Love Life is a Naijaonpoint weekly series about love, relationships, situationships, entanglements and everything in between.
Chris (36) and Dara (34) met through Couch Surfing in 2021.
On this week’s Love Life, they talk about a squeezed taxi ride in Togo that changed everything, a “what are we” conversation that took months to turn into an actual relationship, and building both a marriage and a tour company across two continents.
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Chris: 2021. I’d gotten a Nigerian visa right before the pandemic, valid for two years, and I never got to use it. With a few months left before it expired, I booked a short weekend trip to Lagos over July 4th. At the time, I was really into Couch Surfing, which is a website where you can meet locals and stay with them during your travels. That’s how I found Dara’s profile.
She’d travelled around West Africa and seemed passionate about exploring Nigeria too. I thought she was an interesting person. So I messaged her, introduced myself properly, and told her about my travels. Thankfully, she responded quickly enough and offered to host me at her home in Nigeria. She said she’d show me around Lagos, and we could even take a trip to Abeokuta. I was sold immediately.
Dara: That’s also my earliest memory of Chris. I’d been on the Couch Surfing website as a guest for about a year before I got my own apartment and started hosting. But Chris wasn’t my first guest. A few months earlier, I’d hosted another guy from Singapore.
Chris reached out in June, and I was really tickled when he mentioned that he’d been to over 130 countries. He also introduced himself properly instead of just asking to crash at mine. He shared in detail the last country he visited, why he’s interested in seeing Africa and why he wants to visit Nigeria. I was sold.
Coincidentally, I’d also just started a personal project to visit 30 Nigerian states before turning 30, so when someone said “come show me Nigeria,” I was thrilled to play tour guide.
Dara: He arrived on July 4th. It was a Saturday morning. I picked him up from the airport, we dropped his bags at my place, and went straight to Abeokuta the same day. We didn’t waste time at all. We made it down to Olumo Rock in Abeokuta, visited the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, and I got him to try amala and okra.
I remember he was somewhat hesitant with the okra, so we swapped bowls, and he ended up loving my plate of amala. The next day, we were back in Lagos. He still wanted to see so many places, so we did the Nike art gallery and the beach. That was where he filmed his first viral video, joking that people had warned him not to come to Lagos because he’d die. It got about 5000 views in a day, which felt massive at the time. By Monday, I went to work and left him the keys to explore Lagos Island alone before his evening flight.
Chris: I’d done Couchsurfing with plenty of people before, so I wasn’t overly anxious. I was just excited for the places we’d see, and Dara seemed like a genuinely nice person. There wasn’t much to worry about.
Dara: On my end, I always take safety precautions with male guests. I’d sleep in the living room on a spare duvet and lock the door separating it from my bedroom, just for my own peace of mind. Nothing strange happened at all, and honestly, his hygiene was much better than my first guest’s had been.
That first trip really stood out for a number of reasons. First, I was intrigued by the way he ate. Most foreigners are visibly cautious with their first bite of unfamiliar food, but Chris just dug in like he’d been eating Nigerian food his whole life. Second, and this one really got me, I accidentally put way too much pepper in some noodles I’d made for him before heading to work that Monday. I panicked the entire morning thinking I’d basically poisoned a white man. I didn’t know how to ask when I called to check on him, so I spent some time dancing around the question. When I finally asked if the noodles was too spicy, this man just said, “It was fine.” I’d always told my siblings I could never marry a man who couldn’t handle pepper, so that moment stuck with me.
Chris: I was single, doing a little casual dating, but nothing serious. I guess I was also looking, but I didn’t have a clear picture of what I was looking for. I remember going back to the US and briefly thinking about Dara. In my head, I thought, “That girl was really nice. Now, I have to find someone like her in the U.S.” I knew I didn’t want a long-distance relationship, so I wasn’t really seeing the vision with Dara at the time.
Dara: I was actually single too. I’d just stepped back from something that was starting to feel one-sided, so I was putting my energy into my travel goals instead.
Chris: It’s actually so funny because we both have different memories of how things played out back then. In my head, we stayed in touch for just a bit and that was it. But years later, while filing visa paperwork, we actually went back through some of our old messages and realised we’d been talking a lot more than either of us remembered.
She’d mentioned taking a trip to Benin, Togo and Ghana and I thought that was really cool. Those were countries I also wanted to visit. So we kept in touch until the next time we planned another trip together.
