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Seriously what do you do in a long-distance relationship?

My boyfriend and I just celebrated our 2-year anniversary earlier this February. And during 24 months officially being a couple, we only spent 9 months with each other physically. Our relationship began when I was already in Finland finishing my freshman year, so it was natural that our relationship went this way. It was tough, really tough, but we have made it this far (wow… (seriously, wow)). I guess it is because we made up our minds already in the beginning so it was easier for us to accept the fact that this road was no flower road. Almost everyday since then, we call each other every evening. A lot of people wonder what we talk about everyday and how we do not get bored of those conversations. So in this blog, I am gonna give an answer to that by sharing some activities we do together in our long-distance relationship, and hopefully, I can help other long distance couples out there generate some ideas to spend time with your partner.

I tell him about my day and listen to his.

It sounds very simple and obvious, but this really matters. This is what we do everyday to show that we care for each other and we are not bored of it. When I tell him about my day, I tell him the interesting things happened during the day. I tend to notice the little stuffs that I find really amusing and I cannot wait to share with him at the end of the day. The story can be as simple as how slowly I walk and how I invented a game to entertain myself because it took me forever to get to the school. And he will tell me what he studied today and try to explain all Economics and Finance stuffs in my language so I am really excited to hear all about those. It is a balance between my afflatus stuffs and his knowledgeable stories that our conversations keep going on. But in the end, if you have strong feelings for someone, it does not matter (that much!!!) what that person is talking about, you just feel grateful that you have time for each other.

We found a lot of games to play with each other, and we are still searching for more!

Of course we do not spend all of our times talking about our day. As the relationship going, we found out some interesting games we could play together and it is just as fun, both online and offline! Okay, here it goes…

ONLINE GAMES

8 ball pool: This is a stable online platform for those who love playing pool, we connected to our Facebook accounts and challenged each other with many types of pool. We even created our own rules or bet on something (rather than fake coin they give us in the game) to make it more exciting.

Zynga Poker: Okay, we play poker together… But the funniest part is we play against the others in the table. We do not cheat, we only set a goal to win all the money in the table every game we play. It makes me feel like in old tales that the two of us against the world.

Scrabble: A more “intellectual” game than pool and poker. I introduced him to this game and now he is even more addicted to this game than I am. Basically, it is a word game and you play against each other or you can choose a random partner to defeat together.

Rummikub: This is also a brain-fucked game (sorry we are really into these stuffs). Basically you arrange numbers to win.

Battleship: We play in this link: http://en.battleship-game.org. It is an “ancient” game but everything gets better with bets, trust me

Go and Chinese Chess: Well it seems that we don’t fuck our brain enough with our education, we keep asking for more…

Loveball and Jellydoodle: Two more brain games, you cannot really interact with each other through these, but you can go through the challenges together (with two different phones at two different locations but yeah, still counts). It is just really nice to rack our brain together. True story!

Wordlink or Wordscapes: Words game, nothing much.

The Impossible Test, The Idiot Test, What’s in the box,…: Some other brain games if you’re interested. Cannot stress enough that we’re into these stuffs.

OFFLINE GAMES

Charades, pictionary, all those stuffs: thegamegal.com is a word generator platform for these kinds of games. There are different categories and different difficulty level for you to choose.

Whisper challenge: This is actually from Jimmy Fallon videos that we know about this game. One person mute the call, and say a sentence or sing a song, whilst the other one has to guess what is the sentence or what is the song while listening to some distracting music.

One-word song: Also from Jimmy Fallon channel. Basically you can only sing a song with one word, for example “goose”, so the whole song will go like “goose, goose goose goose, goose goose goooooooose….”. We use a song generator to random a song and thegamegal to choose the word.

5-second rule: This one is from Ellen’s channel. So my boyfriend will ask me to name three things in a categories and I need to answer it within 5 seconds. And then we switch. It is easy to find the questions by Google but we also make up our own categories like “3 things you will do when you see a penguin”. The more unique and creative the categories are, the more fun and unexpected the game gets.

