***TL;DR: GF and I went for 3 months long-distance by necessity, it’s only been a month and things are rapidly falling apart. She’s cold and distant to me, makes no effort to spend time with me, actively shuts me down when I try to make an effort to spend time with her, and refuses to talk to me about any of this. I have no idea what to do, and the relationship feels like it’s fallen apart. I want to mend it and make things feel right again, but it’s hard for me to judge if that’s even possible. I need some other perspective on this because I feel clueless.***

My girlfriend and I have been together for two years, and it’s been the time of my life. I’ve never felt more love for any human being before, and I’ve even considered proposing soon, although that idea is on hiatus now. Recently, we had to transition our relationship to a long distance one, temporarily. Circumstances with my job made me have to leave for three months, and there’s two left.

Normally this would worry me, but we had to do this once before and it went completely fine, and this is the last time it would have to. We were both completely aware this would happen and promised each other to make the best of it and to do as much as we can together and for each other. And the thing is, it’s nothing I couldn’t have called off beforehand either, she assured me, swore to me that it would be fine.

Only, it hasn’t really happened that way. It’s been one month, and she’s practically made herself a stranger to me. Even since the first day away from her, it felt off. I justified this to myself as it just being stress, because I do get that, but it didn’t make the feeling of her being distant from me any better. Skip over a few weeks, and it’s the same story. We never talk like we used to, in fact we only do anything if I’m the one initiating any form of contact.

And even then, lots of times she will just spend entire days playing World of Warcraft with her sister. On one hand I get it since I want her to have valuable time with family as well, but it’s been happening far too often and I’ve been “with” her for far too little time for me to just ignore it.

Hell, when we *do* actually spend time together, even that doesn’t feel right. The chemistry is all off, everything feels stilted and awkward. We genuinely can hardly even hold a conversation anymore. The most conversation we have now on average is just making small-talk about the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard stuff, or small-talk about whatever we’re doing at the moment. Whether it’s watching a movie or spending 90% of the day playing World of Warcraft, which I’ve expressed a feeling of burnout for.

The burnout aside, I do still play it with her at any given opportunity since I want to spend time with her regardless. Lately though, she doesn’t ask or initiate anything with it and just plays by herself. Unless I go out of my way to tell her that I want to play with her, which even then sometimes doesn’t work, she’s just estranged from me and goes about her business like I don’t exist.

It’s basically at the point where if I don’t do exactly what she wants to do, which is play WoW for entire days every day while basically communicating nothing, we don’t spend time together. It’s this “I’m going to do this and you can either join in or not” kind of attitude, and I really resent it. There have been several days in the past month where we just go an entire day without speaking or doing anything, and she just acts like it’s fine.

Something like this would never *ever* occur before I left a month ago, and it especially didn’t occur the last time I had to be away for 3 months. In fact, it would make us both anxious and sad if even we were apart for even half the time we usually are now (on a daily basis), and we would quickly call each other or organize something.

Now, not so much. A lot of the time when I’m even initiating something with her, I get “I’m busy” or any variation of that, and then I have to wait hours on end just to even get a phone call. She doesn’t work, she just finished school, and she’s a home-body kind of girl so rarely is there ever anything to be actually busy with. More often than not it’s just her playing WoW, alone a lot of the time even.

A few weeks ago we had a conversation, just going over hypothetical but realistic situations that could affect our lives, and what we would do. It was a good conversation actually, and it made comfortable for most of it. But then we got to the question as to what we would do if something were to happen to my job, or if for any unforeseen reason I had to stay away longer, **and she all but confirmed that we’d be over in that case**. It completely threw me off because we’ve always talked about how much we were willing to do for each other and how hard we would always fight to keep what we have.

I asked her to promise me that in those events we would at least try, and she just kept saying that it was something she couldn’t agree to or promise. And to me, that’s the absolute worst aspect of any of this. It feels as if she already has one foot out of the door, ready to go if necessary.

Anyone would think “just talk to her, tell her how you’ve been feeling about things”. It’s a great idea, and I have. Multiple times. We’ve had 4 *long* conversations about this, and in every instance it just resulted in her getting annoyed with me. She asks me “what do you want me to do”, says that it’s an unstable situation and of course it feels weird. I ask her what changed to make things so awful this time around compared to the last time we did this, and she doesn’t have an answer.

