Text Messaging Ettiquette

Hi all,

I've posted on here before, thanks for your advice back then. I realise that a lot of making this relationship work has to do with my own patients and calming of my own anxiety.

I'm posting because I wanted to find out what people's thoughts were on the whole concept of text messaging when you're in a long distance relationship.

My partner and I have been together for over a year and lately I've found it very frustrating that he doesn't respond to texts quickly enough. I realise that I need to ease up on him a bit because a good majority of the time he says he's busy because he's trying to get everything done during the week so that he has more time to spend with me on the weekends and hence doesn't have time to respond to text messages all the time (i trust him and know that this is true). I've said that's fine and i'm not the kind of person who would be like "if you don't respond to my text within 20 minutes you're in trouble, mister." Because i'm busy as well and sometimes won't respond to him for an hour or sometimes a few hours. But we're in a long distance relationship and I guess that texting him is my way of getting what our relationship is lacking because he lives so far away.

So i'm finding that I'm getting increasingly frustrated when we're in the middle of a text message conversation and we're trying to organise something via text and the conversation will be fluid and then all of a sudden he'll just stop texting. Like we were trying to organise flights and it was becoming rather urgent because we had found cheap ones online. He sends me a text and says something a long the lines of "yeah sounds good, we'll talk about it tonight" and my response would be "we need to talk about it now or we'll miss out". Then no response for a few hours. When the matter becomes more urgent i text him again (because sometimes he doesn't hear his phone) and then I call him but he still doesn't answer. And he usually comes back with "i'm sorry I was out fixing the lawnmower and couldn't check my phone" or something a long those lines. My response was "if you knew we were in the middle of a text conversation why would you just walk away? It's kind of the equivalent of being hung up on during a phone conversation." We came to an agreement that when the matter becomes urgent I will just call him, which is fair enough, perhaps we should have had a phone conversation rather than text conversation for the flight thing. But there's still the issue of him never actually picking up the phone even if I did call. He used the excuse that none of his guy friends live with their phones by their sides either and this kind of upset me because none of his guy friends are in long distance relationships and they're all married with kids. So it's a bit redundant.

I feel like i'm being highly neurotic and being my own worst enemy in this relationship. I feel like I wish that I could relax a bit more and that my standards are too high, I keep feeling like I'm being dissapointed and that I hate always feeling like I'm waiting for him. I asked him to text me almost 4 hours ago to confirm something for me before I go up to his place this weekend. He still hasn't responded. He has a job where he is out of phone range on a regular occasion and told me yesterday that he would not be contactable till around lunch time today. He knows that I'm coming up this weekend and may need to ask him things before I leave. But he's still out of range. I know this isn't his fault but I would kind of like to know people's ways of not getting so frustrated during these situations. I feel like I'm always working around him, which i know isn't even true because he goes out of his way to make sure that he has time for me on the weekends that we're together.

Does anyone have any advice for this situation?

Thanks