Michael Sinnock on Never Giving Up on Love: How He Met His Wife on the Other Side of the World

**AUTHOR:** Michael Sinnock

Michael Sinnock never stopped believing in love, even after two marriages ended, and that belief eventually led him to the other side of the world.

I am a romantic at heart, even with a fairly stoic exterior. I have been married three times, and I know exactly how that sounds when it is written out plainly like that. I am not going to dwell on the two marriages that did not last, because that is not really the point of this story. The point is that after both of them ended, I had every reason to stop believing love was something I would find again, and I simply refused to.

## Believing in Something You Cannot Prove Yet

There is a particular kind of stubbornness required to keep reaching for love after it has not worked out more than once. Most people, understandably, start to protect themselves instead. I never fully did that. Somewhere underneath the stoic exterior, I stayed a romantic, and I kept believing that the right person was still somewhere I had not looked yet.

I found her in Guinobatan, a town in the Bicol region of the Philippines, sitting at the base of Mayon Volcano. We have been together since late 2018. I was building a life in Memphis, transitioning out of my role with the National Cemetery Administration, and she was building her own life on the other side of the world, and somehow the distance never actually felt like the obstacle it should have.

## What Kept Two People Together Across an Ocean

Long distance relationships fail for a lot of reasonable reasons. Time zones make simple conversation difficult. Culture and language create real gaps that require actual effort to bridge, not just good intentions. Most people who try it eventually give up, not because the feeling was not real, but because sustaining it across that much distance takes a kind of patience most relationships never have to test.

What I can tell you, honestly, is that ours never felt like something we were enduring. It felt like something we were building, one conversation and one visit at a time, toward something we both already believed was coming.

We married on November 8, 2022. It landed during an unusually specific window in my own life, the space between finishing my time with the National Cemetery Administration and starting what would become my career with the EEOC. I remember thinking, even at the time, that there was something fitting about closing one chapter of service and opening a marriage in the same short stretch of days.

Michael Shane Sinnock spent a lot of years believing that love was worth the risk of being wrong about it again. I was wrong twice. I am not wrong this time, and I say that with the kind of certainty that only comes from having been wrong before and knowing the difference.

## What I Would Tell Someone Who Has Stopped Believing

I wrote a while back about what I have learned from my wife's world, the values and the resilience I did not grow up with and had to learn as an adult. This piece is about something that came before all of that. It is about the decision to keep looking, even after two marriages had already taught me that love does not automatically work out just because you want it to.

Here is what I actually believe about that, stated plainly:

Two failed marriages are not proof that you are bad at love. They are proof that you tried, twice, with people who were not the right fit, which is a completely different thing. The right person is not a reward for giving up on being hurt again. They show up while you are still willing to be hurt, which is the only way anyone actually finds them. Distance and culture are real obstacles, but they are not disqualifying ones, if both people are actually building toward the same thing. Timing that feels coincidental usually is not. It is just two lives finally lining up after a lot of years of almost.

We are still in Memphis for now. The plan, the real one, is to eventually build our life together permanently in the Philippines, closer to where she is from and everything I have come to love about that place through her.

I have been wrong about love before. I do not say that with shame. I say it because it is the reason I recognized what was real when it finally showed up.

I write about love, family, and the long road to get here every week at www.michaelsinnock.com.

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 are proud of. Learn more at www.michaelsinnock.com.