Stacked Against the Odds

Do fairy tales exist?

As much as we like to fantasise about the love stories created in fairy tales and those of celebrities who seem to have it all, the reality is some of us have to fight harder than others for what we want.

Relationships mean taking the knocks and not allowing them to ruin you. Love means fighting through the toughest battle fields and not going down after your first hit. When all the odds seem against your relationship, fight harder and more importantly, love harder.

The best part about love it that is exposes you to emotions that you never knew existed. The feeling of emptiness when they are not around or the inability to reach your full potential of happiness because you cannot share your moments with the one you love.

Sometimes, I wonder, if love is so great, why can it make us feel so low? Why do we put ourselves through pain for another person? But I recently realised that the reason is because after all the setbacks, all the hardship that has come with building a relationship becomes the reason for its strength and its ability to go the distance.

Imagine if you every single step of your relationship was easy? The person never annoyed you, you never had a disagreement, you never screamed at each other in a public place, you never had to experience life apart or you never had to stalk them on Instagram—do you think you would still be with the same person 20 or even 50 years later?

Love allows us to be vulnerable and when you have found the person who accepts your moods, knows when you’re upset without having to say a word and knows what can make everything better, then you have allowed yourself to be vulnerable and accepted that it is okay not to be perfect.

If your partner has been accepted a huge job offer in another country, would you consider parting ways because of that? Or would you move with them or make the distance work? Why is there the connotation that because life has changed its course for you in one aspect of life, means that everything else you already love has to change too? Finding what works for one couple is completely different to another, but isn’t the definition of love universal?

If you love someone, you chase their dreams with them and in return, one day they will give it all up for you. Just because you might have to live apart for a certain amount of time does not mean the relationship is now over. It just means you have to fight against the odds. You have to adapt to a different way of communicating and staying connected, but with love, anything is possible.

I married my husband in November 2017. Unfortunately, coming fresh out of university, I had only just started my first full-time job, so I didn’t quite meet the requirements for his Spouse Visa. So, he had to return to Brazil and then we would apply for the visa in April once we knew we would be accepted. With the little money we had, we managed to pay all the visa fees and decided on top of that to pay an extra £600 for a fast track (supposedly within 30 days).

The visa took 90 days to arrive. 90 days of darkness and pure agony waiting every day for Pedro’s passport to arrive at his house with the hopes of finding a visa inside.

The odds always seemed stacked against us, but we didn’t let that break our fairy tale.