We're getting married!!

Some random dude is going to DM you on Udacity. Yes, Udacity. The learning platform. He will say he is networking. It is 2019, and romance, apparently, finds a way. It is very important that you do not ignore the message. Reply. See where it goes. He is in Coventry, UK, doing his Master's in Public Health. You are in Konya, Turkey, deep in a Master's in Computer Engineering. It is very important that you exchange numbers, and that you stay friends. Then the world shuts down, and friendship becomes the thing that holds you together. You send each other long voice notes across time zones, arguing about religion and tech and whatever else you can think of, the way only two people with too much time and too much to say can argue. Debating becomes its own love language. The years move quickly. You both finish your master's. He goes home to Nigeria to start a company on a £1,000 grant (who does that?), and you move to the US to begin a PhD in Computer Science. Different continents, different lives, the same conversations. Then Nigeria happens to him, as Nigeria does. His mother has been telling him to do a PhD in Computer Science. His friends have been telling him. You have been telling him. One day, he listens. He pivots. He emails a professor at your university. (You may want to nudge her, gently, to check her spam folder.) She finds the email. He gets the interview, and then the rejection, and then more rejections, from every school he applied to in the US. Meanwhile, the conversations keep going, only now they are different. You are getting closer in the way two people get closer when they have been telling each other everything for years. You start going on dates with other people. He notices. His heart cracks, quietly. When he asks you to be his, say yes. (November 20th, 2022.) It is very important that you do not listen to the naysayers. "Nigerian men are scammers." "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." Etc., etc. So the two of you turn to the UK. He writes to thank the professor anyway, the way his mother raised him to. She is stunned to hear he was rejected. Her funding has just come through. The university reopens the application portal, just for him. He reapplies. He gets in. Same country. Same city. Same university. Same department. He had started trying to find his way to you before you had even said yes. Two years later, on the same date, he asks you to marry him. (November 20th, 2024. Of course it is.) Say yes, again. And on August 15th, in front of everyone you love, you will do it properly. Some love stories take a single evening. Yours took three years, two continents, one pandemic, and one professor's spam folder. And if this isn't fate, then darling, what is? From Tonye: She tells it well. Better than I could. I will only add this. I did not slide into her DMs by accident. I had seen her on that platform, read what she wrote, and decided I wanted to know her. So I sent the message and called it networking, because what else do you call it when you do not yet know you are about to meet your wife? Everything she said is true. The voice notes. The arguments. The pivot. The rejections. The professor's spam folder. All of it. But here is the part she is too modest to write. I chose the PhD because I wanted to be where she was. I chose November 20th the second time because it was the day she said yes the first time. And I will choose her, again, on August 15th, and on every day after that. Video by our dear friend, Muyiwa.