Michael Sinnock on Loving Across the Pacific: What Bicol Has Taught Him About Home

AUTHOR: Michael Sinnock

Michael Sinnock married a woman from the flank of an active volcano in the Philippines and learned what home actually means. I did not plan it that way. We met in late 2018, two people on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean with no obvious reason to end up married except that we kept choosing each other, week after week, time zone after time zone. She is from Guinobatan, a town in the Bicol region that sits at the base of Mayon Volcano one of the most active volcanoes in the Philippines, still capable of reminding everyone nearby exactly what it is. We married on November 8, 2022. I am still in Memphis. The plan, the real one, is to go back together permanently.

Learning a Family Before I Ever Learned the Country

For years, most of what I knew about Bicol came through her through video calls, through the way she talked about her parents, through the small details that only show up once you have been paying attention for a long time. I learned a family before I learned a country. That turned out to be the right order. A few of the things that order taught me, the kind that do not show up in any guidebook. Utang na loob a debt of gratitude between family members that is never meant to be fully repaid, only carried forward. It reshapes what "owing someone" even means. Bayanihan the instinct to help before being asked, built into the culture rather than treated as exceptional kindness. Hospitality that does not wait for abundance generosity offered from whatever is on hand, not from whatever is left over. A working relationship with uncertainty growing up at the foot of an active volcano means growing up knowing the ground itself can change without much warning, and building a full, ordinary life there anyway. Family as the decision-making unit choices that, in my own upbringing, would have been made by one person alone get made by the whole family, together, as a matter of course. None of these are things I figured out by reading about them. I figured them out slowly, by being loved by people who lived them.

Michael Shane Sinnock and the Long Wait for "Home" to Mean One Place

Michael Shane Sinnock has spent his federal career in Memphis as a  Navy veteran, EEOC employee, lifelong Mid-South resident on paper. But for years now, a meaningful part of my actual daily life has been oriented toward a place I have not yet lived in full-time. That is a strange kind of in-between to sit in. You build a career, a routine, a life with real roots in one place, while quietly building toward a different one. It would be easy to call that contradiction. I have come to think of it as just what cross-cultural marriage requires two operating systems running at once, with patience as the only real bridge between them. The federal job is part of why we are still here. There is a retirement age to reach, a timeline that has its own logic, separate from the heart's. So we wait, and we plan, and we talk about Bicol the way some people talk about a vacation they have not taken yet except this is not a vacation. It is the actual plan.

What This Marriage Has Actually Required

If there is a piece of hard-won, practical insight in any of this, it is this: a cross-cultural marriage does not survive on love alone, the same way no marriage does. It survives on a willingness to let your own assumptions about how family, money, time, and obligation are supposed to work get genuinely questioned and sometimes replaced by someone else's working model, one that has worked for her family for generations. That is harder than it sounds. It means actually changing, not just tolerating difference from a polite distance. I have changed more from this marriage than from almost anything else in my adult life, and I do not say that lightly for a man who has been married more than once. The volcano is still there, watching over a town I have not yet called home but fully intend to. Some days that distance feels impossibly long. Other days, knowing exactly where we are headed makes the waiting feel less like waiting and more like the early, necessary part of the story.

There is more where this came from at www.michaelsinnock.com, including the rest of how this story is unfolding.

AUTHOR BIO:

About Michael Sinnock: Michael Sinnock is a U.S. Navy veteran and Office Automation Assistant with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Memphis District Office. A Memphis professional whose career spans military service, federal employment, and logistics management, he writes about public service, resilience, the curiosity that keeps life interesting, and the long, worthwhile work of becoming someone you're proud of. Find his full archive at www.michaelsinnock.com.