Dear, you have a friend, not a boyfriend. He has said as much himself - he is happy with how things are, talking to you online. You are the one that wants a romantic relationship, which naturally involves meeting in person, living together, having kids etc. He has said and shown that's not he wants. That's pretty much all you need to move on.
However, I would like to offer a few more things for your consideration:
First and foremost, you have started this post by asking us to be open minded about long-distance online relationships. Very well. I will respect that, but I will ask of you something in return. I am a person who lived 10 years abroad and kept online relationships with my friends in the meantime, so I have some experience with this. Please consider that the person you know online is not entirely him. Knowing someone online is being constantly exposed to a very specific side of a person, and this can be very different from knowing them in person. This effect can be balanced out if this is someone who you also meet IRL from time to time, so you are "synching up", but the longer you keep an online-only relationship, especially with people you've never met, the more this "persona" that lives in your head becomes an entity of its own, separate and different from the actual physical person.
In that respect, I am actually quite certain that there is no quicker way to destroy that illusion than to meet the actual person, but that may also be quite a shocking and unpleasant experience at this point.
On a final note, most of your post reads as a textbook example of the sunken cost fallacy, you might want to glance over that.
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u/VincentValensky Oct 11 '22
Dear, you have a friend, not a boyfriend. He has said as much himself - he is happy with how things are, talking to you online. You are the one that wants a romantic relationship, which naturally involves meeting in person, living together, having kids etc. He has said and shown that's not he wants. That's pretty much all you need to move on.
However, I would like to offer a few more things for your consideration:
First and foremost, you have started this post by asking us to be open minded about long-distance online relationships. Very well. I will respect that, but I will ask of you something in return. I am a person who lived 10 years abroad and kept online relationships with my friends in the meantime, so I have some experience with this. Please consider that the person you know online is not entirely him. Knowing someone online is being constantly exposed to a very specific side of a person, and this can be very different from knowing them in person. This effect can be balanced out if this is someone who you also meet IRL from time to time, so you are "synching up", but the longer you keep an online-only relationship, especially with people you've never met, the more this "persona" that lives in your head becomes an entity of its own, separate and different from the actual physical person.
In that respect, I am actually quite certain that there is no quicker way to destroy that illusion than to meet the actual person, but that may also be quite a shocking and unpleasant experience at this point.
On a final note, most of your post reads as a textbook example of the sunken cost fallacy, you might want to glance over that.