I have always wanted to fall in love, get married, and have a family. But as my 30s were fast approaching I was losing a little bit of hope. When I got offered a job abroad I was absolutely elated, but there were some negative thoughts running through my mind. Not about moving to another country where I did not know a single person. It was about love/marriage/my future family. I kept thinking "if I go to England for 2 years, when I come back I'll be 30 and that doesn't give me a long time to fall in love/get married/have 2-3 kids." I pushed these thoughts to the back of my mind because in my heart and soul I knew I had to have this adventure (or I would regret not going for the rest of my life!!) and love would just wait until a little later.

In August 2019 I hopped on a one-way flight to London and my life has not been the same since! It took me a couple of months to settle in, but I quickly came to enjoy the beautiful country, the culture, my job, and most importantly made some life-long friends. My work colleagues were absolutely amazing in helping me adjust to a new lifestyle. It meant so much to me that they were so kind and welcoming.

In October, I felt much more settled and I was curious about dating abroad. My colleagues helped me set up a Tinder account. In the northeast of England, lunch is called "dinner." Most days at work we would have "Dinner Tinder" during lunch in which I surrendered over my phone to my colleagues. They had the time of their lives swiping (although some of those right swipes were very questionable choices, Helen and Diane), looking at profiles, and helping me message guys. The sole male of our group of speech therapists, Matt, did not partake in these activities, but enjoyed everyone's laughter and reactions to profiles/messages. At some point he mentioned this to his wife, Rachel, to which she replied "I have someone I can set her up with!"

I gave my number to Matt for Rachel to give to Gareth. After two days of texting paragraphs back and forth to each other, I texted "We should definitely meet up sometime, I don't think we'll run out of things to talk about." Turns out I was right as our blind date on November 3, 2019 started out as brunch at 10:30 am and ended a little after 10:30 pm after we came in last place in a pub quiz (worth noting that we did win the Latin round though).

Flash forward nearly 2 years later:

We have had multiple lovely holidays, survived dating during the pandemic, gotten engaged, gotten a puppy, and are now in the midst of planning an epically fun wedding while abroad (shout out to my mom who made helping out with my wedding her retirement project!).

At this point, I would like to say that before I moved to England my mom would constantly say, "you are going to fall in love over there and never come back!" She was right about the first part, but who's to say where in the world we'll end up moving to in the future?