Thank you everyone for your input, it's greatly appreciated. I'm learning as i go with this a little but a lot of what you guys have said is consistent with what's been happening with us since i posted this. I'm learning the right way to be supportive can vary depending on the day, and all your advice has helped me realise that. She's visiting this weekend and I'm looking forward to having some downtime together. Thanks again for your insights!

Hi guys

First of all, sorry if I'm posting in the wrong area of the forum etc., I know how annoying that can be! I'm looking for some advice from anyone who's been in a similar situation to the one I'm in now - any assistance at all would be great, and having had a bit of a read around this forum, you seem like a friendly bunch! Here goes..

I'm in a long-ish distance relationship with a girl who's really important to me. She's having some problems with her PhD and it's beginning to wear on her a lot. I'm not too hot on the specifics, but I know that the issues she seems to be having involve experiments not working or breeding usable results, and her beginning to feel like she doesn't have very much to work on. She's been meeting with supervisors etc to register her worries and it seems like they're trying to help her, but she still feels pretty negatively about how it's going a lot of the time.

Because, if one of us has a bad day, the other can't just come over at the end of the day with a bottle of wine and just chat things through, or do whatever would make the other feel better for a while, I'm trying to be as supportive as I can and stay in the loop with what's happening with her day-to-day. The trouble is that while I want to be able to understand what's going on, I feel like if I bring it up or ask too many questions about it, I might sometimes make her feel worse about things by accident.

I suppose what I'm asking is, from the perspective of PhD students in relationships, long-distance or otherwise, what you think the best way is to be supportive in a situation like this?

Thank you!