Dear Coach:
I am an HIV+ gay man living in France and recently traveled to the States on business. During my stay, I had the glorious pleasure of getting to know a beautiful man I met off an Internet dating site, and to say that we really hit it off would be an understatement! We only had a week together, but it was one of the most magical times of my life. The sex with him was the absolute best I’ve ever had! Then wham! Vacation over! Now I’m back home in France and feel like crying. I want him. I think about him every single day. We talk on the phone about four times a week, e-mail each other, and post each other letters and cards. I have a long-distance relationship going here! He’s planning on coming to visit me this summer and I can’t wait! My dilemma is that I want to be with him, as I believe he may be my Mr. Right. I’m impatiently waiting for him to say the magic words “I love you”, but he hasn’t yet and he focuses on the fact that we live so far apart. If he asked me to drop everything and move to America, I wouldn’t hesitate. On the other hand, if I asked him to leave everything and join me in France, he’d have a difficult time with the language barrier. The scary part is that as an HIV+ person whose medications are all taken care of by socialized medicine here, it would be rough going to pick up and move to the States. He is HIV+ also and has very good health coverage through his employer. What am I to do? He lives in a very homophobic state, while here in France, civil-unions for same-sex couples have been legal for 5 years and you can feel safe holding your boyfriend’s hand in public. Plus there are so many social advantages here too. As you can see, my head is muddled with all these conflicting thoughts. My heart says go and my head says that I don’t really know him well enough to give up everything I’ve built here. It’s been so long since I felt like I met someone who I truly felt was a good match for me. Help me get my feet back down on the ground!
Floating In France
Dear Floating:
Thanks for writing! Wow, what a dilemma! What do you do when you finally meet someone of quality and substance and he lives half-way across the world? I’m probably not going to say anything you haven’t already contemplated, but my first suggestion to you is to enjoy what’s happening to you; relish in it, yet also temper your excitement by going slow and pacing the relationship. Let it evolve naturally and avoid rushing things, particularly emotional intimacy. If not careful, your excitement could sabotage things either by scaring him (which would cause him to distance) or by clouding your judgment about his true compatibility for you. It sure seems so far that the two of you are meshing well, but your time together has also been too short and overshadowed by the high of newness/chemistry/attraction to accurately see each other for who you really are quite yet. That comes progressively over time through more communication and experiences shared. So relax, enjoy, and pace. Avoid pushing him for the “L” word and give him time to articulate his feelings. Let his persistent interest and the awesome times you guys have shared so far be validation enough of how special and meaningful to him you are; the rest will evolve naturally. This way he might be more comfortable becoming more expressive as time goes on.
Now to your dilemma. You have three choices that seem apparent. You could chock up the experience as a whirlwind escapade that you’ll treasure forever so you could invest your energies into finding a man more geographically accessible and available to you before you invest your heart any further. Second, if both of you are agreeable, you could try on a long-distance relationship for size. The good news is that these do actually work! The bad news is that they’re extremely challenging and lonely. For a long-distance relationship to work, communication and trust are essential. You’ll need to consider whether you have a foundation for these ingredients in your relationship with him now or if more time and experience would be needed to solidify them. Lastly, one or the other of you could move to be closer to each other.
This last option is particularly tricky and risky. In all honesty, vacation romances, particularly those that were brief, are not typically sufficient enough to gauge life partner suitability. Time is needed to nurture emotional intimacy and observe each other outside the context of the romantic rendezvous to learn about each other’s values, philosophies of life, needs, desires,etc. to assess true goodness-of-fit. If you decide to throw caution to the wind and uproot yourself to be with your new lover, you’ll have to make sure your motives are in the right place. Are you running away from something or toward something? How invested and rooted are you in France? Can you financially, emotionally, and health-wise afford to make such a move as this would be a huge life change and transition to adjust to and will most likely be a jolt to your system. If you moved, where would you live and how would you support yourself? How resilient are you? If you moved and things didn’t work out between the two of you, would you harbor resentments against him and be able to cope with this without an established support system? Whatever you decide, you both have to be on the same page and you have to take responsibility for the choice and be prepared to be accountable for any consequences that result (positive and negative). These are just a few questions to help steer you down the path of your decision-making process. It’s a really hard choice to make, but be clear in your thinking and I’m cheering for you! Good luck!
–The Gay Love Coach