I recently spent 6 months backpacking and I only stopped and settled in a new (foreign) city to start a new job in December. Whilst I was travelling I spent some time in Algeria where I briefly met a guy and we swapped numbers. We got to know each other by WhatsApp and I went back to stay with him in his village for a week before I came back to Europe. We message each other constantly and video call every day but we’ve only been together in real life for a week. We planned for me to go back at Easter and I have already started the process of getting him a Schengen visa so that he can visit me in the summer.
But, now I am more settled in my new life and starting to think about settling down, I am beginning to regret this relationship. When we have discussed where our relationship is going, he has asked me to move to his village in the Sahara because he does not want to leave. He is very reluctant to discuss even moving to a city in his country, never mind coming to Europe. My career is city-based and I could not work in his village even if I wanted to. We have a bit of a language barrier and a massive cultural barrier. He is a not-very-religious-Muslim but his family are religious. I am culturally Jewish but religiously atheist. I have a post-graduate degree in a technical field and he had to leave school before he finished high school. He “gets” feminism and he is very respectful of me and women in general but he has said awful things about LGBT people which offends me. I have been thinking about what I want and we’ve had a couple of serious conversations without really making any progress. I really like him but I think it’s time to break up because we want such different things and do not have a future together.
Then his phone broke. I now have no way of speaking directly to him to actually break up. He has contacted me via a friend to ask me to send him money for a new phone. I said I would and asked how much he would need. Several hours later I got a garbled message via his friend which said something like “if she asks how much, tell her I need a good phone, around €400”. I’ve not felt like he sees me as a cash machine before so this request has really upset me. It makes me more sure I’m doing the right thing in breaking up with him, but I don’t know how. Should I buy him the phone and then break up with him? Send him less money for a cheaper phone and then break up with him? Break up via his friend? I still like him and I want to do this in the least horrible way possible. I feel guilty especially as I don't think he is expecting this at all.