Chris: I came back in September, two months after the Lagos trip. This time around, we did a trip to Benin and Togo together and spent about a week together.
Dara: Before that trip, we actually had a very direct conversation about room arrangements, which isn’t always easy for women to bring up without it sounding like an accusation. Chris offered separate rooms if I wasn’t comfortable sharing, which put me at ease.
That trip had its share of chaos, too. He got turned back at the Togo border, and we had to sort out special permits in Benin, so we spent a lot of time just waiting around and talking about our families, upbringing, everything.
Chris: That trip is really where we moved from acquaintances to actual friends. We talked so openly that I remember thinking, “This is someone I could see myself with,” but I kept reminding myself that we couldn’t be a thing because of the distance.
Dara: I remember this really funny moment during our taxi ride. His arm ended up around me, completely unplanned, and I could tell he was trying so hard not to invade my personal space. It felt like something straight out of a K-pop drama.
When we got to the airport, the hug we shared felt a lot more different from the first time he visited. It felt warmer, like I already knew I’d miss him.
Chris: After that visit, I think we agreed I’d come back in November for a friend’s wedding as her plus one. I remember asking her if I could come along because I’d heard so much about Nigerian weddings. It was also easier to plan the visits because I worked for an airline and there were daily flights to Lagos. So I could just jump on any flight at any time. Unfortunately, my mum passed away that October, so those plans fell apart.
That loss pulled me into my shell for a bit. I wasn’t really speaking to anyone.
Dara: He told me about it almost immediately; I was one of the first people he told. We didn’t talk much for about a month while he grieved, though I checked on him weekly. There was a moment he broke down on a call, and I remember wishing so badly I could physically be there for him. That’s when I realised he wasn’t just a random friend to me anymore.
Chris: In a way. By December, I’d stepped out of my grief a little more and we were talking more again. I mentioned wanting to see rural Nigeria, especially somewhere outside Lagos. Then Dara mentioned her grandmother’s village in Ekiti state.
Dara: I told my dad I had a foreign client I wanted to bring to the village, which wasn’t entirely a lie; it was just easier to frame it that way at first since I didn’t want to explain that I was hopping on a trip with a random white man.
Anyway, we planned the trip and went to Ekiti in February 2022. We met my grandmother and step-grandfather, bought a live chicken at the market, and cooked over firewood outside, nothing fancy at all. He was enamoured by everything. These were things I considered pretty normal but they were new experiences for him, and he was just happy to witness it all. Chris still says that meal is still one of the best he’s had in Nigeria. Even though he also woke up in the middle of the night needing the bathroom because the food was so spicy for him.
Dara: To be honest, I’d already confided in my sister and aunt that I might be catching feelings, so I’d been planning to bring it up myself at some point. But Chris beat me to it on the second night of the Ekiti trip, and I was so relieved. I’d been overthinking every delayed reply to my messages, wondering if I was being too obvious or too into him.
Chris: I asked her what she thought about us. I didn’t go in expecting us to declare ourselves a couple right there, I just felt like we needed to actually acknowledge that something was there instead of pretending otherwise.
Dara: We agreed there was something between us, but decided to keep things as they were, given how much distance stood between us, and just see where it went without putting a label on it yet.
Chris: Well, we didn’t have to stall for too long because we became official by August. There were a few reasons for the gap. I had visa complications ahead of a planned May visit, had to renew my whole passport, and missed that trip entirely.
Fortunately, Dara had a trip planned to Senegal with some of her clients, so we agreed to meet there. I joined her in Senegal for my birthday in June, and it was just yet another time spent bonding and getting closer. We still hadn’t made anything official.
I came back to Nigeria in August and Nike invited me to a friend’s wedding party. The night before the wedding, I told her something along the lines of “You know we should make this official and be a couple,” and that was it. We became a couple.
Chris: It didn’t feel that different, since we’d already built so much emotional closeness over the previous year. We just kept doing what we’d been doing, travelling together whenever possible. One trip that stood out was Spain; it was her first time in Europe after a couple of visa denials and an appeal. We did Madrid, Mallorca, Barcelona, and she continued on to France and Portugal after I flew back to the US.
Dara: Although communication was tricky sometimes in those early days. Our individual accents took some getting used to. He actually understands me better than his own family does, so he ends up constantly translating for them.
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