She tells me “it just is”. The last time we spoke about it, I made it clear just to what extent this is really hurting me and making it hard for me to even feel motivated/excited to come back.

She pretty much just said that she’s sorry I’m having a hard time and then (annoyedly and sarcastically) said she was sorry she couldn’t be exciting for me. At that point, she just got impatient with me and said she was going to sleep, and that she’s sick of having these talks.

Today, the cold shoulder happened again. I didn’t her from her in the morning nor the afternoon. I called her and she blocked it, telling me “I’m playing with my sister, I’ll call you later”. Okay. Coincidentally, I got really good news from work around this time. I sent the news to her, waited a few hours and got “that’s good” back. Nothing for the rest of the day. And not for a lack of effort, because I called her quite a few times, and got no answer.

Turns out she was playing WoW, again, with her sister and some friends. I didn’t hear anything from her for several more hours until she told me via text that she was going to sleep.

I just want things to be normal again. I want us to laugh and talk together like we used to. I don’t know if I’m crazy or overreacting; I’m sure some of this sounds like I’m making a bigger deal than it needs to be, but all of it compacted together is driving me crazy.

And I do get not spending every 24 hours of the day together, because that’s not attainable or realistic, and I also get spending time with family.

But it’s like, if I don’t force interaction of any kind between us, nothing happens and it feels like she prefers it that way. I sincerely feel like I lost her. We don’t talk, hell I CAN’T talk to her about anything important because it just pisses her off. We don’t do anything. It feels like all the affection and care she might have once had for me has just evaporated. Like I’m just an afterthought to her, with her having no regard or care if I’m apart of her day-to-day life or not.

It doesn’t feel like a relationship. Honestly any time we do talk now, it just feels like I’m some casual friend of hers. I have tried and tried to lessen what I’ve been feeling, and to make things better, but all it does is make things worse. To the point now it just feels like she’s better off and happier when I’m not being a thorn in her side at any point of any day. It’s completely emptied me of any excitement, happiness or motivation that I had about our relationship, let alone our future.

And the most bewildering thing to me is how quickly things have withered and died between us. **It’s only been little over a month.** We were fine before I left, and unless she deliberately lied to me about things not being okay, we talked extensively about how things were and how we were going to keep them that way before I left. Then it just never happened.

Sorry, this is really way too long, but I needed to get the whole thing all out in hopes for some kind of answer. I’m really caught up in the details of everything because of how much I’ve tried already. I don’t have many people in my life, I don’t do therapy, there’s really no one I can talk to about this. The one person in the world I would have hoped could’ve had a conversation with me about these things, the one person I hoped would have cared to at the very least listen, has let me down. And I’m getting really tired of being let down lately. I don’t think it will be long before I just become indifferent and lose everything I feel. I hope I formatted and did everything right, I really need some advice on this.

What should I do here, exactly? Going forward, I do want to try my best to alleviate this, but I’m at a loss as to how. Obviously I’d love to talk to her about it but if she so much as gets a hint that I’m upset about her distancing, she turns into a brick wall. I’m not the smartest guy or best with words so maybe there’s another way to come at this in a discussion, I just wish I knew what to do or say since most of my attempts have crashed and failed thus far.

1 comment
  1. Hey there, did you try getting her to talk about how she feels while you are away? Where there any issues unresolved shortly before the trip? I don’t think such a shut down just randomly occurs, is she maybe in a bad place mentally? This could be a few reasons. Of course she could be losing interest, but this would have to be happening a bit before the trip. If you need help with conversation starters here are a few.

    Hey (name), how do you feel about me being away?

    Are you upset with me, if yes, why?

    How are things going with you? Is everything alright? How much did you eat today, etc?

    If she has fallen into a gaming addiction make sure, she at least eats enough, maybe try for her to meet up with her sister if this is possible. Try to slowly coax her out of her comfort zone without trying this to obvious. When you get back and she still doesn’t do anything besides playing WoW try to get her to see a therapist.

    I hope I could help you to some extent and good luck 🙂

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