Maintaining a long distance relationship as an expat in Sweden

Hello everyone,

Moving to Sweden without your significant other can be quite difficult, especially since your partner is an undeniable source of support. This kind of move may require some adjustments from both parties in order to make it a successful one.

What is challenging about being in a long distance relationship in Sweden?

How to maintain an adequate level of communication considering differing schedules and time zones?

How often would you travel to each other's location to meet?

How do you manage to still have a social life in Sweden?

What hurdles need to be considered if you have left behind children who are under the sole care of your partner?

Thanks for sharing your experience,
Bhavna

I really hope those who are in an ongoing long distance relationship or those who have had long distance relationships would share experiences with rest of us in this forum and help each other to handle the situation much easier and help others who maybe one day happened to face this reality, to have some better understanding about it.

I happened to read this old thread https://www.expat.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=667565 and found out things could turn into very seriously bad situations sometimes when a long distance relationship becomes a kind of nightmare even though the couple hasn't been done anything wrong. So please take this opportunity Bhavna has created for you to do a good deed by simply sharing your experiences. Thank you!

The hardest part of a long distance relationship is the absence of the soul.

Then comes the absence of live reality, meaning whatever you say or hear is only the words, which only have the first layer of the knowledge of whatever the words are meant for.
In a relationship there are few more layers of the meanings of words, body language together with physical contacts take a conversation to whole different higher dimension which is totally not there in a long distance relationship.

I wonder if anyone can survive when there is an absence of the soul and when the live reality becomes just a dream.

From my experiences I can say that the only thing a long distance relationship is good for is to create a spiral of misunderstandings which helps you to appear as someone else which you really are not and that is also bilateral. The word "frustration" must be the key word of a long distance relationship. I finally understood what the OP of the thread I posted in previous post meant with her words. I really hope Swedish Migration Agency would hire more and more people so that they can prevent the suffering of people by handling their cases much faster.         

To conclude "Maintaining a long distance relationship as an expat in Sweden" is an impossible mission according to my personal opinion but certainly there are also other people who are much better than me at Mission Impossible.