“I feel sometimes our love story is like a wild Asian soap opera. We met in a video game called Ragnarok Online in 2006. I lived in Tennessee, he lived in Utah at the time (but he grew up in California). We were in middle school then (I was in 7th grade, he was in 8th grade). Keep in mind that we didn’t have our own cell phones or FaceTime back then to help with long-distance communication. We eventually Skyped, but before we could do that, we would send each other long emails or AIM/MSN messages back and forth. He was in military school, so sometimes I wouldn’t hear back from him for months because they didn’t allow him to use the internet freely there. Fast forward to 2012, when I was accepted to UCSD, and he attended UCI in California. It was our first time seeing each other in person since we started dating in 2006. He was shaking so much from being nervous, but we immediately hugged and clicked naturally. We still weren’t in the same city, but it was a dream compared to emails and Skype calls being sent from Tennessee to California. We had to ride a two-hour train to visit each other because neither of us had a license or a car. Our first date was that year in Disneyland, and we still have the tickets, even though they’re worn out. Sadly, after one year of finally seeing each other in person a few weekends a month in California, I had to move back to Tennessee due to the high costs of out-of-state tuition. I lived in Tennessee again from 2013 until 2021, when I finally finished optometry school while Kevin lived in California and Utah. Even while I was in school, there were years when we could only visit each other once a year because we were broke college kids. Who knew that such puppy love, without ever seeing each other, would lead to a long-distance relationship for 15 years before we were finally able to move to the same city in 2021? We now live happily in Utah, together with our cat, and couldn’t be happier!”
– Elsie, the bride
Previous Post
