Expert: Elise - 11/17/2009

Question
My first serious relationship lasted two years. (We were both 18 when we got together.)

We are both 23 now and got back together this year. A month before I had to leave the country. - The problem was that I had already had plans for working on another continent when we reunited.

Now I am on that other continent. - It is here that I met an amazing guy. He's very sweet and he had to go through similarly hard times as a kid. We've been hanging out a lot. We've kissed. We even spend time at each other's apartments. We havn't had sex, though. He knows that I'm taken and I think that he is waiting for my decision.

My initial plan was to go back home after 1 or 2 years of working here. - Also, I don't want to punish my 'home' partner for having had a nice childhood.  

Answer
Wow!
How long have you two been apart?
Do you and your boyfriend talk a lot?
My thoughts on this. Unless the guy is hopelessly in love with you, and I mean the clingy "cant live without" you guy that calls every 20 minutes... He's probably being tempted too. Not to say there is another girl in his eye. But after so long its only natural humans crave a physical connection with someone.
Really, both of you agreeing to this with you moving away was sort of like torture to both of you.
With you so far away it's not like he is going to know, you could maintain both relationships, but I'd think of some other ways before outright lying.
The bigger question for you is can you morally be ok with yourself in this matter?
Like I said, he may be just as tempted as you. You might want to ask him if he would be happy with an "open" relationship until you return to the states.
It seems a shame to be away on foreign soil... and not sample all the... delights the country has to offer.

A note on troubled child hoods... I see your putting some weight on this. I have worked a lot on myself trying to get over this issue. I have a lot of friends who have worked with me to get over theirs.  
The reality is that your boyfriend is in the minority, most people these days have troubled child hoods. But have you ever noticed that there is nothing about this in the history books?
It's not like the old days were great and everyone had perfect ones. Its much more like those Restless Leg Syndrome pills, where all the commercials have statistics of how many people have been diagnosed. Only what they fail to mention is prior to them making up the term there was never a problem with it.
Prior to the creation of child labor laws in America - the concept of a happy child hood didn't exist, and in much of the world it still doesn't. See Americans like to take a concept and just go crazy with it. My grandpa remembers the great depression, selling whatever he could find in the streets at 8, and went home to get beat. There was a time when a child hood wasn't for playing with legos, and a time when getting beat wasn't a deadly sin. When he speaks its clear he sees that as a part of life, and not something robbed from him, or a reason to not enjoy the rest of it.
I don't know what you've been through and I'm sure it was very real and bad. But don't let it affect the decisions you make or the partner you choose. Even if you can get over your story - most never will.