This time-lapse video of a rainbow forming over the island of O'ahu in Hawaii expertly captures one of Mother Nature’s most uplifting feats. In a true display of companionship, the first rainbow is soon joined by a second fainter rainbow.
Shot between just after 3 p.m. to about 4 p.m. by YouTuber Dallas Nagata White, the time-lapse from December 2014 centers on the neighborhood of Salt Lake in Honolulu.
Because of the hot rays of the sun and the cool rain clouds over the mountains, rainbows are a common occurrence in Hawaii. But its nickname, "The Rainbow State," is also a testament to Hawaii's rich mix of cultural traditions and identities, a result of a blending of nationalities and ethnic backgrounds on the island.
Rainbows like this are a reminder of the healing that can begin after a violent tempest has passed.
A double haveli in Nawalgarh, Shekhawati. (All photos: Eloise Stark)
Shekhawati is a slow-paced region in the Indian state of Rajasthan. To reach it you have to drive several hours through the Thar desert from Delhi or Jaipur. The payoff after this long journey is the region’s glorious collection of elaborately painted residences that date back centuries. These are some of the most unique houses in all of India, and they are largely unknown to the outside world.
In Shekhawati's dusty towns, horses still tug carts loaded with vegetables for market. Camels draped with plastic necklaces stroll the streets, looking about as handsome as dromedaries can. But a visitor’s eye is immediately drawn to the grand merchants’ mansions painted with intricate frescoes in vibrant colors that line the streets of many villages here. They are like 3D comic books, adorned inside and out with whimsical scenes of mythology, ancestral battles, and the coming of the Europeans, with their trains, cars and hovercrafts.
The Wright Brothers flying machine, a war and a telephone adorn a haveli.
In Shekhawati, town after town is filled with these frescoes, with 2,000 buildings spread across 5,000 square miles. But with no wide scale effort to conserve them, many are now crumbling into dust. Most of the havelis, as these mansions and townhouses are referred to in India, sit empty.
The structures tell the tale of another time, when Shekhawati was a key stop on the Silk Road. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the region was home to the Marwari community, who made their fortune selling spices, opium and textiles in faraway lands. When the Marwaris returned to their desert homeland, steeped in wealth and fresh dreams, they set to work outdoing each other with their ornate residencies. The paintings had one function, and one alone: to impress those they left behind.
Elephants and a caretaker at the door of a haveli in Nawalgarh.
The paintings are as much a testimony to the patron's wealth as they are to the imaginations of the artists, at a time where these villages were beginning their first contact with the outside world. The “Britishers” arrived in India in the early 17th century, and echoes of their strange customs began creeping into local art.
The painters in Shekhawati had often never laid eyes on the things they were painting. Their trains look like rows of houses pulled by strings. On one haveli, the Wright brothers’ plane is depicted with the caption: “a boat that flies.”
The hindu god lord Krishna in a speedcar in Fatehpur, Shekhawati.
For generations, Ramesh Jangid’s family have carved the wooden doors and windows of havelis. In the 1980s, his father decided to turn their ancestral home in Nawalgarh into a guesthouse, hoping to attract visitors to the town. “When we first started the guesthouse” says Jangid, “we thought the havelis would never last long. No one was taking care of them.”
The residences are often in the center of town, prime property space, which endangers them. Sometimes, goons from the local land mafia come along at night and demolish an entire haveli by morning, says Jangid.
A woman with a gramophone.
He wouldn't leave his town for anything, though. “I couldn't live anywhere else. This place is an open-air art gallery!” he marvels. His favorite haveli is a two-storied house where every room is painted with warm, ochre colors. It's looked over by a tiny old man in a huge turban. He has been the caretaker for 70 years, and has never even met the Marwari family that owns the haveli.
This is one irony of Shekhawati's fond paintings of the Europeans. Little did they know the British would bring about the obsolescence of the ancient overland trading routes. As trading centers shifted to the coast, the merchant families left for Calcutta and Bombay, and the havelis lost their prestige.
Paintings featuring Krishna and British women bathing.
For decades, the residences were occupied only by impoverished caretakers, and slowly fell into disrepair. “Locals didn't see any grandeur in them anymore, explains Joël Cadiou, a French photographer who is renovating one of the havelis. “When something needs repairing, they're not going to bother doing it nicely, or painting frescoes... they'll just put cement.”
Cadiou’s mother, Nadine Le Prince, first bought and renovated this residence in the late 1990s, when it was very run down. She had fallen in love with Shekhawati on a backpacking trip 40 years earlier. Today, the house is a cultural center that sees 3,000 visitors a year, from all over the world.
The courtyard of Nadine Le Prince Haveli in Fatehpur, Shekhawati.
The conservation isn't easy, though. Many of the old techniques have been forgotten. Every year, flooding from the monsoon rains damage the home’s lower paintings. In order to fill the financial black hole of never-ending renovations, Cadiou is transforming the cultural center into a hotel.
“I'm quite pessimistic, even though I want to believe in the project,” he admits. “I don't want to be the last man standing, I'm not going to watch all the havelis disappear around me. After they're gone, no one will ever stop in this region again,” he explains, with a mix of bitterness and resignation.
An autorickshaw speeds past a painted haveli in Ramghar, Shekhawati.
Shekhawati's remaining havelis are an eclectic mix. Some have been repainted in gaudy colours. Others are slowly peeling or fading in the sun. On one haveli, now transformed into a school, the original frescoes have been painted over with pictures of Mickey Mouse.
It might hurt the history lover's eye now, but just as the historic havelis chronicled the marvels of the industrial revolution, these updated frescoes reflect our new era of globalization.
As it did this year, the monsoon—a complicated weather pattern in which the prevailing winds change directions, producing massive amounts of rain—ordinarily hits India in June, lasting until at least September.
But the phenomenon is also very hard to predict, although, since its founding in 1875, the government's meteorological department has kept on trying.
Now, according to Reuters, they're working on their most ambitious effort yet, a $60 million supercomputer based on a so-called "dynamic model" of prediction that was first developed in the U.S. Meant to be operational by 2017, the computer's 3D models won't give hard predictions so much as track how the slow-moving weather phenomenon develops.
A lot is at stake: the monsoon is considered to be the country's "real finance minister," and experts told Reuters that better forecasting could lead to 15 percent more crops.
In part, that's because officials hope the new model—which will replace a statistical model that's been used for decades—will be more specific, and could make local monsoon forecasts possible. Even with the new technology, though, experts expect the monsoon rains will still take Indians by surprise.
"In the last one decade we've gained a greater degree of precision in forecasting rains," one Indian scientist told Reuters, "but monsoon still remains a very complex weather system which only God has the ability to understand fully."
A giraffe surprises some tourists at South Africa's Kruger National Park. (Photo: Nithin bolar k/CC BY-SA 3.0)
These days, some national park visitors spot more wildlife with their phones than with their binoculars. Thanks to a new breed of animal-spotting app, tourists who come across a lion or a leopard can crowdsource their sightings, sharing their locations with fellow parkgoers and drawing huge crowds to particular spots.
But according to South African National Parks, or SANParks, visitors might have to sharpen their other senses once again. Following an increase in road rage, speeding, and animal deaths, SANParks is considering a ban on these wildlife apps, the organization said in a statement.
Apps like "Latest Sightings," which allows users to "ting," or map, spots of interest, have become "a major cause for concern" for SANParks, the organization said in a statement last week. Though these apps may lead to more comprehensive trips, they also "tend to induce an unhealthy sense of eagerness for visitors to break the rules," says Hapiloe Sello, executive marketing manager for SANParks.
Those guests committed to more traditional viewing modes are also feeling, well, cheetahed. “Most guests appreciate the leisurely drive through the parks and the potential reward of a good sighting as a key element of the visitor experience," says Sello. "The usage of these mobile applications is in direct contradiction to the ethos of responsible tourism espoused by SANParks.”
Nadav Ossendryver, the creator of Latest Sightings, told the BBC he'd be happy to work with SANParks to make his app safer. For now, though, humans headed to Kruger might want to charge up their eyes instead of their phones.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
In this age of absurd analytics, Twitter nontroversies, and over-the-top digital campaigns, it seems insane that a yard sign could have any effect on most people, especially for large-scale presidential campaigns.
For one thing, compared to tweets and social media platforms, such signs are not cheap. And they only show logos! There are no policy statements to be found anywhere on these signs.
But, for some reason, they persist. That's despite the fact they're not cheap.
How not cheap are we talking? Well, if you wanted to purchase 2,000 full-color, double-sided yard signs from the website Dirt Cheap Signs, you'd be paying $2.95 a pop—a price total that includes metal H-stakes to embed the signs into the ground. (The full cost of the sign buy is $5,900.)
Purchasing yard signs is a game of scale—buying just one doesn't make a lot of sense, but buying thousands or tens of thousands is relatively cost-effective. In comparison, it costs a few hundred dollars to run a single local television ad, according to Entrepreneur.
