After years of talking online 3,500 miles apart, I finally married my childhood pen pal

Excited but very nervous, all I could say coming out of arrivals at Toronto airport was: ‘I can’t believe I’m here… I can’t believe it’s you.’

I’d spent hours – and most of the seven-hour flight from London – imagining that moment and it was more than anything I could have ever dreamed of.

This was the first time Jaleel and I had met in person having known each other for eight years and starting off as teenage pen pals.

In July 2008, I was a 14-year-old Londoner who dreamed of moving to Japan one day. So I found myself on penpalworld.com, a site that connected people all over the globe and I began making friends in Japan and worldwide. I met a few nice people, but due to language barriers we didn’t stay in touch.

Then I got a message from someone called Jaleel simply saying, ‘sup, wanna be friends?’ He was 16, from Canada, and seemed like a cool guy. I found him interesting, intelligent and easy to talk to.

He had a very entrepreneurial mindset, as did I, and we spent a lot of time talking about all the things we wanted to do to impact the world in the future, such as creating media platforms and starting businesses.

We would email and chat on MSN Messenger almost every day, and sent letters to each other for special occasions along with souvenirs from our different countries. We eventually added each other on Facebook, Skyping all the time and we became best friends.

Our friendship was a consistent part of our teens, but when I went to the US on a study abroad programme in 2013, he and I really didn’t speak much – I was travelling and exploring and didn’t make much time for Skype.

We reconnected in mid-2014 when I got back home to the UK. Out of the blue, he sent me a message on WhatsApp and we got to talking just like old times.

Although we still hadn’t ever met in person, we were both older at this point (21 and 23), had travelled a bit and been in a few relationships. Our friendship felt different this time because we started to like each other as more than just friends.

With these new feelings we decided it was time to meet up in person. My friends and some of my family knew who he was already, as I’d spoken about him for years. Some of them joked that he could be a catfish but other than that, they weren’t against me travelling to see him. I felt sure he was who he said he was because we’d spoken on Skype so many times.

My friends and family thought it would be impossible to maintain a relationship with someone who was so far away, but they still supported me. I travelled to meet him on my own and spent the entire time at Pearson Airport in Toronto moving between excitement and nerves.

I wasn’t sure if our connection was going to be the same in person as it felt on our screens. But the moment I saw him all my fears melted away and I knew I had made the right decision. He was the person I wanted to be with – he had the most calming presence over the phone and it was exactly the same in person.

As teens we’d always say to each other, ‘I wish we could just hang out and go for ice cream or something’ and we finally did! We went on loads of dates, sightseeing, and I even met his family and friends. Three weeks flew by and when I left Canada we had already arranged for him to come to the UK to see me three months later.

We only decided to enter into an official romantic relationship after we’d met in person. I wasn’t sure how we’d make it work but I was willing to give it a shot.

In 2015, we started our digital marketing agency Pink Ship Ltd and with that we were able to afford our back and forth travel, which helped keep us grounded whenever we felt that long distance was getting too difficult.

Running a business together helped us to operate like a team and find solutions rather than just giving up. He made the move to London in 2017 on an exchange programme to become a teaching assistant and basketball coach and he did that while still helping me build and run the company.

Overall, being together all the time after being apart for so long was great, and taking trips and embarking on adventures whenever we wanted made us inseparable.

In 2018, on a trip in Toronto, Jaleel proposed – and I said yes. We got married the following year with just a couple of witnesses. We followed it up with a small celebration in Canada with his family and a celebration with my family in London. It was small, with family and friends at the heart of it, which is what mattered to us.

Fast forward to 2020 and we have a one-year-old daughter and another company under our belt. My husband started a media and broadcasting company called Sol Vision Media and we’re now building it with hopes to leave it to our daughter one day.

Who would have thought that all this would come from a teenage pen pal friendship?

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