February is all about international relationships and showcasing travel ladies being brave in love
Meet Naomi & Jostein
Words by Naomi
About me: I was born in Canada, raised in New Jersey, ready to defend either. I’ve been to over 50 countries but not as many U.S. states as Jostein, to my shame. I love live music, hiking, snow and cold weather sports, feminist rants, Bruce Springsteen, and I am addicted to Twitter. I also have a freakishly good (or annoying, depending on who you ask) memory.
About Jostein: Born and raised on Stord, a large-for-Norway island on the west coast of Norway. A veteran journalist and US politics-junkie. Jostein loves traveling (4o+ countries and 49 US states, only Alaska left), hiking, kayaking, cross country skiing, Arsenal, Bruce Springsteen, and pointing out very obvious things, even when he knows I know them.
How they met: Jostein and I met on a dating app.
My profile said “Funny…for a girl.”
His profile said “Norwegian journalist in D.C., looking to meet fun people.”
We have been together about 3.5 years; married since July 2020.
How it all began
We met in the summer of 2017.
I had been on a six-month break from the dating apps, which I took periodically, because sometimes straight men are just Too Much
I hopped back on when I needed a distraction from the relentless horrors of the Trump administration. I was working for an environmental NGO in Washington, D.C., and things were grim. Ironically, though, we sort of met because of Trump - Jostein is a journalist for a Norwegian newspaper (vg.no), and was assigned to the US in the summer of 2017 to...cover the Trump administration. He arrived in D.C. at the beginning of June, and I guess didn’t waste any time logging on.
Where was your first date?
At a beer bar called Churchkey, in D.C. I don’t know if readers remember how crazy the news was at that time, but multiple things were breaking every day.
Jostein joked that he’d only be late if there was “Trump-chaos” and then a few hours before we were supposed to meet, White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci was fired, after only 10 days on the job.
So, Jostein was late because he had to cover it, but this is how we remember the date we met- July 31, the day Anthony Scaramucci got fired.
What was a cute cultural quirk that you noticed right away about your partner/they noticed about you?
I don’t think this is a cultural quirk so much as a Jostein quirk, but I was used to first dates being kept to one hour/one drink. Which was how I preferred them. Jostein, however, ordered and ate a full dinner, and I thought he was a weirdo (but one I enjoyed talking to).
I think he would say that he noticed that I told him I wasn’t sure about a second beer, because my alcohol tolerance is really low. (It is! But also, the one drink rule.)
Would you say that the timing was “right” when you met one another? Or, if the timing for an international relationship was bad, but you still decided to go for it, how did you come to this decision?
The night before we met for the first time, Jostein told me that he was only assigned to be in D.C. for a year, so he would understand if I didn’t want to meet. Having been on literally dozens of dating app first dates, I thought “what a weirdo, I am probably never going to see you again.”
Obviously, we kept seeing each other despite that potentially looming deadline. We had not even been together for a year yet when Jostein found out that his assignment wouldn’t be extended, which meant we had to agree pretty early on to do long distance. I was fairly zen about it (he was my first boyfriend so I didn’t really know any better), and he was a little more concerned.
Had you ever dated anyone outside of your own nationality before?
I had never dated anyone before Josein. But, *he* had previously dated someone from the U.S. I was lucky enough to have plenty of friends and colleagues from all over the world.
The dating game
Was it clear from the onset that you were dating, or was there ever uncertainty as to the status of the relationship?
I didn’t tell my family I was dating him for literally six months... and I lived in an apartment directly below, and shared an entrance with my brother.
I lived in fear that he would see Jostein coming or going. I know Jostein told family and friends he was dating someone in the U.S. I don’t think there was uncertainty that we were together, I think I just wasn’t ready to accept that he was my boyfriend.
What was culturally different about your international relationship that you enjoyed?
I have discovered that Jostein might be the most open, gregarious Norwegian in the world. He can talk to anyone, anywhere, and mostly enjoys doing it.