But, on the other hand, there's a lot less physical labor that goes into a televised campaign ad—you don't have to shove 2,000 printed signs into the ground.
How effective are those signs, anyway? According to one study, the improvement is marginal, at best.
Columbia University researchers last year found that having yard signs out in force helped increase voter share by 1.7 percent.
The researchers told Politico that they were surprised by the modest finding—because they assumed the study would show that the signs had no effect at all.
"We were surprised by these findings, because the conventional wisdom is that lawn signs don't do much—they're supposed to be a waste of money and time. Many campaign consultants think that signs 'preach to the choir' and not much else," co-author Alex Coppock told the website.
Still, 1.7 percent is not much to write home about—unless you're running a tight race.
Some political consultants, such as David Mowery of Mowery Consulting Group, aren't convinced.
"Signs are a consultant’s nightmare and a print shop’s dream," Mowery wrote in a blog post for Campaigns and Elections. "You can never have enough of them, they’re a drain on your campaign budget and your field staff (if the campaign is big enough to even have one), and they don’t do a damn thing for name ID, messaging, or [get out the vote]."
Such signage, he argues, is ineffective in a time when campaigns have become more sophisticated and data-driven.
And there's another problem, too. "Beyond their lack of effectiveness, the other issue with yard signs is that they get stolen," he adds.
The inefficiency of political signs as a form of marketing makes them the common targets of jokes. In October of 2008, for example, The Onion made a spot-on joke about political campaigning at John McCain's expense.
The joke—that McCain was relying on outdated marketing methods to campaign at a time when Obama was basically inventing the "big data" campaign—was worth a chuckle or ten.
But hidden in the satire is a grain of truth. Burma-Shavedid inspire political campaigning, because it highlighted just how effective signage could be in the right context.
He was given a couple of hundred dollars to try the idea out, putting the signs out in a remote part of Minnesota. Almost immediately, the sing-song ads had an effect on the company's bottom line, and for the next 40 years, Burma-Shave was a constant on major roadways.
The interstate era ultimately did Burma-Shave in, forcing a change in tactics after the company was sold off.
But the campaign helped to show the value of small-scale signage, which ultimately has become a key element in modern political campaigns, Onion jokes aside.
And there's even direct evidence that Burma-Shave had a direct effect on political campaigning. In Canada, the company directly inspired a political term, "burma-shaving," which basically means that a candidate holds out one of their signs and shows off to passers-by, effectively creating a natural photo-op.
Jim Flaherty, Canada's late finance minister, once recalled during a commencement speech at the University of Western Ontario having to do this on election day in 2008.
"While I don’t know if this technique actually gets you votes, I do know that it keeps nervous candidates busy and not bothering their campaign team, the ones doing the real work," Flaherty noted in his speech.
These days, when most people think about political signs, they generally think about them in terms of the rectangular 18"x24" setup that has become the standard-bearer in yards around the country.
Steve Grubbs, however, doesn't think in those terms. The Republican political operative, who spent six years as an Iowa legislator in the '90s and was once the head of the Iowa GOP, launched a company in 1999 called VictoryStore.com, and it's treated him well ever since, earning revenue in the tens of millions during election years. To put it simply, Grubbs realized that die-cutting corrugated plastic into interesting shapes was the perfect way to create yard signs that stand out.
Grubbs, who also runs a political consulting firm, may be a strategist at heart, but as a side effect of being deep in the world of politics, he knows a lot about the processes that go into printing signs. In a 2013 YouTube clip, he explains exactly why these signs work so well for drawing attention, but also spends significant amounts of time discussing how great corrugated plastic is.
"We buy corrugated plastic by the truckload," Grubbs explains in the clip. "During our busy season, we'll have two semi-truckloads of corrugated plastic come in a week."
One of his firm's related businesses sells massive novelty greeting cards, and ahead of political campaigns, his company often introduces new ways for candidates to get their messages across, such as life-size cutouts of people who represent certain demographics.
Grubbs' power over the signage, as well as his politically convenient location, has made him something of a prominent figure in the political world. It also makes him a creative mind to be reckoned with. Just ask Rand Paul, who hired Grubbs as a consultant in 2014.
Grubbs took advantage of his wide knowledge of merchandising and used it to create a surprisingly impressive campaign store for Rand, one that included mock turtlenecks, Beats headphone skins, and Bluetooth-enabled teddy bears. At one point, it even included a mock hard drive, supposedly wiped of Hillary Clinton's emails.
In a campaign store, you really have two goals. The first goal is to raise money to fund the campaign. The second goal is to use product in the store to help support the messaging from the campaign. That’s sort of where we have broken new ground. In the past, campaigns would just put up T-shirts, yard signs, and stickers. What the Rand Paul campaign decided to do was to make the store an extension of the messaging in the campaign. We don’t sell a lot of Hillary’s hard drive but it got a lot of publicity and it drove home the point about Hillary having that hard drive at home and not at the State Department.
Paul ultimately failed to get beyond Iowa, but it wasn't because of his merch game. That was on-point—thanks to Steve Grubbs.
In a lot of ways, political yard signs—at least at the top of the ticket—are mainly of benefit for the people who want to put them in their yards. They show allegiance to their candidate and create a discussion point for those people. (Especially when used in YouTube skits involving 1,000 Ron Paul signs.)
As a result, It's common for people to complain when their signs get stolen.
These days, people who support causes are more likely to change their Facebook profile photos or retweet their candidate of choice, but perhaps the best evidence that physical yard signs still have their place comes from two different approaches to Trump campaign, both in Pennsylvania.
One couple, frustrated that their pro-Trump signs kept getting stolen, decided to build a wall around their sign to prevent its theft.
The other strategy came about thanks to a Pittsburgh resident who decided that the Trump signs didn't really speak to him. He decided to produce his own, complete with slogans designed to annoy the locals—"Trump Likes Hunt's Ketchup," "Trump Hates Pierogies," "Trump Moved My Parking Chair."
Eric Rickin, a psychiatrist, admits he was messing with people's heads.
“I feel his whole campaign and his positions are absurd. But when you try to argue with logic, it doesn’t really work,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Tribune.
Clearly, these folks have been reading the Burma-Shave guide to marketing.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
The Hockomock swamp, or "place where spirits dwell" was the final holdout for the Wampanoags during King Philip's War. . (Photo: Jake Robertson)
The spot isn't easy to find. It's only by crabwalking across stones and painfully ducking under the rock that forms the ceiling of King Philip’s cave, you can rest in the spot where Metacomet, chief of the Massachusetts Wampanoags, likely spent one of his final nights. The leader was slaughtered by one of his own men and beheaded by English settlers in 1678, in a war that pitted Algonquin nation against the white settlers.
In such a lovely spot, you almost forget you are in a quiet neighborhood full of upper middle class houses in the quiet Boston suburb of Norton, Massachusetts. But there’s an undeniable chill in the air: The rock formation is one of many such sites in a 200-square mile area of Southeastern Massachusetts that locals and paranormal enthusiasts call the “Bridgewater Triangle”.
That's right: A mystical swamp-zone within commuting distance of Boston.
For centuries, locals have reported strange activity in and around the swamp: from Bigfoot sightings to Native American ghosts, strange orbs that weave through the trees, UFOs, unmarked black helicopters, satanic rituals, and cattle mutilation. In 1980, Boston Magazine reported that police sergeant Thomas Downey spotted a six-foot tall winged creature while driving late at night on a country road. Some paranormal aficionados asserted that this was the mythical Thunderbird, prominent in local Native American mythology. Around the same time, famed cryptozoologist and folklorist Loren Coleman brought wider attention to the area and its spooky reputation in his bestselling book Mysterious America. In it he traced an area from Abington, Rehoboth, and Freetown, encompassing the swamp and the surrounding towns, delineating the invisible borders of the triangle for the first time.
The Hockomock Swamp, enormous swath of marshland that comprises the single largest freshwater basin in all of Massachusetts, was the final holdout for Metacomet and his warriors in the days leading up to their annihilation by the English. By the end of King Philip’s war, nearly 3,000 Wampanoag men, women and children were killed or sold onto slave ships bound for the West Indies. The landscape is dotted with stone monuments to their lives here. Their ghosts have morphed over centuries into foreboding fairytales of fantastic creatures and fanged entities that tell us more about the ancestral guilt and paranoia of the conquerors than the natives themselves. At Profile Rock in Freetown, a natural granite formation resembling a human face watches over the woods. Locals claim the natives believed the face to be an image of Chief Massassoit, Philip’s father, who was friendly to the newly arrived English. Today, crude graffiti mars the walls of the sacred cliff face.
