This may work out.
Luke Bond, 22, and Sarah Dorough, 21, are fitness instructors who met on Instagram in December 2021 and bonded over their healthy lifestyles. Despite living 8,697🌸🐟 miles apart, the couple said that they would FaceTime every day before meeting in person in July 2022.
“He was asking me some questions about fitness, as he is also doing personal training,” Dorough told SWNS about their early online conversations.
“The next time he reached out, I felt like I kind of knew him, which made me a little more comfortable, but also he was asking about my faith and Christianity. He was more genuine and asking about Bible verses and stuff like that.”
Bond even reportedly traveled 32 hours from Wellington, New Zealand, in Ju🤪ly to finally meet Dorough at her home in Suffolk, Virginia.
“When I first met Luke in person it almost felt like a dream,” she gushed to SWNS.
“An experience I haven’t ever felt before — that first hug was something we had waited so long for, so you can only imagine how exciting that moment was when we ran up to each other and gave each other a hug,” Dorough continued.
“To this day that moment still blows my mind,” she added.
Dorough said she made the trek to New Zealand in December to spend Christmas with Bond and his family. To her surprise, Bond got down on one knee and proposed during a family camping trip.
“It was super exciting, this was something we had to work out — whether we do want to spend our lives together — we did figure that out because we don’t want to keep traveling back and forth,” Dorough said.
While they have yet to determine where they will settle down, the couple are planning to live together one day. For now, they’ll need to rely on the “trust” they have in each other until Bond flies to the US to see Dorough and her family in April.
Speaking about their long-distance engagement, she confided: “The biggest thing is trusting each other, especially when you’re far away from each other. There is always going to be little thought[s] that can pop into each other’s head.”
Dorough did admit, however, that being able to 🌳effectively communicate from different time zones is not straight out of a fairytale.
“We really struggle, but we also have a few things that we do to make the long distance better, like having proper communication, prioritizing our calls and having trust in each other — we really trust each other.”