He also is impervious to weather - in Norway, they have a saying that “det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær” (no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes) and he embodies this.
What is something completely different from your culture that you love about your partner’s?
Jostein introduced me to “utepils” (outside beer) which is more than just drinking a beer outside - it’s the joy of being able to sit outside, in the sun and warmth, after the long cold dark of winter.
Utepils can’t just be on your balcony/at your house; it has to be in a bar/social setting, so you can enjoy the company of others also enjoying the sun and warmth.
A more serious thing that I would say amuses and surprises me about Norweigan culture is the trust they have in authorities/government to do the right thing and to act responsibly and in the best interests of citizens. Whenever I have to fill out a form in Norway and I express skepticism about giving some piece of personal information to the government, Norwegians can’t really understand why.
I still remember asking where the metal detectors were when I had to go to a police station for an appointment related to my residence permit. “We don’t have them here,” explained the amused officer at the door, directing people to the right place.
Classic international relationship question: Did one of you start learning the other’s native language? Both of you?
Like all Norwegians under the age of 50, Jostein speaks perfect, fluent English.
I started dabbling in Norwegian on DuoLingo after we had been together for almost a year, but got serious about learning Norwegian once I moved to Oslo.
I took intensive classes, which means in practice that I can read about half of a children’s newspaper I subscribe to, and am too embarrassed about my vocabulary and grammar to speak to anyone except Jostein.
The extra special part is that there is no standardized spoken Norwegian - there are about 47 dialects and every one of the 5.5 million people in Norway speaks a different one depending on where they grew up. And some of them don’t even understand each other.
My favorite example: We met a couple living in Northern Norway with two kids. The father is Norwegian and speaks to the children in Norwegian. The mother is half US-American, half Japanese, grew up in New Zealand, and speaks to the children in English. The kids could understand my English, and I could understand their Norwegian, but they could not understand Jostein’s Norwegian. He had to speak to them in English.
Did you ever do long distance with your partner? For how long, and what was it like?
We were long distance between D.C. and Oslo from the fall of 2018 until I moved to Oslo in the fall of 2019 (so, about 1 year).
It wasn’t the most fun or easiest thing to do (or the most fun or easiest thing about our relationship), but it was... fine?
I felt that both of us traveled so much for work and for pleasure that we could definitely handle it. And I had maintained solid friendships all over the world with people I had met traveling, so I wasn’t worried about putting in the effort it would take.
I was very lucky in that I was on a secondment within my organization, and the team I worked with was based in Europe, and that I had the resources and flexibility to work remotely. So, I could spend a few weeks at a time working from Jostein’s apartment in Oslo.
Going all in
What did “going all in” look like for you and your partner? Did you initially agree on what this looked like?
Let’s see...I got a new job in Oslo; we bought an apartment together that I only saw over FaceTime; I moved to Norway; a pandemic broke out and I got furloughed; we got engaged; we got married; we moved back to the U.S. for 3 months and didn’t see each other for 2.5 of them... all within a little less than a year.
Almost any one of these things felt all-in, but all of them together was definitely a lot. We definitely had no idea in February 2020 what “all in” would look like in February 2021.
If one of you moved for the other: Does the partner that moved ever get homesick? How do you support one another in times of cultural fatigue?
Homesickness manifests for me in silly ways like, “argh, I just want to be able to order something online and have it delivered to my door in 48 hours” and “why can’t I find a single brand of x that I recognize.”
It does sometimes happen in tougher ways, like, “there is a deadly virus which means my family can’t come to my wedding and I haven't seen my 97-year-old grandfather in over a year.”
The second kind, obviously, made it much, much easier to get perspective on the first. Both of us are very sympathetic to each other’s outbursts about something we miss in our respective cultures/countries, or something we wish was better about the others’. Often, we agree.
What is an aspect of being in an international relationship that sounds romantic or sexy, but is actually really challenging to navigate?
