Love, actually : part I

Long distance love - part I

Andrew, 36, met Lindi, 38, at a pilot training college in Adelaide 12 years ago where they were training to become pilots. After a six-year long-distance relationship, they married and moved to Sydney where they now live with their two-year-old daughter, Nicola.

In this excerpt, Lindi tells her story...

"I was one of only five girls selected for the aviation course. It’s a very male-dominated industry, so I felt as if we were going against the odds. The workload was tremendous, so we had to be committed and focused – especially me, because I didn't have an engineering or aviation background; I knew nothing about flying. I was never in my comfort zone.

"When my relationship with Andrew started, I didn't take it seriously. Flying meant so much to me; I didn't want anything standing in my way. I knew straight away he was a special person, but in my mind, there was no way it could work. I loved my job, and I loved South Africa; it's a magical place. Breaking up was a head decision, not a heart decision.

"We started a long-distance relationship, but we thought it would eventually die out because it seemed as though we had no future. It was hard to make our schedules work. Whenever he came over to Johannesburg I had to make sure I had those days off. We didn't have the luxuries of email and webcam back then and phone calls were astronomically expensive.

"A long-distance relationship makes you weary. You get sick of missing them, sick of the phone. He couldn't be there for special occasions and my whole life had to come to a grinding halt when Andrew was in Johannesburg.

"When he first asked me to marry him I said 'yes', but later I thought, 'no, I'm not ready'. But something changed then; it made me realise how serious he was. For a long time I'd been trying to convince Andrew to move to South Africa because he loved it too, but somehow I knew I'd be the one to move.

"The second time he asked me to marry him was such a surprise. We were on an evening game drive. When we stopped, I thought it was for the sunset, but he had arranged for an outdoor dining table with lanterns on a cliff top overlooking the rest of the park. The ring had both Australian and South African diamonds. It was just the most perfect night.

"I got to the point where my relationship was the most important thing. It's great to wake up in the same time zone, but I still get very homesick. It's a bittersweet story; one of us was always going to be a little bit sad, for the both of us to be happy."

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