The most financially irresponsible thing I ever did for love was to fly to and from Vermont, repeatedly, during my senior year of college when money was tight and I was dreading the move back to my parents house after graduation.

Honestly, though? Worth every single penny.

Matt and I met on Tumblr somewhere around 2011 or early 2012 (we’ve never actually been able to pinpoint a date). We were friends for a long time, talking about video games, The X-Files, and dumb internet memes.

After a while, I was totally smitten.

In the late fall of 2013, we started to talk about the possibility of dating. He was in Vermont but knew he wanted to be moving somewhere (anywhere) in the near future; I was in the midwest and had a job lined up for after graduation, so I had no plans to leave.

I first met him in person in March of 2014, over my spring break. I first visited my best friend in New York, where she was completing an internship. From there, I flew to Vermont and he picked me up at the airport and promptly whisked me off to…his grandmother’s house! He lived with his grandparents to help out with his sick grandfather, who had actually passed away shortly before this trip. This definitely helped me feel a bit safer in visiting, honestly! I met his grandmother over Skype multiple times before I stayed with them.

He came to visit for my college graduation in May, and moved to Minnesota in November of 2014.

We didn’t move in together right away. That, technically, may have also been financially irresponsible. By the time he moved here, I was living alone in an apartment near my work, and he moved in to a friend-of-a-friend’s basement. It was cheap, but still more than what my rent would have been if we split it. We wanted to make sure that we could happily exist in the same state, though, before we lived in the same dwelling.

It’s been almost two years now, and we still don’t live together! I bought a condo and he wanted to live on his own for a while, so he signed a lease on a studio apartment. So, we continue to pay for our individual homes, but we plan to move in once his lease is up in the spring.

We got very, very lucky that everything worked out how it did, and we continue to be head-over-heels in love. :)