It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife... And while a lot may have changed since the days of Jane Austen, what still holds true is that people are still looking for love and for a person to share it with - someone who not only will be loved but loves back in an equal measure.


Now our interconnected world offers the possibility to find that love in places hitherto unthought of, from Bogota to Bangalore via Brunei and Bangkok, there is nothing stopping us from connecting except our imagination.


So it was with us as well, truth be told.

Although when starting on this journey of course none of us had any inkling of where we would end up. But isn't that how the best stories are made?

Now every story is different and unique – even if it sometimes fails to capture other people's imagination. And there is no reason why our story should be any more or less interesting than any body else's. But the end result of it all – our international and multicultural blended family – is worth telling this story, with all its twists, turns and plot devices.

So, when Asiya went to Tefaf – an international Art fair – in Maastricht (Netherlands) in the early months of 2020 she couldn't foresee the consequences of this trip. With Covid-19 hitting the world just about when she left the Netherlands for the comforts of home in St Petersburg (Russia) and the company of her little daughter there her mind was completely focussed on life back home, the coming lockdown and all the ideas she had after spending all this time surrounded by the richness of art and beauty.

As Asiya was packing her bags and going over the last details of the home trip, a mere 25km away Stijn decided to spend a few minutes swiping his tinder account – truly the best 5 minutes ever spend by anyone. Being perfectionist in nature – and especially in looking for tinder matches – he spotted her profile and immediately got hooked by her interesting personality, composition of pictures and – let's be honest here – her supreme beauty. Never before in the history of tinder was a superlike more swiftly and deservedly given.

Of its own, a superlike isn't doing much, and just as it takes two to tango, so it also takes two to match. For Asiya, of course the experience what different. To describe it in her own words:

"I was just randomly checking, swiping to the right or the left. Mostly to the left though, I did have some occasional matches but not so much; most people didn't strike me as interesting enough. Then, I saw your profile and it had a different colour, the blue frame of the super like although I didn't have a clue what it was, and I started to read the profile text. I really liked what you wrote, checked out your pictures and then… BAM… match!"

Now, it seems almost like a counter-natural reflex. While all of society is locking itself down, trying to minimize the risks and shunning contacts how different the situation is we found ourselves in compared to the everyday person's worries.

Instead of stressing whether or not we've stored enough toilet paper and pasta we had the joy of coming across a person, a profile, that is so very interesting that seeing the distance between the both of you (approximately 2000km) with about 5 countries in between is shrugged off with a "we'll worry about that later".

Little did we fully grasp the impact the corona virus would have.

Little did we know how fast we would develop our relationship emotionally and physically.

Little did we imagine the opening of the borders would be the most important thing on our minds.

In hindsight it all seems so normal, because from where we are right now there is nothing more natural than the two of us being together. But still the first messages had a little awkward feeling to it, like they all have.

Because however witty or catchy your opening lines are (and hand on heart, Stijn's really was spot on) ultimately you are trying to get to know the other person more, including all the different things there are to know such as work, kids and their ages and each other's personal history. But do you honestly think we would be so smitten with each other if it had stopped with these functional bits and bobs? Well, me neither.

In talking with a magical woman you open yourself up to be enriched and enchanted, so naturally the conversations meandered from all these normally boring topics to things like art and beauty, magic, love languages and so on. In that way sprinkling these erstwhile soulless questions and answers with some magic dust and a little love (already) transforming them beyond recognition.

So, after just one day of almost constant communication we already started to feel how we matched. How we had such a very natural flow in all different aspects, understanding each other and having the same outlook on life, feeling like we already complemented each other for instance when thinking about art, philosophy,…

All in just the first day. So many messages, back and forth, like we were already invested in each other and couldn't stop talking to one another. Something magical was indeed happening.Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components of a book into a coherent whole. In the words of Jan Tschichold, "methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve, have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books, these rules have to be brought back to life and applied."
Front matter, or preliminaries, is the first section of a book, and is usually the smallest section in terms of the number of pages. Each page is counted, but no folio or page number is expressed, or printed, on either display pages or blank pages.

How can you beat a perfect day like that first one, I hear you thinking? Well, after a little back and forth regarding Disney's Beauty and the Beast, Asiya decided to give me the first of many different BOOM moments…

Being magically turned back into a prince we continued our daylong stream of constant communication, discussing psychoanalysis and Jungian archetypes and how they are present in stories and art (as you do on Tinder). Then moving on to Van Gogh and Asiya's passion for his work and art in general (of which you can find a lot more art-related content on Asiya's personal page).

With finding a shared language and array of topics to discuss, we both marvelled at how fast this connection was already deepening and how strong it felt after only two days…

The conversations kept flowing, but we both simultaneously decided to leave Tinder for what it was and continue more privately. The deeper topics like parents and our relationships with hem, and Asiya's remarkable family line of strong women, were alternated with lighthearted and fun moments comprising dancing in the kitchen and sharing and exploring each other's Instagram accounts together (although we doubt that any of us could have foreseen where we would end up with this).



It made Asiya say how much she liked "how deep our conversation is going, it's interesting for me" with "short breaks become two hours ????".

So was it possible to say we were starting to fall in love? Possibly, probably, although as a final step or the last little nudge before our magic carpet ride started to take off something was needed. And it had to do with a particular aspect of Russian dating culture.



So early in the first week of getting to know each other Stijn casually dropped that just the previous day he had come "across a nice little thing/present I want to sent to you, but of course I don't have your address to sent it to! Don't feel pressured to share it if you don't feel like it yet, but if you wouldn't mind I'd love to be able to sent you something?"



To which Asiya, without a heartbeat of a doubt replied that "as a girl, of course I like presents and I will not stop you feeling to do something for me, I love it."