The solitude stone rests by a stream in West Bridgewater, MA. (Photo: Jake Robertson)
A few miles away, in the hamlet of West Bridgewater at the base of a wooden bridge is hidden the Solitude Stone. Lost for nearly a century beneath moss and overgrowth, the stone bears a 150-year-old inscription thought to be carved by the Reverend Timothy Otis Paine of the New Church of Jerusalem, a Christian sect founded on the principles of the occultist Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose philosophies purportedly influenced Freemasonry. In his doctrine of correspondences, Swedenborg asserted that the physical world was the result of spiritual causes, and the laws of nature reflections of spiritual laws. The mysterious inscription reads:
All ye, who in future days,
Walk by Nuckatesset stream
Love not him who hummed his lay
Cheerful to the parting beam,
But the Beauty that he wooed,
In this quiet solitude.
Perhaps the most interesting spot in this area is the Dighton Rock. People of unknown origin carved figures of people, animals, and symbols into the flat side of this trapezoidal boulder roughly the size of a small Volkswagen. The origin and meaning of the markings has been the subject of debate for centuries, with theorists attributing the petroglyphs to peoples as various as ancient Native Americans, Phoenicians, Norse, colonial Portuguese, and even medieval Chinese sailors. In the 1950’s the stone was removed from the river by crane and deposited on the shore, where a museum was built up around it. Today, a small but knowledgeable fellowship of local citizens runs the museum, and even organizes lectures exploring the history of the area, and the theories surrounding the stone and its markings.
King Philip's Cave in Norton, MA is one of the final places the Wampanoag Chief stayed before his death. (Photo: Jake Robertson)
The museum is opened for self-guided tours by appointment only. On this particular day, I had not called for an appointment. Crestfallen, I was ready to quit the woods when I encountered two women, one strolling, one rolling heartily in her electric wheelchair along the wooded road, who told me they were Friends of the Dighton Rock Museum, and that they happened to have a key. They were kind enough to help me set up an appointment with the park service. The woman in the wheelchair didn’t buy the single-origin humdrum. “Personally, I think it’s from a multiplicity of cultures.” I agreed to meet them the next morning.
The next day, I was allowed to spend an hour with the stone. Indeed, the markings seem to signal a mishmash of cultures, with geometric shapes and humanoid figures that recall Paleolithic paintings from Australia and Central Africa, as well as formally striking representations of a deer and a seal. These primordial images comingle with etchings that appear almost modern, with a roman letter “R” and “F” clearly defined at the center of the stone, which may very well be colonial graffiti, but which has inspired theories that the markings are proof that lost Portuguese explorers, or even Vikings, made it to the New World.
One theory from the 1700s states that ancient Phoenicians, after making it to New England shores, engraved the stone with images from their cosmogony, with the past, present, and future represented simultaneously in symbol-strewn vignettes that bleed into one another on the tide-facing side of the stone. If you look closely, you can find the most recent carving: a signature made in the 1920’s by a guy named Jesse. The Friends of the Dighton Rock Museum, although careful to preserve an air of suspended judgment, cannot help but offer their own theories. The human figure on the left, they say, is a symbol of femininity and fertility. The symbol resembling an x with and upside down v above it, they say, signifies separation.
“As far as I know, no theory is definitive,” says Ramona Peters, director of Historic preservation for the Massachusetts Wampanoag tribe. “There is one theory saying the Chinese left the artifact. They would use the language of the people they were hanging out with before, which accounts for the European letters on the stone.”
Another favorite theory, heard around the picnics and public lectures at the Dighton Rock Museum, posits that the stone is the last record of a doomed Portuguese expedition to the area which ended with a violent confrontation with the local native peoples. The carving, they say, was an historic record left by survivors of that doomed expedition.
“The symbols do not speak to us as much,” offers Ms. Peters, “and by ‘we’ I mean our tribe and other native people. We do have petroglyphs in our culture, but the symbols here are not familiar.” Figural representation in Wampanoag art, like the human forms depicted on the stone, were especially uncommon. “The people,” she says, “did not put themselves above other things.”
When Jonathan Walker got married to his wife Megan in a historic dancing pavilion in New Orleans, they didn’t skimp on the cake. In fact, they ordered two. Like other couples around the southern United States and in parts of the U.K., they picked out a separate, smaller cake to accompany the large traditional wedding cake: the groom’s cake.
Walker’s groom’s cake was shaped like a Monopoly board. “Megan and I, when we were getting together would play Monopoly all the time, like daily. We'd play two movers each,” says Walker. Because grooms generally don’t get as much attention as brides in heterosexual weddings, the groom’s cake has developed over the last two centuries as a fun way for a groom to express his personality.
Groom’s cakes were brought to the United States via Victorian England and Ireland in the 19th century, and in some places are still seen as just as essential to the festivities as throwing the bouquet or wearing something blue. Until the 1940s, the two-cake tradition was seen at weddings throughout the United States, but now the Knot Book of Wedding Lists deems it a ritual of the southern states, which is where you’re most likely to find a groom’s cake today.
The only consistent “rule” of the groom’s cake is that must be smaller than the wedding cake;hitched.co.uk suggests that if you spent all your budget on the wedding cake, “you can go with a single tier groom’s cake and decorate with a themed topper.”
But in contrast to the elegant, often flowery, multi-tiered wedding cake, groom’s cakes can get as fanciful as one likes; they sometimes take the shape of large, three-dimensional robots or the groom’s favorite game.
When Joshua Plethora, also a resident of New Orleans, got married, he chose a a re-creation of the board position in the Ear-reddening game, a historic match-up in the strategy game Go, for his groom’s cake. “I am an avid Go player, and I wanted to have something Go-related in the wedding, and this seemed like a small thing I could do that would incorporate that into the event,” Plethora says.
Although it’s hard to believe today, in an era of $600 wedding cakes and the reality shows dedicated to them, but wedding cakes actually began as a humble accessory. The first ones were more like small buns covered in an almond paste coating; these evolved to more modern un-iced cakes by the 1600s. According to The Home Guide to Cake Decoratingby Jane Price,European wedding traditions at the time included crumbling a piece of the wedding cake over the bride’s head for marital luck.
By the late 17th century putting fanciful decorations on wedding cakes became more of a staple, and rather than scoop into the flowers and frosting, wedding couples added a separate cake for ceremonial hair-sprinkling; often a variation on a thinly iced, dense fruitcake.
By the Victorian era, this dark fruitcake was served as the groom’s cake; often given as a special gift to the groom’s men or cut into cubes, wrapped, and sent home with guests as wedding favors. According to wedding lore, single guests might dream of the person they’re destined to marry if they sleep with a piece of the groom’s cake beneath their pillow.
But it’d be hard to keep a slice of groom’s cake beneath your pillow today—modern tastes have pushed the groom’s cake to be as delicious as the wedding cake, and sometimes much more inventive. “We recently did a roasted pig [groom’s] cake, and the client actually had a barbecue set up to put the cake in—that was one of my favorite recent ones,” says Jenny Pacaccio, the baker at Sweet Life Bakery in New Orleans, which she owns with her sister, Jessica.
Sometimes the bride surprises the groom with his groom cake—but often, the groom plays a big part in choosing the design and what he wants to have on his special day. Pacaccio has designed groom’s cakes to resemble armadillos, dogs, all manners of hunting and fishing scenarios, as well as sports team-themed cakes. Her three-dimensional cakes might start off as an oval or circle cake, and the layers get stacked with frosting and then cut down to the right shape and size.
Amid the formalities of color-coordinated decor and elaborate centerpieces, groom’s cakes modeled after beer pong tables or The Incredible Hulk can break the ice before the dancing starts, and help people chill out on a day with a packed program. “it’s a nice tradition for a guy to have his own cake,” says Pacaccio. Also: “It’s fun to see a regular square cake turn into a frog or R2D2.”
This machine that analyses and measures the spatial, 3-dimensional properties of the diamond and then drops them into a program akin to CAAD, which determines the design the cutters can cut on it. (Photo: Jake Stangel)
It doesn’t look like the entrance to a paradigm-shifting, potentially world-changing start-up, but there it is: an unmarked door, facing out of a low-slung beige building on a street lined with tune-up shops. Inside, the scene is equally unassuming. There’s a man wearing black gloves, seated in front of a box about the size of a passenger van that’s blasting an ominous ommmm.
Welcome to California’s shiniest new diamond mine.
From the other end of the room, Martin Roscheisen, Diamond Foundry’s CEO, is explaining what, exactly, is going on here. That box is called a growth reactor, he says. Basically, it’s an atomic oven. Inside, a tiny diamond, known here as a “seed diamond,” sits waiting to be blasted with hot plasma. The reaction will cause the crystal latticework of the diamond to extend. In other words: From this seed, a new diamond will start to grow.
“They grow slowly, atom by atom, and there’s about one quadrillion atoms per layer,” Roscheisen shouts over the din. “So it’s a slow-growth process.” By slow he means two weeks, which is how long it takes the Silicon Valley–based company to hot-forge jewelry-grade diamonds identical to those the earth takes eons to mete out.
