Dino and Squirrel: Love with Age Gap.

“My husband was in Vietnam,” I say.
“Oh, we were there last year too. Was he backpacking?” a colleague asks me.
“No, he was in the war,” I say.
I'm good at conversation killers.

My husband and I not only have a long-distance relationship between Germany and the USA, but also a large age difference. He is my soul mate and best friend, my biggest adventure, my biggest source of drama, my inspiration, my motivator and the reason I get mad that no one has taken out the trash yet. We're like Ernie and Bert, like Bonnie and Clyde.

Here is the story of how we found each other, what age, love and togetherness mean to us, how even a pandemic and a cancer diagnosis didn't keep us down and why time is the most precious thing we have. And finally, why we should say YES to love. Love has no boundaries.

It's July 2017 and I'm fulfilling my lifelong dream of roadtripping solo across the USA for four months. During my trip I discover the travel platform Couchsurfing on the internet, where you can stay with nice people for free while you get to know their culture and country.

One of my many hosts is an older gentleman in a cowboy hat. His name is Rand, his nickname is Paladin. When I arrive at his wooden house in Wyoming he is smiling mischievously. He does not complain one bit although I turn up over an hour late, unannounced, because I had to quickly take 317,000 photos of stunning geysers on my trip through Yellowstone National Park.

I spend five days with him, during which he shows me the great natural wonders of the national park. We hike a lot and he impresses me with his vast knowledge of geology, art, history and nature. The playlist in his car is kind of weird, fluctuating between Mozart, Korean rap and Australian didgeridoos. Sometimes he reminds me of my grandpa, who also knew a ton and was just as kind and curious as my host.

By this time, I have been on the road for a total of three and a half months and a ton of impressions and new experiences have been firing at me non-stop. When I leave Yellowstone, I break down, crying alone in the car for over an hour without knowing exactly why.
I had promised Rand that I would send him detailed photos of the rock structure of Devil's Tower, which is my next stop. So I send him an e-mail with photos a few days later.

We stay in touch after my trip. Not in that stale way that you stay in touch with distant acquaintances, where you text less and less until the conversation simply dies.

Back in Germany, a storm of personal change sweeps me off my feet. I quit my new job in a press office after just one week and decide to become self-employed as a digital nomad and writer. I had tasted the free life and I had too great difficulty squeezing myself back into a 9-to-5 office routine, which wasn't for me even before the trip.

In between mental crises and breakdowns, there is always one person who is there for me, alongside with my best friends. He always keeps an ear open and supports me with his calm attitude and wisdom: Rand from Yellowstone. We write each other endless emails and I confide in him a lot. Because it feels right. Because he is like an anchor for me - and at the same time such an exciting person who has so much life experience.

A few months later, he tells me that he is planning on a river cruise through Eastern Europe which will end up in Berlin. He asks if I'd like to meet there for a few days. What a cool idea! I can show him my own home country and return his hospitality. We arrange everything.

A few days before he leaves the USA, he buys a 50-ton bag of birdseed and hurts his back so badly while lifting it, that he has to cancel the entire trip and is on crutches for several months.
A happening that hits me unexpectedly hard. Memories of my grandma flood to the surface. How she died suddenly overnight in 2013 while I hadn't visited her for weeks because she was always fit and I thought we still had an infinite amount of time together. Rand is already 70 years old and I now know that life can be a rotten traitor. As I am now successfully self-employed and can work from anywhere, I book a flight to visit him in the USA. If the prophet doesn't come to the mountain, the mountain comes to the prophet. A few months later, in October 2018, I take off. I am excited to see the beautiful Yellowstone National Park again and to meet up with a person that had become a close friend. Seeing him again before he bites the dust.

Our time in October goes differently than expected.

We spend every day together, hiking to magical stone circles and colorful springs. We fly in a small plane and lie on a meadow laughing and interpreting clouds. Once we walk through the streets of a small western village at night until it is dark enough to see the Milky Way. While we drive, we play a card game with questions and answers where you always have to tell the truth. So on our last day he tells me that he has fallen in love with me. “If we hadn't sworn to always tell the truth, I would never have told you,” he confesses later. “Because I knew you'd just laugh at me.”

But I'm not laughing. I'm crying. Again. We have an age difference of 45 years and a distance of 6,000 miles. Something like that cannot work. I'm admittedly a bit crazy, but not that crazy. My flight back to Germany leaves the next day. We hug for a long time and then I'm gone. But my fucking life is upside down. Even if I am not ready to admit it to myself yet: I've fallen in love, too. With his wonderful personality, his humor, his interests, his spirit.

But this cannot work!

Yes, it can. A month and a half later, we meet again. In Paris. To find out what we're going to do now, who we are, what we are and how real our feelings for each other really are. 45 years. My gosh. Rand is older than my dad!

Then I surprise Rand at 6am at Charles de Gaulle airport, having secretly arrived the night before and then walked for three hours through Paris at night. When he sees me, his blue eyes light up. He runs up to me and kisses me. Just like that. At that moment I know: this is it. Fuck it. It's him. Let's go for it!

