My husband and I never lived in the same town/city/ state until we got married. I don’t know how much that puts us in the minority but I think we are in our own special statistic.
I grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky. My husband is from Indianapolis, Indiana. How did we meet? Facebook.
There is a little more to it, than just Facebook. My childhood best friend (also from Indianapolis) is actually really good friends with my husbands family. So through her, is how he became Facebook friends with me.
One night during my senior year of high school, I saw I got a Facebook message from some guy and of course asked my best friend about him. She said he’s a really nice guy, and from then we chatted ever since.
I wasn’t much of a girl who likes to date growing up. My best friend had several boyfriends, and I just never was like that. Call me old fashioned I guess. We started talking in January of 2010 and we chatted every day on Facebook.
I eventually had to give him my phone number; I guess he was too nervous to ask. But I was getting annoyed about having to log into Facebook everyday. So we moved onto the texting level of our relationship and eventually the actual talking on the phone stage.
By March, he and his mom had planned a trip to come down to Bowling Green. His mom, like I said was good friends with my best friends family. So she planned on visiting with them, while we went on our first date.
Side note, I’m pretty sure both of our families thought this was a silly relationship to begin with, we didn’t even live in the same state. It was actually a four-hour drive between us.
Our first date went well, we actually went and saw the first, “How To Train a Dragon” movie, which now is kind of a special movie to us, for that reason.
From then on, he pretty much would drive down to see me almost every weekend, or every other weekend. We were young and in love. 😉
Five years later we got married, and now we’ve been married for almost three years.
So what are my tips, now that you know the background of our relationship.
– 1 – Become each other’s best friend. That is really my tip in any relationship. But if the genuine friendship is not there, it will not last. You have to be able to talk to each other, especially since the physical aspect isn’t always there. We talked about everything, our day, our dreams, jokes, things we like. He was and still is one of my best friends.
– 2 – Be committed. This is not going to be easy. If you feel like you can’t do it or don’t trust the person enough, either spare yourself the heartache, or go back to my first step and work on your friendship.
– 3 – Faith. Both my husband and I love the Lord and try to live our lives showing Christ’s love. Now neither of us are perfect or holy. But I think our faith was a big part of our success. We both believed in being faithful to each other, honest with each other, and believing in God’s design for marriage. We would pray together and read our Bible together while on the phone or Skype.
– 4- Have a countdown on your phone! Some times we would go a month without seeing each other. That was really hard. So one thing that helped me was downloading an app on my phone that would do a count down. I would count down the days till we got to see each other again. It was always fun getting so excited when the countdown was just two or three more days.
– 5- Variety of dates – We knew that when we got together, we would be doing something fun. We would go to museums, parks, go hiking, shopping, or go to the movies. These dates make fun memories. Some of my husband and I most fun memories is when we went hiking in Tennessee to see three different waterfalls, all while it was a rainy day. Also, sometimes its just fun to snuggle on the couch and watch Netflix when you haven’t seen each other in weeks.
– 6 – Have a schedule for talk time. While my husband and I texted through out the day, it is still really important to try and talk on the phone or Skype/ Facetime. I noticed that when all we did is text, it made me miss him more. Talking on the phone or seeing him on Skype gave our relationship a sense of being together. We actually had a one hour time difference between us. So we had to plan our times around that. Every night before bed, we would try to talk on the phone. Even if it was just to say good night.
Now, while these tips might make it sound easy, I don’t want to mislead you. There were nights I would just cry because it wasn’t always easy being so far apart. Our relationship was not perfect and we did have some hard times. But what relationship doesn’t?
It’s funny watching people’s faces when we tell them that we dated long distance for five years. Sometimes I can’t even believe we actually made it. I’m not too big into believing in soul mates, but I do believe my husband and I have a very special relationship. It’s a little freaky sometimes how much I feel that we go perfect together.
But I believe it’s all because the Lord blessed a friendship that started on Facebook.