Part of the foundry's reactor. (Photo: Courtesy Diamond Foundry)
Roscheisen is lanky, with a boyish face and clear plastic glasses. He has a surprisingly honkish laugh, which he lets out when asked whether he likes to check on his diamonds “like muffins in an oven.” (Answer: He does. The reactor has a window.)
Diamond Foundry launched to exuberant press last November, promising to “reimagine the diamond industry.” It’s an industry that is notorious for environmental and human rights abuses, most notably in Africa, where our lust for diamonds has fueled civil wars in seven countries, leaving millions dead, maimed, or displaced. “This is fundamentally about creating a better choice,” Roscheisen says. “Our product is a better diamond in every way. It is materially pure. It is ecologically pure. It is made in America.”
The Foundry’s machines are helmed not by child laborers but white-collar professionals. These are eco-friendly diamonds (even the energy required to create them is offset by the purchase of solar power credits), yet they’re atomically identical to nature’s gems. It’s an achievement Maarten de Witte, one of Diamond Foundry’s master cutters, describes as “beyond the dreams of the ancient alchemists of turning lead into gold.”
Martin Roscheisen, Diamond Foundry's CEO. (Photo: Courtesy Diamond Foundry)
But the company faces an uphill battle if it’s to realize a world with no diamond mines. Convincing people to wear man-made diamonds is one thing. There’s also the very profitable industry built around mined diamonds (this year, Bloomberg reported that sales hit $79 billion worldwide), which means that man-made diamonds are banned from the world’s largest diamond trading floor, in Israel. “They don’t fit in our stores,” Mark Aaron, vice president of investor relations at Tiffany and Co. told The Wall Street Journal in 2007. “Natural diamonds fit in our stores—diamonds that come out of the ground.”
So even if Diamond Foundry has achieved the seemingly impossible, the real alchemy is just beginning. It has nothing to do with the perfect alignment of atoms, but rather, decades of seductive advertising. Can it convince consumers that a weeks-old diamond baked in a machine is just as valuable as a billion-year-old stone?
Close-up of a diamond produced by Diamond Foundry. (Photo: Courtesy Diamond Foundry)
Man-made diamonds might sound hypermodern, but the science was actually decoded in 1954 by H. Tracy Hall, a GE chemist who earned just a $10 savings bond for his discovery. Any diamond, whether it originates below ground, above ground, or in outer space1, is made of carbon. Natural diamonds are formed 100 miles below the earth’s surface, where temperatures hover above 2,000°F. There, carbon is crystallized by immense heat and geological pressure before the gems rocket to the earth’s surface by way of volcanic flues.
Historians estimate that the first diamond mines were established as early as the 4th century BCE in India, where the stone was revered for its strength. Over two millennia later, that strength sparked a technological arms race to synthesize the gem. After World War II, there was a global shortage of industrial diamonds, a key component in making the tools that build everything from munitions to subway tunnels. Hall was part of the team behind a GE mission called Project Superpressure, which succeeded in creating a press powerful enough to mimic the geological forces acting on carbon deep within the earth.
The process, known as high pressure, high temperature, involves sandwiching graphite between a natural diamond and a metal solvent, heating the press to above 2,552°F, and applying pressure. The melting metal acts as a catalyst, forcing the graphite to crystallize atop the diamond.
A second process, called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), was later developed, in which carbon-rich gases are combined with hydrogen in a chamber and exposed to enormous levels of heat. The gases react, causing carbon atoms to hitch onto the “seed” diamond.
Inside the plasma reactor at Diamond Foundry. (Photo: Courtesy Diamond Foundry)
The first jewelry-grade man-made diamonds weren’t created until the 1970s. And only in the last decade have manufacturers produced stones rivaling those found in nature. Roscheisen says it took his team three years and five generations of reactors before they were able to efficiently produce the gems. Their process remains a tightly held secret, but the Gemological Institute of America, the world’s top diamond-grading body, identified two samples submitted by Diamond Foundry as CVD diamonds.
“I really don’t think they have a fundamentally different technology from other CVD producers,” Wuyi Wang, the GIA’s director of research and development, says, though, he explained, the Foundry might have modified the process to grow more crystals at faster speeds.
Other diamond manufacturers around the world make similar claims about stone clarity and technological improvements, so, technology aside, how is Diamond Foundry different? With famous billionaire investors—including Internet glitterati like Evan Williams of Twitter, Alison Pincus of One Kings Lane, and Andreas von Bechtolsheim of Sun Microsystems, as well as Leonardo DiCaprio, who starred in the movie Blood Diamond—it may be the first grower with sufficient brawn and e-commerce savvy to revolutionize the diamond market and pull off the impossible: to convince consumers a man-made diamond is “forever,” even if it’s only day-old.
The Kimberley diamond mine in South Africa was operation from 1871 to 1914, also known as the 'Big Hole'. (Photo: Vladislav Gajic/shutterstock.com)
On the market, a diamond is much more than a metastable allotrope of carbon—it’s everlasting love. And credit for that goes to De Beers, which began the engagement campaign as part of a 1938 advertising blitz aimed at pulling the diamond market out of its Depression-era slump. Over the next 40 years, De Beers’s advertising budget grew from $200,000 to $10 million per year as the industry realized the words they used to describe diamonds were as valuable as the stones they pulled from the ground. Diamonds were not just Forever, they were also a Girl’s Best Friend, de rigueur for engagements, encouraged for anniversaries, a Valentine’s Day staple. De Beers had stage-produced a massive increase in consumer demand to fuel a diamond market it already mostly controlled.
But there was a shocking secret behind De Beers’s romance machine: Diamonds weren’t actually valuable. De Beers stockpiled huge surpluses of the stone, artificially maintaining high prices. “Diamonds are intrinsically worthless,” Nicky Oppenheimer, then-chairman of De Beers, admitted in 1999, “except for the deep psychological need they fill.”
Billions were spent creating that need, and even though man-made diamonds only account for up to 2 percent of jewelry sales, the industry shudders at the idea of competing with gems produced at the push of a button. Fears of infiltration aren’t unfounded, either. In 2012, a lab in Antwerp discovered 600 man-made diamonds salted into a parcel of mined diamonds.
This is why you won’t hear traditional diamond traders referring to the Foundry’s product as a miracle; they employ a word that makes you think of plastic-wrapped cheese—“synthetic”—though they grudgingly accept “lab-grown,” “man-made,” or one of the other terms suggested by the Federal Trade Commission to ensure consumers know what they’re buying.
After the synthetics-mixing scandal, the world’s largest diamond exchange made its anti-man-made stance clear by adopting the slogan “Natural Is Real.” In fact, nowhere will you find a group of people so passionately engaged in the definition of words like “real” and “natural” and “authentic” as in the diamond industry. Take Brad Congress—the “romance specialist of southwest Florida”—a third-generation, 44-year-old jewelry dealer.
He regularly pores over trade publications for ads employing “deceptive” language, sending findings to the industry’s compliance arm, the Jewelers Vigilance Committee, whose staff has been known to hit shops incognito to ensure dealers aren’t overreaching, word-wise.
Congress even invented and secured the URL for his own word, diamonditis, a term he defines, basically, as owning a diamond that isn’t what you think it is. “Oftentimes I have to burst the bubble with someone. They thought they had something natural, and then [I] tell them, ‘I am so sorry—it is synthetic.’ That’s why I’m so ethically charged on the subject,” Congress says. “It hurts.”
Tools of the trade at Diamond Foundry. (Photo: Courtesy Diamond Foundry)
Neither he nor any estate dealer he knows will sell synthetic diamond jewelry. For Congress, the issue is financial. While some man-made diamonds retail for 10-30 percent less than natural stones, their cash-in value tends to be far lower. He also cites simple economics: As technology improves and it gets cheaper to manufacture more man-made diamonds, their value is bound to fall.
After all, a diamond may be forever, but the romance it commemorates often is not. Consequently, the resale market—which the mining industry can’t control—remains overstocked. Diamonds are a terrible investment. Retail markups range from 100-200 percent, which means a typical diamond ring or bracelet loses at least 50 percent of its value as the jeweler’s door shuts behind you.
And when it comes to putting a price on factory-made diamonds, manufactured scarcity isn’t exactly new. As De Beers once proved, value can be conjured from something as slight as a metaphor. Is it so impossible to imagine a techno-diamond also fetching a premium?
It’s tempting to assume that someone committed to mined diamonds sees the industry’s ecological and human rights problems as a necessary evil. Not Congress. He considers himself an environmentalist. He drives an electric car. Last year, he and his wife launched a jewelry line made from recycled gold. He’s sympathetic to consumers wanting ethical, conflict-free stones, and steers them toward antique jewelry from an era predating industrialized mining. In fact, some of the industry’s biggest players maintain a fierce commitment to mined stones while actively fighting the environmental and human rights abuses around them.
