"We started going out together in our city without leaving room for homosexuality"

Laith (a 23-year-old pseudonym), a young Jordanian like me, talked about two emotional relationships that he had experienced from a distance. Both ended.

Read the full blog: Love Remotely

I do not remember the number of times my friends asked me last year: "Why did not you fall in love with someone who lives in your city?" And I had just come out of a love affair at a distance, the first but not the last.

I have lived in love, not in both, me and the other person, we live in the same country, despite the insistence that I had the two times not to the make. The first was with a young man from my city whom I had known since my adolescence but who lived in a European country, the second with a stranger whom I had known for a month, then we made our decision. The first lasted one year, the second did not exceed three months.

Both relationships were superficial: our ages were close and the environments we belonged to were similar, and both lived in countries that required a complicated visa with equal chances of rejection and acceptance. But the merits of the two relationships differed entirely because of the partner in the relationship and its duration, and even because of the changes that took place through the relationship between them.

When someone asks me the question I do not answer, I say: "Because I like to collect different visas on my Jordanian passport" or "because I hate myself".

My friends started asking this question after living with me the details of the first relationship, thinking that logic might force them not to repeat it. Some even decided to avoid this type of distant relationship because of what I have experienced. But if I want to open them, and also to myself, I can not pretend that distance was the reason for my first relationship. I think my old friend and I agree on this fact, although we do not agree on many things related to our relationship.

During his visit to our city in 2017 after his return abroad, we met. I met him for the first time in an English language school in 2013. We had a superficial friendship that continued even after I moved abroad, and each of us recognized his or her feelings towards the other I returned to my city a year later.

After a while we got closer and we started going out as much as our city, which leaves little room for homosexuality, allowed us. But we approached.

Trip.

I swore we would not try the relationship between two countries, and then we withdrew from our division.

Throughout the year, I visited him at his home and he visited me in our city. Every visit to the country where I live was preceded by a period of tension due to the collection of the documents required to apply for a visa and wait for the decision.

We talked daily, by SMS and voice messages during the day and by video at night. If any of us is concerned someday, he wants to send a voice message, as usual, "Become my darling".

At first, we had no problem. Desire has almost vanquished us more than once when the pressure of study and work on one of us has increased, but we have faced this feeling together, and although the statement is commonplace, she actually brought us that experience and strengthened the strength of our relationship. We were lucky because my visa application was not rejected in our relationship and that his family still lives in our city, which means that he visited me at his visit without revealing the secret of his inclination or anything about our relationship.

We traveled together and with our friends. We felt a great satisfaction during our travels, because our relations were not secret abroad.

After a while, I began the phase of experiences that did not bring us together: each of us began to imagine a relationship different from that of the other and divergent. We did not master the treatment of these changes and it was only later that we discovered that our problem was radical. We broke up, then came back, then we separated again and finally accepted the inevitability of the final split after several months.

Distance has not ended the relationship, but it has played a crucial role in procrastination, since separation at a distance makes reconciliation with separation impossible.

I missed my second relationship. I will not linger long on it.

We met in the summer of 2018 in a third country, far from our two countries. We regrouped and spent ten complete days together, then we all returned to his country and we repeated a representative rejection of the distance relationship, before the relationship started at a distance.

He visited me two months later and lived in a secret relationship because my city allowed him to spend a month studying.

We came to the obvious but painful conclusion that our relations in my city were blocked and we saw each other for a month of the year, that is to say we were looking forward to the remaining 11 months went beyond reason. We found that harmony was not enough in the relationship and we did what my first friend and I could not do: we separated at the time of the breakup.