Help with long distance relationship would be appreciated

[AnnadinNoliman]

I'm in a long term long distance relationship with a person I like very much. We should only be long distance for about five more months (she left the country for a year). And we've worked out a schedule for texts and voice messages and we get to call at the end of every week. But it's very inconsistent when she is able to call on these days, so most of the past weeks I've spent almost the entire morning and afternoon keeping myself available to call and it's been tiring because my brain gets stuck in waiting mode and I'm incapable of doing anything else.

But this week I couldn't spare the time and I needed to work on school before we called. But I can't work on school unless I'm at the library, and I can't call her if I'm at the library. So I told her to text me when she was available so I could get home first. But then she called me without warning, which I couldn't answer because I was in the library, and then she texted me I needed to pick up because she was going to sleep soon.

So I gathered all my stuff and sprinted outside and called her on my walk home but I found that I had no capacity to communicate. There were so many awkward silences because my brain had just been wrenched out in the middle of school work (which is itself very stressful). And then I could hear in her voice her getting impatient with how little I was talking and at how uncomfortable I was being which made me feel like I was ruining the one time we get to call every week and then made it harder to talk. And in the end my brain was completely losing it and she knew it and we both knew she couldn't do anything to help because she was exhausted and had to go. So she left and then I had a meltdown.

So question: what do you do if the one time a week you get to talk to your partner your brain is freaking out? I feel awful because I had so much that I wanted to talk to her about and I just wasted all the time.

 

[Fino]

Maybe cancel the call once a week and have no contact. Be together when they're back.
Alternatively, you can both take the contact less seriously. It's just five more months. Enjoy the talks when you can, but don't let your life revolve around it or each other.
It sounds like it's turned into a chore. It should be a joy.

 

[Loren]

I agree with Fino. Or, perhaps, you can revise your plan, so that the time you actually speak to one another, isn't limited to the end of the week, as, you have learned from trial and error, that it isn't going to work, necessarily. I might also make a pact to text, prior to speaking, so that you can relax a bit, knowing that there will be a warning, and that if it isn't going to work at that time, you can, imediately, make other arrangemets to speak to eachother, when conducive to both of you/ your schedules.

 

[BraidedPony]

You could write old fashioned letters. The number of times you make contact would still be about once a week, but you can take your time to think about what you want to say.

 

[Clueless in Canada]

I was in a long distance relationship for seven years and we've now had two years living together. We used messaging and e-mail and played online scrabble where there was also a chat feature. Neither of us felt we had to be in a relationship but we simply wanted to be together however that might work out.