We did what?! Surviving an 11 year LDR...
What makes love endure despite distance, time and life’s challenges?
What makes love endure despite distance, time and life’s challenges?
11 years of LDR and (perhaps, despite!) 1 year of marriage later, my husband and I are still in love.
I say that not to brag, but in wonderment that our relationship has lasted that long and is still going strong. Today marks the official one year anniversary of our second(!) wedding party. Being an LDR couple for 11 years meant that we had built communities in our respective countries, and our communities can’t wait to celebrate with us as we finally got married. In my case, my community probably also wanted to ascertain with their own eyes that I am marrying a decent man, given that I was moving to his country for good, and for most of the LDR, he was unable to travel to me.
Nonetheless, I digress.
Many ask of our 11-year LDR, “How did you manage?”
And I usually replied, “I don’t know.”
What a BS answer, if I say so myself.
The truth is, I do know now.
After spending the first year of our marriage in person, I have come to realise that my husband and I had unwittingly built simple systems that helped sustain and grow our relationship despite the LDR, and these systems are now helping our marriage. I love him more today than one year ago at our wedding, and I loved him more at our wedding than at the beginning of our almost foolhardy LDR, when we both decided as final year university students to begin our relationship, knowing full well that we each have government scholarship bonds to serve in our respective countries.
As a hopeless romantic who thinks that there should be more love in this world, I’ll not be sharing our private lives but the principles and systems that helped us, in the hope that you too will have a love that endures.
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PS. As some of you might have realised, this publication’s title is a cheeky allusion to Shakespeare’s Love Labours’ Lost. The King of Navarre and his 3 friends swear off women to devote themselves to study, and immediately falls in love with the Princess of France and her ladies. However, unlike his typical comedy plays, the play doesn’t end in marriage; the wedding is set for “a year and a day” later because the Princess’s father dies.
In an almost ironic parallel, my husband and I fell in love at university back in 2013 when we were supposed to devote ourselves to study, didn’t get married immediately because of our scholarship bonds, and my father also passed away a month before my wedding. However, in our case, it is a blessing to be able to say that our Love Labours Won.