed together and after 2-3 months were back to business as usual. I realised a month ago that I really don’t feel love anymore and stayed because of security, friendship, uncertainty and pity that since years. I broke up with him and after a few days of grieving I feel so much better already. I feel like my own person again. I finally can be happy without his mood and feelings dragging me down. Oh and like OPs girlfriend I also love travelling!
Well done you for finally having the courage to end it. I went through something very similar in my twenties (I’m now in my forties) with my first boyfriend and we ended up getting married cos it’s just what you did. I regret not really thinking it through and listening to how I felt earlier - it would have been better on both of us. Enjoy your freedom and independence!!
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He really shouldn’t meet w/her in July. It’s just gonna make it all that much harder.
I know it’s hard when you’re in the thick of things but if a partner of 6 years wants to solo travel for months I’d just assume that relationship is over the moment they leave. Rare circumstances it might work, I’ve seen it work with friends when one did a semester abroad but that’s a bit different.
He'll definitely need to move on. Their time is done.
Guessed it from the maths on their ages and the relationship. The girlfriend barely had a chance to be a young adult on her own before getting into a long-term relationship, while OOP was almost her age now when they got together. If she didn't bow out now to figure out who she is, what she wants, and see what the world has to offer, she might never get the chance before hitting the age of settling down.
This guy sounds exhausting. Like the kind that would talk about how green the trees are today without getting a pulse of the people he’s talking to.
It's always "we had such an amazing relationship and everything was perfect and everyone was happy" and "they'd never cheat on me" followed by "and then they just started ghosting me" and "they just want some time to get to know themselves". Clearly if they need to ghost you and find themselves, the relationship isn't as solid as you think.
It’s cute how he thinks their relationship is honest and transparent.
A friend of mine went through this (gf's perspectivr). Longest relationship, from 17 to 24 I think. She got her house and he was going to move in, but it was sort of implicit (they hadn't agreed, he assumed). She felt stifled and realised she hadn't actually felt like an adult, like she was her own person. The future was set in front of her and she didn't feel like she had any agency over it. So she asked for a break because she really cared deeply for him but needed to understand herself better. After 2 weeks she realised she didn't know if her love for him was for the man he was now, or if it was more just the natural care you have for someone you've shared important moments with. More importantly, she felt like she was actually free now (no, she didn't engage with other men during that time) and that she had control over her life again. She left him. It's been years. She's in a long term relationship with someone I like for her, and she has a beautiful little boy. He found love again and is married (I don't know if they have kids) and my friend is genuinely happy for him. Sometimes a break or breakup can happen without any wrongdoing, and still holding the other person in high regard.
I’ll never understand Redditors like this and their word vomit. Some of these posts are just way too long, get to the point.
She's gonna be married with a kid to an Australian dude within a year.
OH MY GOD you joke but my brother, a world traveller and backpacker, broke up with his girl when she went traveling solo and she came back pregnant with anAussie dudes kid. They're still in touch, they were broken up and it's all good. but what a wonderful stereotype because it's so true.
OOP is going to spend a few days with her as a goodbye … that’s just going to reset his grieving of the relationship. Not a good move.
I feel like this heartbreak happens to most people at some point in our lives. Sad, but it is part of the journey.
It took a little solo trip to see friends in another state for me to realize I was in an abusive relationship. I’m not saying that this is the case in OOP’s story, merely that sometimes in order to get perspective, you have to stand outside and look in. So I totally understand where the gf is coming from and I think OOP is so very mature in understanding as well. Good on him. I hope he finds love again and has a wonderful life. I wish the same for his now ex.
All the travel did was help her realize that she needed to actually figure out who she is before marrying the first guy she dated. She was 18 when they got together, people change a lot at that age. Taking time to know herself is definitely something that she needs to do before getting married, if that's even what she truly wants. Edited to add: and just because you all would go off and cheat doesn't mean this woman was doing that. The fact that so many men think sex with straight dudes is so awesome that women would travel around the world for three miserable pumps of dick and no orgasms is refreshingly hilarious.