My wife and I spent twelve years engaged while I lived in Southern California and she lived in Taiwan. There is no formula hidden in that sentence. We made compromises, changed routines and sometimes accepted uncertainty longer than either of us wanted. What kept the relationship alive was not constant romance. It was learning how to build an ordinary life together before we could live in the same place.
We met in a moment, then built the relationship slowly
We first met at a company event in Taiwan. We danced, talked and then went back to our separate lives. Work consumed me, and we did not reconnect for roughly three months. When I returned to Taiwan, I asked her to see a movie. The language barrier was real, but laughter made it less important. We began texting and occasionally talking on FaceTime.
About a year after we met, I proposed during a trip to Sun Moon Lake. That proposal did not resolve the practical questions of two careers, two families and two countries. It began a twelve-year engagement in which the relationship had to mature while the logistics remained unsettled.
The first adjustment was letting the honeymoon end
International relationships can begin inside an unusual bubble. Travel concentrates attention. You are temporarily released from errands, work routines and the quiet stretches that make up most of a shared life. It is easy to mistake the intensity of a visit for the operating rhythm of a relationship.
We could not preserve that bubble for twelve years, so we stopped trying. Our visits were not designed as continuous entertainment. We cooked, watched television, spent time with family and friends and allowed some hours to be uneventful. Those ordinary moments were important because they gave us a more realistic picture of how being together might eventually feel.
Communication became a form of shared space
We communicated almost every day. At one point, our morning routine happened on FaceTime roughly twenty days out of the month. I would text when I reached the office, one of us would call, and I would leave the phone on my desk while I worked. She might watch television, play a game or do something around her home. We were not performing a date for hours. We were simply present.
That kind of parallel time helped us share the small things that are easy to lose across time zones: a funny clip, a minor frustration, what someone made for dinner, the part of a day that would never justify scheduling a formal call. It created a version of living together before we could physically do it.
I would not prescribe our exact frequency to another couple. Some people need more uninterrupted attention; others feel crowded by constant contact. What mattered was that we agreed on a rhythm and noticed when it stopped working. Consistency reduced uncertainty, but it had to remain connection rather than surveillance.
Distance makes sacrifice easy to misread
I lived in suburban Orange County. She lived in Taipei, surrounded by the convenience, density, food, friends and family that made her life hers. Moving to the United States was not an automatic upgrade. It meant giving up proximity, routines, career options and a sense of competence built over a lifetime.
I had my own anchors: my son, family, friends, work and a home. For years, neither of us could simply declare that the other person’s attachments mattered less. The question was not who loved whom enough to move. It was how to understand what each decision actually cost.
Over time, some sacrifices felt smaller and some priorities changed. That evolution mattered. A decision that would have created resentment in one year could become possible later because our lives and our definition of home had changed.
Learning her culture was part of loving her
I did not want Taiwan to remain the setting where I happened to meet my wife. I tried to learn Mandarin, understand Taiwanese food, watch local entertainment and become comfortable inside the everyday culture around her. I already loved Taiwan, which made that curiosity natural for me.
When she reviewed the first version of this essay, she made an important correction. She thought I was unusual in how deeply I tried to participate in her culture and cautioned me against treating my approach as typical. She also noted that the expectation that the foreign partner should relocate may be especially common in Western—and particularly American—relationships. Her point improved the article because it exposed an assumption I could not see from my side.
Cultural understanding did not mean that either of us had to approve of every custom or erase disagreement. It meant resisting the lazy conclusion that unfamiliar behavior was inferior behavior. We needed enough humility to ask what something meant before deciding what was wrong with it.
Two places gradually became our home
Early visits felt like travel. I stayed in hotels and lived out of a bag. Later, clothes and household things were already waiting for me in Taiwan. We slipped into routines when I arrived. She came to see her place there as our home, just as the house in California became ours. That change was subtle, but it gave the relationship physical continuity.
Our travel frequency changed with work and life. There were years when I visited Taiwan three or four times, often for about a week, and periods when we saw each other less. We learned that a visit could not repair months of neglected connection. It had to continue a relationship that was already being maintained between trips.
The questions I would ask before promising forever
| Pressure point | What helped us | What a couple should make explicit |
|---|---|---|
| Time and attention | A repeatable daily rhythm and ordinary parallel time | How often to connect, what counts as quality time and how to ask for space |
| Travel | Visits that included family, friends and routine | Budget, frequency, who travels and what happens when plans change |
| Money | More realistic expectations outside the vacation bubble | Income, spending, debt, support and the lifestyle each person expects |
| Culture | Language learning, curiosity and correction from each other | Family roles, holidays, food, religion, conflict and what neither person will surrender |
| Closing the distance | Letting priorities evolve without pretending sacrifice was equal | Possible countries, careers, immigration, family responsibilities and a decision horizon |
What lasted was deeper than proximity
Physical intimacy mattered to us, but it could not carry a relationship across an ocean. Most of our twelve years were built from conversation, patience, humor, cultural learning and the willingness to remain interested in each other’s ordinary lives. By the time I first published this story in 2023, we had married. The distance had not made us perfect; it had forced us to practice forms of intimacy that were easy to overlook when people can always share the same room.
I cannot promise that our approach will make another long-distance relationship work. Sometimes distance reveals incompatible plans that affection cannot solve. But if there is a lesson in our story, it is this: do not build the relationship only around reunions. Build a life that remains recognizable on the days when nothing dramatic happens.