Two weeks before my visit to Diamond Foundry, in the eighth-floor conference room of a heavily fortified skyscraper at the edge of New York’s diamond district, I sat facing one of these players: Martin Rapaport, a fire hydrant of a man who worked his way up from a job as a lowly diamond butcher, sorting and cleaving rough stone in Antwerp, to become one of the most important men in the industry.
Rapaport created the first global diamond pricing index (the “Rap Sheet”) and heads a leading diamond trading network (RapNet). His influence within the clannish world of diamond dealers is regal and omniscient. But that day, he was yelling like the sidewalk barkers selling fried nuts on the street below.
“Leonardo DiCaprio is a rabbi taking ham sandwiches and telling everybody, ‘They’re kosher!’ He is saying that a synthetic diamond, which takes foodout of the mouths of people who are starving to death, is a better product to wear than something that could actually help these people by having a fair-trade diamond!”
Though Rapaport’s career is built on diamonds mined from some of the poorest reaches of the globe, he’s no apologist for the industry. Nearly seven years before Blood Diamond turned the human grist of Sierra Leone’s mines into headlines, he toured the country’s amputee camps.
“Thousands of people. An arm. A leg. An arm and a leg. Little children,” Rapaport recalled. “You have to understand—my parents, they were in Auschwitz. I saw this and said, ‘What the hell is this? This cannot happen.’”
Despite the legacy of violence plaguing Africa’s diamond mines, Rapaport believes in a solution: fair-trade diamonds, the proverbial $4 latte that lifts thousands of subsistence-level diggers out of poverty. But more than a decade of effort by concerned stakeholders has failed to produce a foolproof fair-trade diamond certification scheme. Even the Kimberley Process—the UN-supported initiative to keep conflict diamonds off the market—is compromised. Some members of the coalition boycotted this year’s plenary meeting because it took place in the United Arab Emirates—“the go-to place for illicit gold and diamonds,” according to the dissenters—in protest over the country’s dodgy import controls, which commonly allow conflict diamonds onto the market.
Given the bleak prospects for truly feel-good diamonds coming out of Africa’s mines, man-made diamonds could be an alluring alternative. But Rapaport views diamond manufacturers as remorseless technocrats, freeloading off of mined diamonds’ value while doing nothing for impoverished miners. In countries like Botswana, he says, 40 percent of government revenue is derived from the diamond industry. The solution, he insists, isn’t to stop mining (or, in his parlance, “‘Hey, you million and a half diggers and the seven million people you’re supporting, all of you go to hell—we’re going to sell synthetic diamonds!’”) but to convince people to buy diamonds that actually help people.
When I present this argument to Martin Roscheisen, who’s never visited a mine, he shrugs it off as twisted logic. “That also would justify releasing the Mexican drug leaders from jail,” he says, smiling. “After all, they employ a lot of people.”
Besides, he insists, Diamond Foundry’s clients “are people who would not buy a mined diamond.” The company’s first production run sold out within two weeks, at prices exceeding those of natural diamonds.
“The only diamond they would want to have is a diamond like ours,” Roscheisen says, rising at the sound of the door buzzer. And with that, he excuses himself. The FedEx guy has just arrived with a gift for his girlfriend: a custom diamond, born in California.
This story was co-produced with mental_floss magazine and appeared in the June/July 2016 issue. Click here to subscribe.
Over the past few days, as the country reels in the wake of the horrific shooting in Orlando, Floridians have turned out in droves to offer prayers, support, and something slightly more tangible: blood.
City blocks have filled up with potential donors, standing in line for hours awaiting the chance to help. Volunteers are bringing food and cold water to make the wait more manageable. Some blood banks have been so flooded with support, they've been forced to turn people away, urging them to return in the coming days.
But a particular legal footnote has kept certain faces out of the lines, and certain names off of the signup sheets. Due to FDA guidelines, many queer men—specifically, men who have had sex with another man sometime in the past year—are not allowed to donate blood. Despite blowback from medical experts, who called prior versions of the ban "antiquated" and "discriminatory," it has remained in place, in one form or another, since it was first instated in 1983. On this particular week, the ban seems like an additional assault. "I want to be able to help my brothers and sisters that are out there, that are suffering right now," one gay man, Garrett Jurss, told NBC Orlando. "But I can't, and I feel helpless."
But this isn't the first time blood donation has mixed with discrimination. Right when the U.S. entered World War II—just as blood donation was becoming a way for people to express their patriotism, dedication, and pride—black Americans nationwide were banned from giving blood. A look back at this ban highlights how decisions regarding who gets to donate blood are driven as much by cultural questions as by medical ones.
In the early 1940s, large-scale blood donation was still a relatively new technology. Improvements in storage, ranging from special plastic bottles to new anticoagulents, had made blood banking and transportation a sudden possibility. Governments, anticipating unprecedented wartime injuries, jumped on its promise—as did civilians looking for a new way to help. Even before the U.S. joined World War II, Americans proudly sent blood overseas via the "Plasma for Britain" project, which was masterminded by Charles Drew, a black doctor from Washington. A Life Magazine article from October 1940 shows a woman in a string of pearls smiling as she gives a pint.
After donating blood at a Red Cross center in Washington, D.C., a man waits for his free cup of coffee. (Photo: LibraryofCongress/LC-DIG-fsa-8d30150)
As the war ramped up, the Army asked the Red Cross to test and roll out a National Blood Donor Service, focused on collecting plasma for soon-to-be-deployed American soldiers. They opened dozens of donation centers across the country, and spread the word with radio ads and posters explaining, "He Needs Your Blood." The public responded with gusto, proudly showing up to do their part. The kind of group donations that might barely make the local news today were lighting up national headlines in 1941: "102 Blood Donors In Day," for example, and "Aircraft Workers to Give Blood."
But the social mores had not caught up with the science. In late 1941, the U.S. Army and Navy told the Red Cross that they would only accept blood from white donors. There was zero medical justification for this—as John Egerton writes in Speak Now Against the Day, "scientific studies had proved conclusively that no racial differences existed in the chemical makeup of blood." Instead, Egerton explains, "the military, under heavy political pressure, yielded to the prevailing social bias."
In the words of the Army surgeon general, “For reasons not biologically convincing but which are commonly recognized as psychologically important in America, it is not deemed advisable to collect and mix caucasian and [N]egro blood indiscriminately.”
Because of this, black Americans who showed up at donation centers to do their part were instead turned away. The resulting outcry was swift, pained, and furious. The American Medical Association spoke out against the ban, as did the Red Cross themselves—although they went along with it, in Egerton's words, "for the sake of the war effort." Drew, who had been promoted director of blood banks for the entire Red Cross, resigned his position in protest. Sylvie Tucker, the first person to publicly protest the ban, wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt after being refused from a donation center in Detroit, Michigan. "I was shocked and grieved," she wrote. "[I] challenged… [the doctor] to accept my blood and place it in a container… and after due process make it available for some Negro mother's son, who like his white American brothers-in-arms, must face shot and shell and death."
After three months of uproar, the military changed their position slightly—instead of refusing black people's blood outright, they would instead segregate it from the white supply. Meanwhile, they doubled down on the party line, suggesting that all those who disagreed with this policy were undermining the war effort. Letters from thousands of white constituents appeared on the desks of Congressmen, expressing concerns about multiracial transfusions and supporting the separation. Politicians described those against it as "crackpots, Communists, and parlor pinks."
"In the absence of clear scientific evidence to support their decision, blood segregation appeared to work largely as a way to calm cultural fears of contagion," writes historian Holly Tucker.
Once again, many fought back immediately. "Nearly all the major civil rights organizations of the day… made changing blood policy a top priority," writes historian Thomas Guglielmo. Labor unions, religious organizations, and those aforementioned Communists held rallies condemning blood segregation. A group of diverse and precocious Harlem schoolchildren performed a science experiment to prove blood was the same between races. Many African-Americans boycotted donation altogether, while others refused to play by the rules: in his Chicago Defender column, Langston Hughes described how "passing" African-Americans would give blood without mentioning their race. "Thus, by now, white plasma and colored plasma must be hopelessly scrambled together," he wrote. "It amuses me to wonder how the Red Cross will ever get it straightened out."
Indeed, the Red Cross did not get it straightened out until 1950, when, after a decade of criticism, they finally stopped segregating blood. (Some states, like Louisiana, took even longer to come around.) "It has long been known that human blood is all alike, from whatever race it comes," the New York Times explained as it announced the change.
As evidenced by blood segregation, it's hard to get people to swap their deep-held beliefs for scientific truths. It's a bit easier to imbue science with a little bit of poetry. Those waiting in line in Orlando are repurposing this biological truth for a new generation of healing. As Orlando's Micah James told the Sentinel while waiting in line to donate, "We're all made of the same stuff, flesh and bone and blood."
