it's been long enough since the Great Migration from hpff (five years!) that many of you won't know who i am or who @sihaya is. there's a big group of us who have been mostly dormant here on the new site but you can find us all on twitter, where we've been hanging out since a certain homophobe threw a tantrum and shut down the old forums. 

i was vaguely aware of @sihaya on the old site, when she had the dubious username of 'evil little devil' and we happened to be active/between hiatuses at the same time around the 2015 house cup. she was still around, luckily, when the site shut down and we all moved to twitter, where, free from the rather oppressive rules about being on-topic and not sharing personal info, we got to know each other as people. sian and i had a lot in common - we both occupied the same corner of the world, we were both doing postgrad degrees and more or less living in our offices due to terrible housing situations, and we were, crucially, both gay and single. after two years of friendship, a suspiciously thoughtful Christmas card on sian's end and a lot of gentle bullying by my friends, i slid into her DMs to confess my feelings for her and we started dating, despite the entire Tasman Sea and some national borders separating us, in December 2017.

we met in person for the first time a few months later, when sian arrived on my doorstep at 1am in a storm. from then we flew frequently between adelaide and christchurch and on her last visit before moving here permanently, i proposed.

(i was not sneaky about it; she knew it was coming, and proposed right back)

three weeks ago we exchanged vows in front of all our favourite people, and if you follow me on twitter you'd have had the livestream link to join the ceremony. but it feels fitting to post something on here, the continuation of the site where we began. i can't believe the series of accidents of fate that led us to each other, but if it weren't for communities like this, we would still be living our lives separately, oblivious to each other's existence or what we were missing without each other, and that's just unthinkable.