Mar 21 - The Illusion of Being Apart

I woke up yesterday to his text requesting a full, detailed recipe of how I made the Hainanese chicken rice his family really loved. Before I went to sleep yesterday, he video-called me to ask which buttons to press on the washing machine and tumble dryer.

This guy surprises me in ways I had never seen anybody do before. He cracks me up with jokes so original people wouldn't realize they were meant as such. Or maybe it's because we think the same, and the times we don't, we still get each other.

He reminds me, without so many words, that distanced or skin-to-skin, phone calls or whispers, sharing a kitchen or doing laundry alone, a lot of me is him and a lot of him is me. Except he wouldn't in a million years keep a digital diary this obnoxious. :)

Mar 21 - Secret to LDR

Shared interests. And a shit ton of patience and commitment. And honesty. And luck. And a pocket full of money for those damn airline tickets and lavish holidays.

But shared interests.

The entire time I was in the Netherlands, Luis was on a Shopee Candy fever. I'm now addicted to OSM. He titled the screenshot: "Ichi the Housewife won the triple!"

Yeah, shared interests.

Mar 02 - The Married Life

 A friend and ex-colleague, Arky, asked me yesterday over chat, "How's the marriage life going?"

What a great question. With Luis being in the Netherlands and myself being in Indonesia, essentially performing a rather frowned upon Long Distance Marriage, the simple question forced myself to rake the most honest answer I could muster for the time being. My initial response was to write, "What marriage life? We aren't even together." 

But the sassiness didn't sit right as I discovered it to be an inaccurate depiction of the way I feel. Granted it's not ideal to be geographically separated from your significant other, it isn't cultivating distinctively more stress and/or odd feelings than the Long Distance Relationship we had mastered and been so familiar with 7.5 years prior to tying the knot.

That's when I realized marriage is technically a form of relationship. So nothing new, really, just him and me relying on videocalls and instant messages to keep each other updated with our tremendously different lifestyles. We're back to what we know very well, just now with extra bands on our ring fingers.

"It's amazing," so I replied.