Obi* is a 28-year-old product manager living in Berlin while his wife is in Lagos. In this week’s Love Currency, he talks about landing a first date because she thought he was someone else, proposing while surrounded by their favourite foods and choosing to work in Germany because of her.

Occupation and location
Product manager living in Berlin, Germany.

Monthly income
My take-home salary is about $4k after tax.

Monthly and recurring relationship expenses
First date: ₦30k at a restaurant in VI

Her birthday (2021): ₦10 – 20k restaurant date and ₦200k cash gift

Her birthday (2022): $1k cash gift

Wedding ring: ₦500k

Business loans: Nothing over ₦1m

Miscellaneous: the occasional ₦100 – 200k

How did you meet your wife?
I was scrolling through Instagram in January 2021 when I came across a reel of her redesigning a space; she’s an interior designer. I enjoyed watching videos of her work, and she was also pretty. So I followed her and started sending responses to her stories — a clapping emoji here, heart eyes there.

A few weeks later, I slid into her DMs to ask her name since it wasn’t on the page. She told me, I asked if we could grab lunch together, and we started discussing arrangements. At some point, she confessed that she only agreed because she’d mistaken my DM for someone else she’d been talking to on Instagram.

Did the date still happen?
Yes. We’d gone far into the planning, so why not? We agreed to have dinner at a restaurant in VI. We ended up talking through the night till the restaurant told us they wanted to close. Our food even ran cold. We’d ordered lamb, some seafood and drinks — everything cost around ₦30k.

I lived in Abuja at the time and was supposed to returnthe next day but postponed it because I wanted to see her again.

Did you?
Yes, a few days later, she told me about a meeting near my house, and I asked her to meet me at a restaurant afterwards. We talked and played the “36 questions to fall in love” game, which left us feeling emotionally vulnerable. It was late, and the restaurant was closing, so we decided to walk the short distance back to my place.

When we got there, she sat on my table because she didn’t like my couch. After trying unsuccessfully to get a ride, she decided to spend the night but insisted on staying in the living room. I brought out a mat I had, and she offered her password for us to watch Netflix movies. At some point, I tried to cuddle and kiss her, but she quickly shot that down, and we went back to watching movies till we fell asleep. After she left, we started talking regularly on WhatsApp, and she even visited me in Abuja.

How did that happen?
Towards the end of March 2021, she said she wished I was in Lagos to celebrate my birthday in April together. So I got her a ticket to Abuja which cost ₦20k – 30k, but Lagos traffic happened, and she missed the flight. The only other available flight that day was about ₦70k, and we both agreed it was a lot of money. I gave up on seeing her, but later that day, she showed up at my door to surprise me. She’d paid the remaining ₦40k for the ticket. That was the best part of my birthday that year.

How was her stay in Abuja?
She stayed just over a week, and we went out two times; one was to a friend’s birthday party. The other times we left the house were when she accompanied me to the coffee shop I worked from or on our regular evening walks around my estate.

She prefers to cook her food or order online rather than eat out. She also doesn’t drink or enjoy the nightlife, so getting her to leave the house is always a struggle. I thought this was a good time to ask her to date me, but this babe said no.

Read full story here: https://www.zikoko.com/money/a-berlin-to-lagos-long-distance-marriage-on-a-4k-monthly-income/