You Will Get There.

Seriously, you will.

If you’re reading this, there’s a reasonable chance that you’re in a long distance relationship. The more I look into the phenomenon, the more I realise how widespread it is, and how varied. A lot of LDR couples are parted by job moves across the US, or college moves, or family ties. If this is you, chances are you’re on the younger side of life (which is where I’d class myself, though I’m well out of college). Another group of couples met online, in forums and interest sites or through a shared acquaintance. If this is you, you might be a little older (or you might not) and you might very easily be not just in a different country, but on a different continent. That’s definitely my category – as you may already know, I’m British and my fiancee , Tina, is American. We have a space and time gap of 3,500 miles and a 5 hour time zone difference. That’s pretty steep but not the steepest – one couple I know have 7,600 miles and a 7 hour difference, though I suppose you could say that once you’re into ‘air travel or nothing’, differences in distance aren’t as huge as they seem, unless you’re in UK to Australia territory.

If you’re one of those lucky different continent couples (DCC? maybe not) then, like us, you may well be looking down the barrel of a long and tedious process to get your hands on a visa and travel to your loved one for good. No more airport separations. No more long distance. No more Skype.

Pretty powerful goals for most of us. Even with that motivation, though, it can seem an endless and overwhelming task at times. Not only do you have a whole bunch of forms to be very precisely filled out and checked a million times, you also have a bewildering array of certificates and evidence types to organise, all split into several stages with their own confusing acronyms and labels (NVC, USCIS, AOS, EAD, I-129F, K-1, CR-1. I-134, etc etc etc….). You have the stress of waiting every time you send something off and it’s out of your hands…. will you hear back in a couple of months or in 10 or 12? The timescales are so painfully vague. And all the research! Finding out exactly which information to put where, which varieties of each form you actually need for your situation…. the workload seems infinite sometimes. Of course, this isn’t even taking into account the task of moving out of your home, leaving friends and family (if you’re the mover), leaving your jobs and so on….

The point is, it’s a lot to deal with. At times it feels like so much you don’t even know where to begin, and it definitely feels like there’s no end in sight. But – and this is the important bit – there is. It might take a while – it probably will – but just the fact that you’re doing it means you will one day be together. All you need to do is work away at it a little each day, whether that’s gathering evidence or logging information in a form, and before long you’ll be much further ahead than you realised.

Tina and I started the first research stages over a year ago. As I write this, I’m nine days away from my one way flight. That’s a long stretch of time! Sometimes it feels like we’ve been locked in this waiting game forever. It’s taken its toll on us too, with the stress and anxiety, the pain of separation and the out of kilter sleep patterns from trying to connect around our time zone differences, to name but a few. And yet…. here we are, just over a week away. It does have an end. Your lives together do have a beginning. You just have to keep going, do your research and prepare, and you will get there.

Us, over in a year ago, somewhere in New York. Crazy to think how much we’ve been through since then… but we did get through it.

 

One thing I would recommend: have a definite end date for your long distance existence. Look at the average visa processing timelines and make an educated guess. It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong, and you can adjust it as you go if it is, but you’ll probably be in the ballpark area (we picked Christmas this year and clung to that, even when it looked unlikely, and amazingly it turned out to be December sixth). It’s so much better to have that actual date as a beacon to look to instead of ‘in the future….’ and other such vagueness. Plan actual things. Make it real; because it is.

Keep plugging away and don’t give up.

 

Us, Pennsylvania, just a few weeks ago. Almost there!