When they first started long distance, they thought they had a pretty good idea of what it would be like.

Turns out, they were completely wrong.

Between his military training schedule and Lexi’s nonstop days training and grooming protection dogs, life got chaotic very quickly. Somehow, though, they made it work mostly through determination, handwritten letters, and an impressive amount of patience.

While he was away for training, Lexi made sure he never felt alone for a second. She sent him a letter every single day without fail, which slowly became a running joke because mail call started looking less like support from home and more like he had a full-time fan club. Everyone else would get one letter every now and then, while he was carrying around stacks of envelopes like a very emotional mailman.

At some point, the people around him stopped asking if he got mail and started asking how much mail he got that day. Even the drill sergeants seemed slightly confused by the sheer commitment. Meanwhile, Lexi somehow managed to balance all of this while spending her days working with protection dogs, grooming them, training them, and handling dogs with more personality than most people.

Even when he barely had access to his phone, she still sent videos constantly little updates from her day, funny moments with the dogs she worked with, random stories, and reminders that she loved him even when they couldn’t talk much. The second he finally got phone time, those videos became the highlight of his week. Nothing hits harder than hearing “I miss you” after days of exhaustion and barely any sleep.

And somehow, no matter how tired she was from work, she still found time to write letters long enough to feel like short novels. Some were sweet, some were funny, and some were just stories about whichever protection dog had decided to have a complete personality crisis that day.

When he couldn’t travel to see her, she was always the one making the trip instead. Long drives, short visits, exhausting schedules, none of it ever stopped her from showing up. Somehow she made even a few hours together feel worth every mile in between.

Looking back, a lot of their relationship during that time was spent waiting. Waiting for phone calls, waiting for letters, waiting for visits, and counting down days until they could finally be in the same place again. But through all of it, they never stopped choosing each other.

Somewhere in the middle of all the chaos, they realized their relationship was built on a lot more than convenience. It was built on effort, consistency, laughter, loyalty, and finding ways to stay close even when life kept trying to pull them in different directions.

And honestly, if their relationship can survive distance, impossible schedules, military training, multiple protection dogs, and enough handwritten letters to keep the postal service in business… then “Love Across Miles” was never just a title. It was the whole story.