Eat, befriend or fight: This is an interesting game from The Big Bang Theory. I will choose 3 animals like dinosaur, bear, and elephant; and then I will ask him to choose which animal he would rather eat, befriend or fight with. He needs to answer and give an explanation to that. We had quite a lot of fun with this game.

We also watch TV shows and movies together!

Instead of going to the cinema or sitting next to each other watching TV, we do it through Skype. We both turn on the episode we want to watch and then press play at the same time. We watched 10 seasons of “F.R.I.E.N.D.S”, 12 seasons of “The Big Bang Theory”, and 6 seasons of “Criminal Minds”. We choose series that are about 20-40 minutes long so we can watch it while we’re having meals (dinner for me and midnight snacks for him). If time allows, we would watch longer movies like “Our times”, some silly chick flicks (I choose of course) or mind-fucked movies (yeah you can tell). Recently, we do not have time to watch a long movie, so we switch to short videos from Ellen’s and Jimmy Fallon’s channels. It is soooo fun that I finally have someone to share all of these videos with. I used to watch these all alone and this really is amazing to me. Also, I watch NBA highlights with him because he’s crazy about basketball. I like basketball, not in a passionate way, but yeah I enjoy it. I never watch it all by myself, because I don’t know the teams, I don’t know who is who, and sometimes I don’t even know what just happens on the court. But it is really nice to watch basketball with him because he will not let me sit there like a potato but he will explain things to me, or give me some background information like who the tall black guy is and so on. I think we can share our interests  like this mostly because one person is willing to share and the other one is open to it and ready to find out more.

We take breaks from the fun and have deep talks too.

By deep talks I mean we talk seriously and truthfully in emotional, intellectual and spiritual aspects. It doesn’t have to be serious and stiff, we still laugh and joke along the way but we know the talk is real stuff. It can come very naturally in our conversation, one thing leads to another and we have the “deep talk”. They say that we cannot force a “deep talk” but turn out we can. We find some questions online, (they are available at thegamegal or you can use Pinterest and Google – there are plenty of them), and we take turn answer it and discuss our answers together. We understand each other much much better through this experience. I get to know his reaction and thoughts on certain situations and subjects. And through his explanation, I understand his reasons, his perspectives and clearly I could understand him better. It is really interesting how sometimes I think what I see is obvious but it turns out very differently in his thoughts.  These questions are mainly for the emotional and spiritual aspects, but it is really good to talk “intellectually” too. So when we come across some interesting topics that we both have knowledge and interests in, we discuss and sometimes, debate about that. Being in a relationship with a person means growing with them in all three dimensions. Therefore, it is important for me, and I believe for him also, that we have those talks. Also, it is really fun to prove someone wrong, so why not?

We plan something special for special occasions.

Surprise is my favorite element in life. And I’m talking about good surprise from my loved ones. I myself enjoy very much the process of planning and making presents for people I love, and distance doesn’t make it any harder. For example, on his 19th birthday, I prepared an Instagram account full with our pictures and stories to show him how much he means to me, and last birthday, I made him a playlist so that he can listen to that on the long bus to his university. We also called each other from a chicken restaurant to have a lunch date with each other – both dressed up! In return, he filled an empty USB with all the videos of himself singing and playing ukulele for me so that I could bring to Korea and listen to that when I was sad. He even wrote me a song on my birthday! There was one random day, it was after our first summer together and I already came back to Finland, he just went around in Hanoi taking pictures of places that were meaningful to us and sent them to me because “I suddenly miss you”. These special little things remind us why we do this in the first place, and show the other person that we care and we are also trying hard for our future.

These are basically everything we do during our 2 years of relationship. It has not always been fun and games and special things like I wrote above. Sometimes we just leave the Skype there and do our own work (and watch the other person do theirs) because we are too busy. But that is okay, because we know everything will turn out well for us as long as we still cherish each other everyday a little bit more and set some times to ask the other “How was your day?”

#long distance #long distant couple #ldr #ldr blog #nvdxcmh since05022017