Ask Beastly: He’s Leaving for His Dream Job—What About Us?

She wants to stay together, but he’ll be gone.

Hi.

I’m a straight-ish woman (female pronouns) in my mid-20s, so not your target audience, but I’m neurodivergent, a recovered addict, and used to be a sex worker, so we have things in common.

My boyfriend recently got accepted for a job he’s always wanted, which will have him on the other side of the world for 8 months each year. He’ll be home the other 4 months and is only planning on staying in the job for 15-16 years, it’s not an industry people often spend their whole career in. I’m really happy for him, although I’m worried he’ll start to forget about me or get distracted.

I’d like to stay in a relationship with him. He makes me happy, he makes me laugh, he prefers the icing, while I prefer the cake. We go well together, but we’ve only been together for a year, and although we’ve talked about 'the future', he’s only 19 (the age of consent is 16 both here and where he’s going, I’m not doing anything illegal). I struggle to understand how he can be so confident in talking about 10 years when 10 years ago he wanted to be Spider-Man, and when I was his age, I only cared about having enough smoke for the night (it was a dark time).

I’m looking for advice about maintaining an intimate connection in long-distance relationships, both romantically and sexually.

Now that I’ve thought about it, any advice on getting his parents to like me, despite the age gap (they know nothing of my past), would be appreciated too, although I’m fine with them not liking me. I don’t like them much either.

Also, I know you’ll get my name from my email address. I trust you won’t publish it.

Best of luck xx

P.S. Apologies, I just realised that once I’d taken out everything irrelevant, what’s left is monumentally boring.

Hey Jane Doe, 

You sound cool, and that makes you my target audience. I only include the nicknames people give themselves, and only when those nicknames are included in the message. All questions are published anonymously here. Even when proper names are included in a message (which is discouraged), I delete surnames to protect identity.

To repeat: I do not get names from emails, and anyway, email names are not reliable. I cannot assume that a message from janedoe@gmail.com (just as an example) is from someone named Jane Doe. Anyone can make an email address with any name in it.

Your message is not boring. All messages are appreciated, but many of mine come from beginners—newcomers to life’s tribulations. And that’s not you. You and I share neurodivergence, sex work, and a drug history, so I will speak plainly, as if to a friend: I’m sorry babe, long-distance relationships do not work. 

LDRs have a low success rate even in optimal conditions. Humans may be infatuated with images and impressions of each other online, but that’s not love. Instagram crushes can run deep, hovering between mild curiosity and low-voltage want, but real lust needs skin and smell, and love needs in-person face time. Deep bonds live in the flesh, in being and breathing and sharing all those mundane, quiet moments in which we truly fall in love with someone: getting coffee, going for a drive, walking around.

As I wrote this month in Document Journal, a relationship is shared time, nothing more—think of dating like latching on to someone for a bit, not just to their timeline but to their physical location in the world. Life is movement, and dating someone means moving with them.

If you were married, you would just move with him. Even marriages bound by finances, social pressure, and legal obligations, such as parenthood, are often strained under the harsh conditions imposed by travel and work, and usually fail to survive over distance. Marriages are inconvenient and often force people to give up opportunities they would otherwise take if they were single. To go the distance, a marriage must be flexible and mobile. Married people move with their partners.

You are not married. You are not tethered to him by children, money, or law. You are linked to him by affection, a chemistry built on in-person contact. You must be physically present with someone and look into their eyes to maintain that connection. Eight months out of a twelve-month year is too much time apart. If he keeps this job for fifteen years, you will spend only five of those years with him. You will get a third of his life. That’s not enough.

Any couple spending so much time apart will naturally drift and seek intimacy elsewhere. Humans need humans. You can’t expect him (or you) to go without intimacy for eight months. So, at most, you can have a casual, non-monogamous or even polyamorous relationship with him in which he (and you) enjoy sex and companionship with others during the long stretches apart. If you cannot do that, this should probably end.

As many couples with age differences will tell you, age difference matters less as you age and stops being a concern altogether at a certain point. The differences between someone nineteen and someone twenty-nine are substantial—the nineteen-year-old still has a lot of growing up to do—but the twenty-nine-year-old and the thirty-nine-year-old are on more even footing. I personally would be wary of dating someone so young, but as he gets older, his age will matter less. 

It’s a slightly red flag that you don’t like his parents and that they don’t like you. Parents are, for better and worse, part of dating someone. Liking them is not required, but it really, really helps. I would not be as concerned about your relationship with them if your relationship with him were more solid. Since it’s not, the tension between you and them only adds strain. If you were married to him, had a child with him, or were planning to move with him, you would simply have to endure his parents, and their approval would be of greater concern. Your attitude about them (“It doesn’t matter if they don’t like me”) suggests something in you knows it’s over.

So, things don’t look great. That’s not me being fatalist, just honest. Be proud of him, happy that he found a job and is going on an adventure, and let him go on it—alone. Sometimes people have to go on adventures, and we have to let them. That’s love. 

Sometimes people wind up together. Sometimes they don’t. Life cannot be predicted. Love has a way of looping back on itself and reconnecting people who drifted apart, but I would not count on that. I do not believe in a grand design or ordered universe—I believe in chaos and chance—but love lives in chaos and chance. Thrives, even.

I’m not saying you will date him again. He might be a stepping stone, a growth point, a place of warmth in your history. On a long enough timeline, and in the best-case scenario, that’s all anyone can be: someone you love who helped you grow.

If he is that, be grateful. Love him for that. Name a star after him and look at it once in a while. Don’t text him drunk. 

Love, Beastly