Quickie w/ Yue: Does A Couple Need To Go Through Hardship To Feel Connected?

And something that's been on my mind lately is this question of, is the depth of your relationship together directly correlated to the amount of shit you go through together? I'm asking this question because I talk about my parents' relationship a lot, and I've been looking at their friends' marriages as well, and all of them have that immigrant story, picked up their lives, moved to the US, came with $2 in their bank account and didn't know anybody here.

So two people had to really come together as a team, survive in this new environment, this new world together.

And something that I find very admirable for my parents is that both of them set their egos aside because they both came from academia in China, came to the States and, and in order to survive, my mom, you know, worked in assembly line.

She worked as a housekeeper.

She was a babysitter.

She just did whatever she could to make ends meet.

And my dad did the same, uh, at the sacrifice of their relationship.

I mean, there were nights that, like, I wouldn't see my parents till I was ready to go to bed.

But because of this survival phase of their relationship, I think it is what's made them so close.

I feel that my parents are more like relatives than anything else.

Like, and my mom says this all the time, like my dad is her family.

They are family because they went through so much together.

And they have a lot of friends who've, who've had similar, similar, like, survival stories you could call it.

Many of them had to live apart.

If you are a part of any immigrant community, you're probably familiar with this story.

A lot of people actually live apart when they move to a new country to make ends meet 'cause one person could have gotten a job in a different state or one person stayed back in their home country to take care of the kids and the other one came to pave the way.

And so many of my parents' friends did that.

I mean, many of them lived apart for years, like five, six, seven years, and some of them didn't even see their kid till their kid was grown, like seven or eight.

Can you imagine having, having really never met your kid till they were a grown-ass kid? But with my parents, I think it also was a cause for a lot of turmoil and friction, and they fought a lot, and they've survived, and they've now y- are in their retirement golden years and they get along very well.