All relationships come with their own sets of challenges and rewards, but none seem to reap more of both than for those who fall in love from a distance. There is a lot to talk about, a lot to decide, and a lot of compromises to be made in the pursuit of a meaningful partnership.
At 23 years old, Logan Flott knows this very well. She has always been a "mushy" romantic, and always willing to give anything a chance, even when it required patience, persistence and a lot of late nights. Logan grew up outside Chicago and went to school in an area that was mixed between the upper and lower classes of the city. She was happy but in her school, if you did not fit the mould, finding friends was difficult.
However, on one completely normal day, she was in the hallway of her small high school while messaging with a friend, who was studying in Australia. She suggested Logan speak to a few of her new Australian friends. That’s when she started talking to a boy named Andrew Sanders.
“When I first saw his cute profile picture, I thought; Oh no, he's cute.”
She knows exactly when she started talking to Andrew, “November 11th, 2013,” She responded without missing a beat. “He told me that he had feelings for me one year after we started talking, so, our anniversary is the 11th of November.”
Andrew confirms although he looked to Logan form confirmation as he spoke, “We started talking every day, well, right from that very moment … I would say it was probably Christmas time where it was getting to the point where she was one of my best friends.”
And then he starts to laugh, “I am embarrassed (because) I didn’t ‘ask’ her out, I declared, like: ‘we’re going out, right?’”
Seven years later, Logan was studying psychology in Boston, but her move to Australia was a given. A date was planned, a flight was booked … And then the pandemic hit.
Logan had planned to make her move in September, but things started to change in March, when she got a call from her mother. The EU was going to close their borders, and so Logan's mother told her that she needed to get to Australia before the borders inevitably shut too.
Logan had 24 hours to pack everything in her apartment. All furniture, decorations and clothes had to go. She packed while taking an exam and booking the next flight out. Only when she laid her head down to sleep, did she realise that she forgot to tell her friends and grandparents what was happening. She had just packed up her life to leave for Australia and forgot to share the news.
By the time she woke up, Australia had announced its own border shutdown. The country would be closed a full 12 hours before she was due to land. She would have made it if she had left the day before. Defeated, she unpacked, she put everything back. She was staying, for now. She returned to her university online classes and pretended that everything was fine.
She immediately started to contact the Department of Home Affairs, determined to make this journey happen, the first application in May was unsuccessful, the second in June went unresponded to, and the third... well, she technically didn't have to do a third. When she followed up her third application in July, the Department told her that she was accepted, but hadn't been informed. She arrived in Sydney for hotel quarintine in mid-July, before flying into Melbourne, which was in a soon-to-be intensified lockdown. But she was ready, because now she was going to be locking down with Andrew and his family.
There were many reasonsn why she chose to make the move to Australia, as opposed to Andrew making the move to America. The first was family, mainly-- how close Andrew was to his. She couldn’t ask him to make that massive move away from them. And then, there was another reason.
“I can raise a kid here, and not be afraid of them getting shot at school." Logan said, "I can get sick here and not bankrupt my family.”
She also values Australia's social security system, especially in a pandemic situation, and is optimistic about the future, now that she is finally living with the man she met online seven years ago. Even though it took a while, and a lot of persistence, patience and hard work, she is finally here.