We've been together ever since. We live on two continents, visit each other frequently and for long periods of time and travel the world together in between. We don't care what other people think about us. If someone can't be happy for two people who have found each other, love each other and are happy, I'm not gonna waste a second of thoughts of our valuable time on this person.

That brings us righ to the most important topic: time. Time is something extremely valuable. Something you can't buy, earn, get back, extend or shorten. When you are in a relationship with a (large) age gap, you know that you will probably never grow old together and that one will pass away (significantly) earlier than the other - although young people can surely also have accidents and diseases. We humans just tend to forget this.

This is precisely why we have always tried to spend our time very consciously and enjoy as much time together as possible.

But then 2020 hit and with it the global covid pandemic with border closures. A dramatic situation for all intercultural and international couples, because suddenly everything was locked down and travel became impossible. For two whole years (!), it was no longer possible to enter the USA directly from Europe. Europe, in turn, imposed an entry ban for Americans.

Never in my life will I forget that one evening in March 2020 when the extend of all this became increasingly clear. I felt like I was trapped in a science fiction movie. So I acted like I was in a science fiction movie. I spontaneously booked a flight to Canada for the next morning and rushed off to Frankfurt airport by dawn, with my credit card, backpack and passport in hand. I made the penultimate flight before Canada closed all its borders, too. At the same time, Rand drove over a thousand miles from his home in the USA to Canada, where, after some really dramatic hours where we lost cell service and communication, we were able to reunite just before the world shut down completely. From then on, we spent two years playing hide and seek with ridiculous entry regulations, which took us to Croatia, on a solo trip to the Caribbean and to Costa Rica, among other places. A time that tested us hard, but also showed us that we would do anything for each other - not just in theory.

You can find the detailled stories here:

• Covid-007 and the Love of my Life: How I disappeared to Canada overnight
• A Love Story in a Third Country: How I saw my Boyfriend despite Border Closures
• Smoke on the Airplane - my adventurous flight to Aruba

Just a year later, when everything seemed to be back to "normal", the absolute nightmare for every couple came true. Rand had been experiencing abdominal pain for a while, which he finally wanted to have checked out.
When he came home from the doctor in November 2022, he looked at me blankly. “Sarah, I have cancer.”
I can still hear the silent roaring thunder in my ears. The way I stared at the bare tree outside the window. Part of me was sure this just couldn't be real, part of me wanted to scream and part of me just fell apart.

Weeks of tests followed. One result was darker than the other. The cancer had already spread, was incurable, a rare, aggressive type and chemo only had a 10 percent chance of success. One time the doctor said quite frankly: “If the chemo doesn't work, you have a few more weeks left.” A few more weeks weeks. A few weeks ago, we were still hiking through the jungle in the Amazon.

Though I am not religious, I felt this one sentence so strongly at the time: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

Between treatments we flew to Alaska in the winter and visited Rand's former home in Savannah. Everything suddenly became a bucket list item. But of course we still felt fear, despair, pain, inner terror, inner emptiness. We didn't want to just stop being.

Knowing intellectually that your partner is likely to die before you is one thing. Facing the truth emotionally is a completely different dimension that no one can prepare you for.

And then my visa ran out exactly one day before the day we were due to be told whether the chemo had been successful or not. I had tried to apply for a visa extension due to special family circumstances, but the American authorities didn't care. I had to fly back to Germany alone, not knowing what our future would look like, not knowing if I would see Rand next time in the hospice or never again. I wanted to rip open the cabin door over the Atlantic and jump out.

The therapy was a success. After all the bad luck Rand had, he was actually one of the ten lucky percent. The doctor gave us another two to three years in April 2023. Since then, we've been living even more intensively than before. Time has become gold for us. More than that. It means everything. We are everything. Since then, we have hiked 200 miles on the Coast to Coast Trail through England, been to the Himalayas, to Africa, hiked the Laugavegur in Iceland and got married.
When someone asks me if I'm worried about what the neighbors think about our age gap, I am laughing out loud.

But apart from all the drama in our relationship, what do we do in everyday life and what's it like with a 45 year age gap?

We love long (long-distance) hikes, traveling, backpacking, being outdoors in nature and camping. We often have deep conversations, laugh about complete nonsense and cook together. We have very similar tastes in music, starting with Elvis and ending with Bon Iver. Rand likes to read aloud from books with different voices and I love it when someone reads aloud to me. We share the same spirit, the same zest for life and the same dreams. We both love to teach each other new things, learn from each other and motivate and support each other.

While Rand is always trying out new devices and taught himself programming for fun back in the Stone Age, I'm the old aunt who gets confused when the milk is suddenly placed in a different aisle in the supermarket. On paper, Rand is the older one of us, but he's actually the fountain of youth and I'm the old soul who likes to think too much. Speaking of being old: after all these years, we no longer see the visual difference between us. At least I don't wake up every morning and think: “Holy fuck, he's old!” We are just us and I love it.