International relationships sound fun and romantic when you’re posting pictures hiking the fjords or from meeting for a weekend in Berlin in the summer, but no one tells you about the admin.
About how much paperwork there is to fill out. About how many government departments you will have to navigate, from both countries, in multiple languages.
Jostein was reduced, at one point, to pleading on Twitter and Facebook for help with some forms we needed to get married, and I had to beg the US embassy in Oslo for an “emergency” appointment to get a document that we needed to get in time for our already postponed-due-to-covid wedding.
I am also extremely aware of how much easier it is for me, a US citizen with a Norwegian employer, a graduate education, and resources, with a Norwegian citizen partner, to navigate the immigration system (and to be welcomed into Norway).
If you’re a partner that moved for the other, how was it decided that you would move and not the other way around?
We had the classic “whoever gets a job in the other’s country first will move” arrangement.
We were both equally willing to move, which was important, and we were, at one point, in a situation in which I might be working in Norway and he might be working in the U.S.
It obviously wasn’t an ideal situation for our relationship, but neither of us would ask the other to give up a professional opportunity for the other - we knew we could make it work if we had to. And we are pretty flexible about moving again in the future - whether to the US or somewhere else completely.
How do you navigate the holiday season and family events?
We have different religions 🙂
I’m Jewish; Jostein isn’t, so holidays aren’t really a problem. We’re happy to travel with each other to each other’s family events if we can, but it’s not an issue if one of us goes alone.
If you have a child, what has the experience of raising them been like?
We don’t have a child BUT we just brought home a puppy. He is a golden retriever named Attila the Hund (“hund” means dog in Norwegian). I grew up with dogs and have trained puppies before, but Jostein has not.
Wish us (and Attila) luck; we need it. He is obscenely cute. He’s also going to be bilingual (luckily, “sit,” “come,” and “no”) sound basically the same in Norwegian as they do in English.
What role does travel play in your relationship as a couple?
I assume we’re talking about the before Covid times here 🙂
We absolutely wouldn’t be together if we didn’t both love and value traveling; it’s something that we talked about before we met (it’s pretty much a requirement on dating apps to post travel photos) in person and it’s something we did a lot of together, pre-covid.
We’re also extremely lucky that we live in Norway, and have been able to travel within the country, even during covid.
That’s something we think about a lot as a privileged, white US/European couple, whose passports (until Covid, obviously) afforded them a lot of freedoms and advantages not available to many, many people in the world.
Traveling opens the world to you, but that comes with awareness and responsibilities that you have to constantly grapple with.
And, we have an endless argument over beach (Jostein) vs mountains (me).
Advice for the masses
Most everyone, I think, associates international love stories with romance and rose bubbles. For those of us in them though, we know that they’re just like any other and require daily work, commitment, and more than a little determination. These last few questions are to give folks interested in really peeking under the hood of a strong international partnership a glimpse of the true nuts and bolts.
I think most people would say that communication is the most important thing for any successful relationship, but especially an international one. What, in your opinion, is the SECOND most important thing to have in a strong international relationship? What advice would you give to a fledgling international couple who wants to really give it a shot?
Since Jostein was my first boyfriend, I don’t think I am best suited to give advice on relationships. Maybe... pick a Norwegian if you like hiking and skiing?
I asked Jostein how he would answer this. He says: “Patience. And at least in the beginning, if you aren’t living in the same place, you just have to accept it and be ok with it.”
I agree with that - you can’t just focus on how you’re not physically together - you both have to live your lives fully, and be full people without each other.
Thank you for reading a special February edition of the 52 Weeks of Fearless series: Fearless in Love
This feature has been lightly edited for concision and clarity. Features are posted at least once a week on Friday evening Central European Time.
If you connected with Naomi and Jostein’s story, you can follow both Naomi and the couple’s sweet (but naughty!) new puppy on Instagram!
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