The Greatest Love Story I've Ever Heard (part 3....visa stuff and waiting)

Continued from parts 1 (how we met) and 2 (the real beginning).

This has been a hard post for me to write (hence the time gap between this and the previous post) because of all the different directions I could go with it.  But I decided to just tell the story, and I'll save my commentary for later posts.

After returning home in July 2012, I went back to school for fall semester.  We talked on Skype pretty much every day, which was not easy, because of the time difference, plus all the difficulties that come with a long-distance relationship (more commentary on this here)....and ours was long-distance with epic proportions.

Towards the end of my fall semester, Best Friend set up an appointment to get his visa to come up and spend Christmas with my family.  I bought my ticket home, talking my way into taking my finals before finals week actually started, so I could get an extra week at home for Christmas break.  Yeah, I totally pulled the Brazilian boyfriend card, and it worked like a charm!

Best Friend's appointment at the American Consulate was for the end of November.  Imagine how anxious I was all day...especially when I got absolutely no news until much later in the day.  Well, when he got there, with all his paperwork, documents, passport, photos, etc., he still had to wait in line, despite having an appointment.  The lady who attended him was less than thrilled to be working, and treated him like dirt.  Best Friend spent 3 minutes with the lady interrogating him.  His visa was then denied, with no explanation whatsoever.    At the time, it felt like the end of the world, because it meant we wouldn't see each other again until 6 months later.  We explored the possibility of me coming to visit over Christmas but it ended up just not being possible.  After his awful experience at the Consulate, Best Friend told me he wasn't going to try the visa again.

So we continued with our long-distance, Skype-based relationship.  In May 2013, we finally saw each other again...after 11 months.  11 LONG months.  Long-distance has its ups and downs, and it felt like ours were REALLY HIGH HIGHS and REALLY LOW LOWS.  Sometimes we were on cloud nine, sometimes we felt like we couldn't do it anymore.

In May 2013, Best Friend and I met up at the Temple in Recife, Brazil.

 The day we got there was the day Best Friend asked me to marry him!  He didn't do anything huge, which is just perfect for me.  His proposal was simple, private, and better than I could have ever imagined.  Even though we knew we were going to get married and I knew he was going to ask me, I had no idea when or how, so I was still surprised!

In Brazil, ring culture is a little different than in the USA.  Here, when two people are engaged to each other, they wear a gold band on their right hand ring finger.  When they get married, they either move that same band to the left hand, or put a new gold band on the left hand.  Either way, I think it's awesome because it shows that BOTH of them are engaged, not just the woman.

I spent the next month or so in Bahia with Best Friend and his family again.  We even got to spend Brazilian Valentine's Day together, which was the day before I left to come home.  Before that, though, we met up with a friend in Salvador and got to be tourists for the day.

It was the first time I had been to Salvador, other than in the airport!

I left to go back and finish my last year of college in June 2013.  We didn't have a definite plan for when we'd see each other again, though we knew we'd be getting married about a year from then.  We talked about me coming down again at Christmas.

As fall semester dragged on, Best Friend decided that he was going to try for the visa again.  This time, though, he didn't tell me until about a week beforehand.  We thought for sure he'd get it this time.  He had more stability in his life.  He went to the Consulate in São Paulo; he refused to go back to the one in Recife after how he was treated there.  I don't blame him. 

He was treated much better in São Paulo.  The guy interviewing him spent about 10 minutes with him, interviewed him completely in English, made it seem like things were going great.  Then out of nowhere at the end, Best Friend's visa was denied.  Again.  With no explanation.  Again.  With the exchange rate the way it was at the time, and my semesters, I ended up not even being able to come down for Christmas.  So we went back to waiting.  And once again, the long-distance thing was wonderful and awful, all at once.  We had a wedding to plan...while being thousands of miles and a few time zones apart.  But we managed to do it.  I have to give Best Friend a LOT of credit...I know there are a lot of guys out there who are less involved in planning their wedding than their fiancées are, but in our case, Best Friend did a LOT more than I did!

13 months after we'd last seen each other, we were reunited....and that's the next post!