Loving Across Time Zones: The Reality of Dating a Partner in the Diaspora

Chidinma met her partner, now her fiancé, during his two-week visit to Lagos for a cousin's wedding in 2022. He returned to his life as a logistics analyst in Toronto three days after their first date, and for the eighteen months that followed, their entire relationship existed almost exclusively through video calls scheduled around a six-hour time difference, voice notes sent during commutes, and increasingly expensive flights timed around whichever public holiday made the trip financially bearable for whoever was travelling that round. "People romanticise long-distance relationships in movies," she says. "Nobody shows you the part where you're falling asleep mid-conversation because it's 1 a.m. for you and he just finished work."