How do you know if you’re overreacting?

I’m in the middle of a tiff with my boyfriend, and I’m looking for your advice.

I’ve been in a relationship with my boyfriend for four years. We get on pretty well most of the time, but like in all relationships, there come those moments when you get angry or sad at what the other person has or hasn’t done.

We’re usually able to sort out our differences pretty quickly. We’re not the sort of people to dwell on things for days and days in bitter silence. We tend to confront things head-on — say what’s on our minds, have it out, and move on.

There are other times though when I in particular think about things more deeply. And it just so happens that we’re in the middle of a tiff right now, and I don’t know if I’m overreacting or not. It’s nothing major, but I’m upset.

Let me set the context for you. We are currently on different continents due to delays in a visa process and we don’t have a set date yet for when we’ll see each other again. This means that our daily communication via calls and texts is more important than ever. It also means that I am feeling nervous about our future and impatient for a plan to work itself out.

Now for the actual tiff. Due to the time difference, it’s harder for us to call each other during the week, especially as we’re both working full time while we wait for a visa decision. On Friday night I asked my boyfriend to call me when he woke up the next day, knowing that we would both have more time to chat given that it was the weekend.

So the next day, I’m sort of sitting around waiting for his call from the time that I know that he’ll be awake. If he’s tired, he’ll probably sleep later than normal. But the call never comes. I wait about six hours, with all sorts of thoughts running through my head before I finally send him a message asking him what happened to the call. I wonder if maybe he’s had a power cut and so doesn’t have any battery, or if the WIFI is down, or if perhaps he’s just decided that we should break up and so is going to ghost me from now on. If you can’t tell, I have some self-esteem issues and very powerful imagination.

An hour after I send him that message, he sends me back one of those smiley face emojis with a teardrop in the top right corner — it implies a jokey sort of laughy face. I find that an annoying response to my serious message asking him what had happened, but perhaps he couldn’t read my serious tone given that it’s WhatsApp. I don’t send him a message back because I’m sort of waiting for an explanation. Nothing comes. Half an hour later he sends me a message to ask if I want to talk now and I reply instantly saying no. It’s now late where I am, I’m upset and I want to go to bed.

He sends me the perplexed emoji face with the finger and thumb wrapped around the chin. I tell him straight off that I wanted to talk to him at the time that we agreed. That I don’t want to now. It’s only now that he apologises and tells me that in the morning he forgot.

This also pisses me off. So he forgot about the agreement that we made a mere 12 hours before, and he didn’t think about me for the whole time that he was up and awake to remind himself of it, or even to send me a message where he would have seen what we’d written the previous day.

Probably at this point you’re thinking that he doesn’t care about me. Maybe he’s even using me to get a visa to my country. You might think that I’m never going to feel that he truly loves me, even when he says it to me, because actions speak louder than words. Or maybe that’s just my catastrophising. He does love me, but he is one of those personality types that lives totally in the present. It is hard for him to think about more than one thing at a time and it is hard for him to think about something that he can’t see.

I link my next message to the laugh smiley emoji and I say: I don’t find it funny. It makes me sad. I was looking forward to talking to you all day. But you forgot. Now I’m going to bed.”

He responds four minutes later by saying: My love, we normally call each other in the afternoon. I apologise.

Now that’s true, due to the timings, we usually do talk in his afternoons, not mornings, but that is always late for me, so for once I wanted to talk in my afternoon, his morning. So for me, this message is irrelevant. We had an agreement to talk in the morning. I don’t reply and do go to bed. I wake up at 4am, thinking that perhaps he might have sent me another message, or tried to call me, but nothing.

I haven’t sent him any messages so far this morning. Not because I’m trying to play some game of who can not talk for the longest (he would definitely win that), but because I’m not really sure what to say.

So, here’s the thing. Am I overreacting? He made a simple mistake, forgot to call me at a time when we don’t usually speak, apologised and offered to call me later on. Shouldn’t we just move on?

Or am I justified in expecting a bit more of an apology, or at least an attempt from him to understand why I am upset? Am I justified in wanting him to take the lead on resolving this to show that he does care about me after all? And if this is just the beginning of our long-distance relationship, shouldn’t we be setting good routines now that will keep us together through this period of uncertainty?

I am genuinely asking for your opinion here. It’s hard to know if I’m being irrational or totally rational.