Dammit, Gandalf. In the midst of his quest to spread the words of Shakespeare all across China, Sir Ian McKellen recently took a moment from promoting The Bard, and as reported on Shanghaiist, promoted himself at the Shanghai Marriage Market.
First started in 1996, the marriage market is a well-known portion of the city’s People’s Park, where meddling parents congregate to discuss the romantic fates of their unwed children. Parents who visit the market, which can see crowds of over a thousand people on the weekends, can post hand-written CVs about their children like analog dating profiles. They will often include information about the single child’s occupation, earnings, education, and other metrics that might make them seem more dateable. Unsurprisingly, many of the unwed children being advertised are none too excited about the whole process, and end up not finding a mate anyway.
But those unlucky single children and fretting parents might finally be in luck since the Oscar-nominated actor who played both Gandolf and Magneto, has thrown his hat in the ring. McKellen was in China to take part in the Shanghai International Film Festival, which is putting a focus on the works of Shakespeare this year. As part of his travels, the actor is taking photographs of himself holding Shakespeare quotes in locations all over China including The Great Wall, and yes, the Shanghai Marriage Market. But as seen in a photo shared by the British Council on Chinese social media app, Weibo, he also made his own charming, hand-written dating profile:
5’11’
77 Years
Cambridge University
House In London
Still Active
It's even signed with a little caricature.
McKellen probably just showed up for a laugh, but, in any case, he has once again made all other single men seem a bit unworthy.
When shopping for an engagement ring, the standard advice is to consider the four C’s: cut, color, clarity, and carat. In 17th-century Europe, however, the four C's were a little different. Back then, those on the lookout for the perfect engagement ring had to consider consent, corporeality, concealed messages, and clasped hands.
Gimmel rings, which rose to popularity during the Middle Ages, then enjoyed a heyday in the 1600s, consist of two interlocking hoops that, when connected, form one big fancy ring. Traditionally, the members of a newly betrothed couple would receive one hoop each. At the wedding ceremony, the two rings would be joined.
The name of this interlocking jewelry comes from the Latin gemellus, meaning “twin.” Sometimes the component rings were identical, and formed a symbol of unity when joined. A popular design was the clasped hands motif—each ring had one hand, and, when interlocked, the hands held one another. Other rings were not identical, but complementary, such as a design featuring a heart on one component ring, and a pair of hands on the other. When joined, the hands fell over the heart, protecting it from harm.
A ring with a clasped hands design. (Image: Public Domain)
The gimmel ring below, held at New York's Metropolitan Museum, is a German creation from 1631. One side of the split bezel features a ruby, the other a diamond. When the combined ring is broken apart, you get a diamond ring inscribed with "QUOD DEUS CONIUNXIT" and a ruby ring with the words "HOMO NON SEPARET." Quod deus coniunxit homo non separet: Whom God has joined together, let no man tear asunder.
The most striking feature of the 1631 ring is its inclusion of a memento mori—a reminder of death amid all the love and unity. A cavity beneath the diamond ring's bezel holds a tiny, curled up baby, while an identical hollow on the ruby ring is home to a smiling skeleton. Together they are birth and death; beginning and end. Just a reminder that marriage doesn't make you immortal.
Once a couple had entered matrimony, the conjoined rings were usually worn by the wife. Sometimes, says the 1912 guide Chats on Old Jewellery and Trinkets, one half would "be given by persons going on a journey to those left behind, to be a kind of token to establish the identity of a messenger.”
This token-of-identity function was also useful in a marriage context. In the notes on a 17th-century gimmel ring, a British Museum curator points out that until England and Wales introduced the 1753 Marriage Act, a marriage didn't require a formal ceremony to be valid. Mutual consent was enough, and there were "certain signs and symbols that could indicate consent."
With its dual components, each held by one half of the couple, the gimmel ring was the perfect way to convey that both parties were game for a legally wedded life.
Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com
But let us put this in perspective. They are giant. They can reach 150 pounds. That’s not just more than any other rodent in the world weighs, it’s more than many human women weigh. Capybaras are very large.
The two that escaped the Toronto zoo on their very first day there were only six month old, so they had not yet reach such gargantuan size. They were both about 30 pounds—the average weight of a human two-year-old. For the past two and a half weeks, they have been hanging out in a park, where, the Guardian says, they have been “celebrated as folk heroes.”
But over the weekend, one of the two capybaras wandered into one of the zookeepers’ traps, which were baited with capybara-friendly food. The other is still lost in the woods, plotting its next move. The zoo asks that anyone who sees the remaining capybara not appraoch it, because the zoo is working hard on "gaining their trust with feeding."
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
Tsar Alexis of Russia chooses his bride, c. 1882. (Photo: Public Domain)
For the past 14 years, millions of hopeful romantics and cynical snarks have watched matchmaking TV show The Bachelor and its numerous spawns. Everyone knows the formula. A group of attractive singles stays in a generic mansion, gradually getting whittled down to one by an allegedly desirable “bachelor.” The bachelor then gives this “true love” an engagement ring, and the rest is tabloid history.
This process may seem like an entirely modern conceit—a collaborative game show in which love is the prize. But the ratings juggernaut’s roots can be found in the royal bride-shows that captivated Russia for two centuries. And at these bride-shows, the fate of entire families—of the empire itself—often depended on which young girl received the metaphorical final rose.
During the 15th and 16th centuries, the tsars of Muscovy (later Russia) had a plethora of problems when choosing a bride. European royals were reluctant to send their daughters to this isolated land, which was considered to be backwards and dangerous. They also did not want their fair princesses to have to convert to the mysterious Russian Orthodox faith.
A map of Russia (Moscovia) published by Sigismund von Herberstein in 1549. (Photo: Public Domain)
Among Muscovites, things weren’t much better. While tsars were supposedly all-powerful, they were actually heavily influenced by shifting alliances of noble families, which made up the royal court in Moscow. In an age where marriages were the main way to build alliances and accumulate influence, it was not wise to take as a wife a close relation of an already powerful boyar (aristocrat).
In 1505, the future Vasili III and his advisors decided to hold the first Russian bride-show to select a perfect mate. Russell E. Martin, historian and author of the fascinatingABride for the Tsar, believes they probably got the idea from the ancient Byzantine Empire, who in turn may have been inspired by the fictional “Judgement of Paris.” For many centuries, the Chinese royal family also held bride-and groom-shows. No matter the location, these performative contests had many of the same aims. “Bride-shows helped to control conflict,” Martin explains. In his book he says that “until the end of the seventeenth century, nearly every native born bride of the Muscovite tsar had participated in a bride-show, even when the choice was decided beforehand.”
While each bride-show was different, all shared a common pattern reminiscent of the fairy tale Cinderella. The first step was to find virginal, well-born women throughout the land who were from good, but not great, families. Martin describes the preliminary process in A Bride for the Tsar:
An edict was drawn up in Moscow and disseminated to all the land owners of Russia…to all regions, to bring their maiden daughters to town for a bride-show … At the regional bride-show, the tsar’s trusted servitors were to select the most beautiful maidens and compile a special list. These beautiful maidens were then supposed to appear in Moscow, within a specified period.
Once these girls, who may have numbered in the hundreds or low thousands, reached Moscow, they were faced with another round of preliminary viewings. These evaluations, overseen by the tsar’s advisors, were often held in the open courtyards of the Kremlin. “The contestants first appeared before a jury of courtiers and doctors who weeded out the weakest,” historian Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in The Romanovs.“Descriptions were sent to the tsar and his advisers, but apart from beauty and health, the essential details were any kinship ties to Kremlin clans.”
Noble families campaigned heavily for their relatives and tried to ensure they were finalists. This negated one of the main reasons for the bride-show in the first place—that of neutralizing powerful courtiers. “Since the brides' families were to become enormously important after the wedding, the court—the boyars especially—wanted to know who was going to be riding in the brides' wake into the Kremlin,” Martin explains. Chancellery documents discovered by Martin, show that “the tsar's boyars...were deeply involved in the search for a bride for the tsar, that their wives performed the investigations into the prospective brides' health and ’virtue,’ and that they picked who would end up in the final line-up of candidates before the tsar.”
The young women who passed the test (who ranged in number from under 10 to over 50) had made it to what was essentially the final round. According to a 16th-century Polish diplomat, what happened next was very Bachelor-esque:
A large and beautiful house with many rooms was prepared, and in each bedroom there were placed 12 beds, each assigned to one of the girls. And they all lived together in one house, waiting for the royal bride-show…When that time had arrived, his tsarist majesty came to the house…and he sat on a beautifully decorated seat prepared for him; then the daughters…all dressed in the finest maiden’s costumes…entered one after the other before the tsar, and bowed at his feet. At that time, the tsar gave each of them a kerchief, sewn with gold and silver thread and with expensive pearls, throwing it at the girl’s feet, and then each girl returned to her own room.
