How can you fall in love with someone who lives on the other side of the world? And when the feeling is mutual, how do you maintain a healthy and exciting relationship with each other? The majority of people I talked to who had a long distance relationship told me that it never works. You can never trust your partner with all those hungry singles in their neighborhood; no man is strong enough to resist all this temptation.

That’s where I disagree. I for one can tell you that it is possible to be faithful to each other even if you live on the other side of the world. I met my fiance online when a mutual friend introduced us to each other. I never thought that we would take it this far given the fact that I lived in The Netherlands (Europe) and she lived in Surinam (South-America). But we’ve kept our focus on each other and something beautiful grew between us. She came to visit me and we fell in live even more. But when it was time for her to leave we were devastated of course.

We kept on traveling back and forth with a few months in between visits and we got tired of the distance. Now we got to a crossroad: do we end this? Or will one of us take the next step and leave everything behind to live with the love of his or her life? She chose the latter. Even though I totally fell in love with the South-American climate and the laid back attitude of the Surinam people, we chose for her to come to Holland. Our plan is to save up enough money to eventually go back to Surinam to buy a piece of land and build something that’s ours.

We are now living together in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and things are still going great! How did we come this far you might ask? Well the first thing you need to make sure is that you REALLY LOVE your significant other. That’s our solid foundation for our relationship. The second ingredient is: Communication. Talk about everything. That’s all you have in the beginning. You can’t get to smell or touch each other until you meet each other. Next up is trust. You are not in the position to keep an eye on each other so through communication you can decide if the other is worth waiting for. What gave me the confidence that she was always telling the truth was the fact that I could always reach her. We kept in contact through MSN and we had video conferences. And then we exchanged phone numbers and we talked every day. And she never gave me an awkward feeling that got me thinking she would be doing something unfaithful. And I never gave her a reason to think so about me.

If you at least have those three things you’re probably going to succeed with keeping this relationship going. Now the last thing you need is a goal. You need to have a vision of where you see this relationship going. As I explained before I fell in love with Surinam and I want to live there and my fiance wanted to work in Europe to eventually go back to Surinam and build up a life there. She’s lucky to have found a man that matches her wishes. If you’re not on the same page with this it’s going to be a lot harder. Decisions are going to be made when stuff like this comes to the surface.

Don’t think that a long distance relationship is anywhere near easy. A good friend of me told me that if it takes too long before a there’s the prospect of you to living together or near each other then break it off before you both go crazy. And believe me we both almost went crazy but we remained strong and conquered the greatest obstacles. And yes it is empowering, it gives us the feeling that we can do whatever we want. No bridges to far, no mountains to high, right?

What I’m saying is that you should follow your heart, listen to your feelings and don’t give up to soon. People tend to think negative of long distance internet relationships but they aren’t engaged in one so they can’t really judge. Just make sure that you take everything step by step and things can end up really beautiful.