Florence Reisch is a certified coach and author of “Expat Wife, Happy Life!” This is part one of her story.
I was a young Swiss woman, living a beautiful love story with my boyfriend Alex. One evening, about a year and a half into our relationship, he took me out to dinner and told me he’d been offered a job in West Africa.
Alex came from a family of Austrian diplomats, and had spent several years in Kenya as a child. He had always dreamed of continuing to live an expatriate life as an adult, too, a dream that he had shared with me ever since we had first met in London in January 1996. (I was working as a PR in a communications agency in Geneva at the time, and he was already working in Lausanne for the same large multinational that took us around the world.)
A few months passed between our first meeting and the start of our relationship. We met again the following summer at a lakeside party in Geneva before he left on vacation. Although he had promised to call me when he got back at the end of August, I didn’t hear from him until the end of October, all because of a mix-up with another Florence in his address book! But fate had decided to reunite us no matter what!
When we finally met for dinner, it was love at first sight, and we’ve been sharing our life experiences ever since.