According to one source, the tsar occasionally spied on the girls to help him make up his mind: “They all dined together at one table, where the Tsar had an opportunity of seeing them in public, and incognito, in order the better to direct his choice to one of this beautiful company.” Some reports claimed that when the tsar had made his choice he handed his new fiancé a golden ring. Runners-up were married to lesser nobles, sent home with cash and prizes or banished, depending on the mood of the times. In 1505, Solomonia Saburov became the first woman to become tsarina as a result of the bride-show, when she married Vasili III.
Konstantin Makovsky's 1889 painting The Russian Bride's Attire. (Photo: Public Domain)
Not everyone was excited about the prospects of a tsarina in the family. Many rural boyars were horrified by stories they heard about abuse of the girls by the tsar and his cronies, by the invasive medical examinations that came with the show, and by the prohibitive costs of outfitting their daughters for their public exhibition. Others simply did not want to enter the fraught, often deadly world of court politics. One man even claimed“it would be better if you drowned your maiden daughters in water that to take them…to the bride-show.”
The girl who accepted the risk and won the ultimate prize found her life immediately transformed. She was given a royal name and whisked into the Terem Palace at the Kremlin to be groomed for her new role. “Muscovite elite women—boyars' wives and the tsaritsa herself—lived in seclusion,” Martin explains. “They occupied parts of the Kremlin royal complex that was segregated from men (except young boys). They did not go out in public and they were veiled, even inside sleds or carriages as they moved about, or when going to church.” But this did not mean they were protected from the court intrigues that swirled all around them.
Take, for example, the story of Maria Khlopova. In 1616, Michael, the first Romanov Tsar, shocked his influential mother and her allies when he selected Maria, over their chosen candidate, at his first bride-show. Maria’s name was changed to the royal Anastasia, and she was installed in the Terem Palace with her family. She soon fell ill, vomiting and fainting in front of the court. Though her family claimed she had simply had too many sweets, a rumor started that she was unhealthy and therefore unable to perform her main duty—bearing royal heirs. Instead of simply being sent home, she was exiled in disgrace. Years later, single and still smitten with Maria, Michael discovered that not only had she been poisoned by one of his top aides to make her appear ill all those years ago, but that she was now in perfect health.
Though Michael ached to recall Maria and marry her, his mother again stood in the way of his true love. At the next bride-show he picked his mother’s choice—but she quickly fell mysteriously ill and died. In 1626, another bride-show was held, and Michel picked Eudoxia, the daughter of poor gentry. Perhaps because of her lack of court ties she survived, and bore him 10 children, making her the perfect royal spouse.
Maria would not be the last woman to suffer as a result of these court battles. According to Martin, the first picks of the first three Romanov tsars each fell prey to similar intrigues. The Tsar Alexi’s first choice fainted suspiciously as a crown was placed on her head. She was sent into exile, with some fine linens made for her aborted wedding night as a consolation prize. Another girl’s hair was reportedly braided too tightly so that she would faint. And those that actually made it to their wedding day? Well, they could look forward to a lifetime of secluded childbearing. If they were one of the wives of tsars like Ivan the Terrible, they faced death by execution, poisoning, or life-long imprisonment in some forlorn nunnery.
The bride-show went out of fashion in the late 17th century, during the rule of the Westernizing, forward-thinking Peter the Great. Until the violent end of the Romanov Dynasty in 1917, Russian tsars would increasingly marry European princesses, as Russia became more and more a part of the surrounding world.
But the bride-show had already firmly fixed itself in the collective memory. “Official sources and…foreigners portrayed the custom as a true love match,” Martin says. “The tsar picked the ’fairest in the land,'” creating a “façade of autocracy.” But he thinks “the bride-show reveals a more traditional monarchy in Russia—one, like in the West at the same time-that relied a lot on collaboration with elites at court.” While the final choice was nominally picked by the tsar, behind the scenes he essentially had producers, agents and writers in his ear, telling him who to pick. The game of love has never been simple.
This past December, Ellen Degeneres asked comedian Andy Samberg how he and his wife, harpist Joanna Newsom, celebrate their wedding anniversaries. "We do the thing, with the gifts, where there's the thing it has to be made of for the year," Samberg told Degeneres. "First year was paper, second year was cotton. Cotton, I got her a Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer Sweatshirt, and paper, I wrote on a piece of paper, 'We can buy that table you wanted.'"
Most people know of of the general anniversary gift tradition (the crowd went wild at Samberg's joke) but fewer are aware that there are a number of lists, each with their own variations, peculiarities, and deep cuts, and shaped equally by tradition, commercialism, and the wiles of public librarians. Where did they all come from? Which are real, and which are made up? And, most importantly, do any couples actually use them?
"There are only eight 'true' traditional anniversary gifts," stressed the Chicago Public Library Information Desk in an email. These eight make a certain amount of hierarchical sense—paper comes in the first year, followed by wood in the fifth and tin in the tenth. After this, you level up quickly through crystal (15), china (20), and silver (25), before taking a long break and building toward gold (50). Diamond nabs the top spot at 60 years. After that, presumably, you'd be worrying about other things.
All of these materials have some grounding in (relative) historical precedent—under German tradition, for example, brides were given silver and gold myrtle wreaths when they reached milestone anniversaries, and Queen Victoria invented the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, to mark sixty years on the throne. In 1922, Emily Post gathered these traditions up in her Blue Book of Social Usage, calling them "eight anniversaries known to all," though even she specified that "the paper, wooden and tin wedding presents are seldom anything but jokes."
Fifteen years later, seeing an opportunity, the American National Retail Jewelers Association, a trade organization for jewelers, watchmakers, and salespeople, began working on a more comprehensive list of suggested anniversary gifts. This group was fresh off a recent triumph: In 1912, they had revamped the traditional birthstone list, filling it with slightly more expensive suggestions—pearls instead of cat's eyes, sapphires over lapis lazuli. It worked like a charm. The years following saw similar PR coups, including a successful campaign to convince women that it was embarrassing to wear "winter gems" in summer.
According to news clippings from that time, other industries fought hard to get on the new Jewelers Association list. Appliance manufacturers tried to unseat "wood" at year five, but were stymied by the furniture industry and ended up at number eight. But the real winner was once again the jewelers themselves, who stacked the list with leather, silk, and other materials they were well-suited to provide.
Mrs. Rogers celebrates her golden wedding anniversary in a Gobowen Orthopedic Hospital in Wales, in 1954 (Mr. Rogers is out of frame). (Photo: Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/CC0)
The next semi-official list—the one now excerpted on Wikipedia, Hallmark.com, and other sources—didn't show up until the 1990s. According to the Chicago Public Library, this one was made by and for librarians, who, as the Wikipedia equivalents of the time, found themselves fielding a number of phone calls from distressed husbands and wives. Eventually, the librarians got together, pored over some etiquette guides and encyclopedias, thought about their own lives, and put together two different lists: "Traditional" and "Modern."
Reading the Chicago Public Library's "Modern" list, you get the sense of just how desperate people were. The librarians took it upon themselves to fill in a full half century of potential presents, and things quickly start to get a little strange. The stretch beyond the Silver anniversary holds "Sculpture," "Orchids," and "New Furniture." "Land," at year 41, is immediately superceded in year 42 by "Improved Real Estate." As we edge closer to 50, the librarians seem fairly impatient, falling back on bad gifts ("Groceries") and on the tools of their own trade ("Books," "Optical Goods—binoculars, microscopes," "Original Poetry Tribute"). Like so many future-oriented documents, it reads less like a description of anyone's real life and more like an impossible ideal, stuck between timeliness and timelessness and settling on "Luxuries, any kind" (year 49).
Accordingly, nobody really uses it."I don't really understand the modern list, to be honest," says Dana Holmes, the editor in chief of Gifts.com. "Some of it could be useful to some people, but who really needs silver hollowware? It’s a very specific kind of couple who needs that, and chances are that they’re inheriting some."
The traditional list, though, still holds some sway. "There are a handful of traditionalists and sentimental couples out there who like the ceremony and tradition of it," says Holmes. Like the Samberg-Newsom family, younger couples tend to riff off of the theme in a way that fits their lives—a camping trip for the "wood" anniversary; "Iron Chef" cooking classes for iron. For their second, cotton anniversary, Holmes and her husband considered a cotton candy machine, but went with a hammock. “In a hammock," she says, "you can chill out together and relax.”
Around Valentine's Day this year, we got the idea of asking Atlas Obscura readers about one of the most fraught kind of relationships—the long distance kind, or LDRs. We assumed we'd get 50 or so responses, and maybe we'd pick a few stories to highlight.
