My husband Daniel is from California and I am from South Africa. We met while we were teaching English in South Korea in March 2010 and dated for 6 months. After his contract was completed, he went back home to California and we maintained a long distance relationship for another 6 months while I finished my own contract. We met in Australia in March 2011 and spent 2 months backpacking around the country before I went back home to South Africa, and he once again set sail for California. In June 2011 I visited California through the Visa Waiver Program on my Austrian passport (I have dual-citizenship), where I met and fell in love with his family. I only stayed for three weeks, but in August 2011 I was back again, this time for 2 months. Daniel came to visit me in South Africa and meet my family in December 2011 and stayed for a 7 weeks while they got to know one another. In March 2012 I visited him in California again, we had discussed marriage before, but I was completely over-whelmed when he proposed in April. I said yes, and we started planning a non-long-distance future together. We realized that the K-1 visa was going to take a while and we were both fed up with being apart, and had slowly run out of money visiting each other back and forth. We decided to get our paperwork in order, we went into court and got married on May 25 2012! We had a big family celebration in January when our parents met for the first time.