But nearly 600 of you filled out the survey. The results were incredible—and fill the interactive map above. People conducted relationships from the ends of the earth, spanning years and ostensibly filling whole hard drives with video chats and text messages. The reasons for the geographical spread were manifold, and many people reported being continents apart for years. Here are some of the more surprising findings:
Long distance relationships are not temporary. Far from it. The longest clocked in at 46 years (!) but there were five relationships reported over 30 years and at least a dozen more that lasted over a decade. Keep this in mind next time you think a week away from your significant other is too much.
Three people conducted relationships from Antarctica. A statistically anomalous number. All were there for work.
Most people are still in their LDRs. Of the 595 total relationships we counted, only 117 said that they had broken up. That means 478 of you, as of February, are going strong!
Longest distance: 11,767 miles (Coventry, England<-->Christchurch, New Zealand). We were overwhelmed by the literal lengths people will go for love. At least 17 people were separated by over 10,000 miles (Australia/New Zealand accounted for much of this) and only one of those relationships was reported as being over.
Shortest distance: 41 miles (Hempstead, NY<-->Haskell, NJ). On the flip side, six relationships were clocked at under 100 miles apart. And two of them have already concluded.
Work was the most common reason given for being apart. This was followed by school, then family. Some of you just felt like it though.
Planes were the most common mode of transit. No surprise there. But only 20 respondents used buses as their main romantic conveyances.
Many of you were kept apart for long periods by visas. Immigration to the U.S. posed a particular problem.
IRL meetings are overrated. A significant number of respondents kept the flame alive without meeting in person for many years, and in 17 cases, not ever.
But the numbers can only tell us so much. Here is a smattering of our favorite stories:
I was living in NY when I got an OkCupid message from someone in Denver, even though my searches were set to the NY metro area only. (And, let's be honest, really just Brooklyn. Queens counts as a LDR.) Her profile said she works outside the US October through March, and her photos included a lot of ice and snow. One photo showed her posing next to a gigantic seal, and the caption said, "Near McMurdo Station." I Googled, then wrote back and asked, "Do you really work in Antarctica?" I didn't really believe her when she said yes.
Over the next six months, we exchanged long emails and asked each other the 36 questions that that NY Times article claims create intimacy between strangers. She told me all about life on the ice and I told her all about my own weird life. When I found out her name and googled her, the search results said someone with that name does work in McMurdo, and that her hobbies include motorcycles, skydiving, scuba diving, surfing and skiing. I was half skeptical, half intimidated. To prove that she was real, she sent me a series of postcards, letters and gifts with Antarctica postmarks. She later told me that our correspondence kept her sane in Antarctica's surreal conditions.
This summer I'll either move in with her or move to Beirut or Erbil while I work on my dissertation. If she goes back to the ice this year I'll take a short-term contract with an aid organization in the Middle East and we'll meet up afterwards. Someday we'll be a normal couple with a home of our own and a few pets but until then we count the days until our next vacation.
Length of long-distance relationship: 18 months Status:Ongoing
Bering Sea to New Milford, New Jersey
I was on the USCGC Boutwell on patrol in the Bering Sea. My fiancée was in New Jersey. We kept in touch via letters and the phone when I was in port in Seattle and via Ham Radio while underway. It was worth it as I ended up marrying her, and we are married to this day. I was on the Boutwell from 1978 to 1980.
Length of long-distance relationship: 24 months Status: Ongoing
United States to Mongolia
I met Zorig in the summer of 2014 while on a trip to Mongolia with my father. We toured parts of the country and capital for two weeks, then went on a one week fly-fishing trip in a northern province. Zorig was our fishing guide and interpreter. After only six days together, Zorig said, "I love you," to me at the airport as I departed. I thought the man was crazy—as we had hardly begun to know one another and had only shared some stolen kisses in the wee hours of the night. (I was 40 and traveling with my 71-year-old father after all!)
But once I returned home to the US I had three emails from Zorig waiting for me. We began an online relationship—first via email, then through Facebook Messenger, and finally through international SMS texting. For 4.5 months the relationship grew and developed. We each sent one another a couple of videos—but never once did a video chat. It was all words that built our relationship.
Then, on December 22, Zorig arrived to me in the US (I lived in Colorado Springs, CO) to see if we had the magic, the love, that we thought was between us. Oh my, was it ever! I began preparations to move to Mongolia.
I arrived to Mongolia on July 2. Zorig and I got married on October 2. I've never been happier since meeting this unexpected man. It will sound silly—but I got a fairy tale! This man pursued me over an ocean and 6,000 miles. Then I followed him home to this beautiful and fascinating land of Mongolia. We are beyond happy—we are living the dream of love.
Length of long-distance relationship: 11 months Status:Ongoing
Yangon, Burma to Sangin, Afghanistan
We were not able to meet up because my partner was serving a combat deployment as a US Marine. I tried to email him several times a week. I couldn't send handwritten letters because the postal system in Burma was so unreliable. I also used MotoMail, a system which prints out messages for troops (so he at least had something to hold in his hand). He emailed me back sporadically when he had occasional access to a computer. It worked because we were very committed to each other. I quit my overseas job and came home when he was severely injured after stepping on an IED.
Length of long-distance relationship: 4 months Status: No longer together
Jamison City, Pennsylvania, to Central African Republic
I met a wonderful woman online and romanced her with every means available, including handwritten letters, terrible, occasionally operational local cell, satellite phone, and satellite internet from a remote African jungle location. After a year, I moved back to the States to work, and we are now living together, going into the fourth year of our relationship.
Length of long-distance relationship: 36 months Status: Ongoing
Louisville, Kentucky to Norway, New South Wales, Australia
We met online, playing World of Warcraft. We knew each other for two years before I moved to Australia and we moved in together.
We had a lot of interests in common and similar life goals. We were married a couple of years after I moved. We have one child but are no longer together.
Length of long-distance relationship: 36 months Status: No longer together
Clifton, New Jersey to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada
Met online on a punk music message board, and somehow that turned into long nights on the phone. Eventually we decided to meet. I went to Saskatchewan first—I flew for the first time in my life—and decided I hated it. We hit it off in person, and from there we dated for three years. We'd drive back and forth every other month each and would up seeing each other about 8 or 9 times a year for a week or more at a time. Eventually it just ran its course, and she wound up changing significantly so we parted ways. It was a lot of miles on my car—highway miles, though.
Length of long-distance relationship: 36 months Status: No longer together
Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina to Melbourne, Australia
We met on a photography website, back in 2005 when there were only about 50 people on the internet. It wasn't a dating thing. We just struck up a friendship over our shared hobby in open chat forums. He's a wonderful photographer, and we're both very funny. Then we began emailing, and then phone calls. A million phone calls. After two months of nonstop talking we decided to meet in person. I flew to Melbourne for a two-week vacation. It was love at first sight. The day my plane was leaving for the States, we decided to get married. I didn't get on the plane; instead we drank champagne at a street café and freaked out a little. We'll be married 10 years in May.
Length of long-distance relationship: 2.5 months Status: Ongoing
San Jose, California to Frankford, Ontario, Canada
We met on Reddit and didn't expect to go from friends that message and talk every day to falling in love. Due to a previous law issue on my end (nothing exciting, just a DUI) I was afraid that I wouldn't be let into Canada to go see her so we first met in Buffalo, NY. Eventually I'll be moving across the country to be closer so we can meet more often while we work out immigration.
Length of long-distance relationship: 10 months Status: Ongoing
Albuquerque, New Mexico to Aztec, New Mexico
As I answer these questions I am driving to see my love. At 75 miles per hour it takes me about2.5 hours to reach him. I pass through three geologic provinces: basin and range, the southern Rockies, and the Colorado Plateau. And for the past two years I have witnessed the growth of fracking in the San Juan basin. I have also enjoyed the fall of gas prices. I met my lover on OkCupid. We are camping geo-geeks. This relationship works because we love spending time with each other. We are best friends, lovers and caretakers. I call him my pocket boyfriend because I can reach him on my phone almost at all times.
Length of long-distance relationship: 21 months Status: Ongoing
Jacksonville, Florida to Wellington, New Zealand
We met in a virtual world (Second Life) and continued to meet there for two years. We had a virtual wedding in this virtual world in 2009 on Halloween day. I traveled to New Zealand to meet her in 2010, and I stayed in New Zealand, never going back to the USA. We married on 2013, and we are very happy together.
Length of long-distance relationship: 24 months Status:Ongoing
Washington, DC to Brisbane, Australia
We met online and had an instant connection. This was back in 1996. We talked online and on the telephone for a ridiculous amount of hours—I had WAY too many $1,000+ phone bills, as did she. We had one visit, a year after we'd started talking. I flew to Australia, and we spent three months together. We even had our own marriage ceremony in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens. Once I came home, it seemed harder. The logistics of moving my wife (I'm a woman) to the US at that time were prohibitive, to say the least. There was no gay marriage then; only domestic partnerships in Vermont were allowed. It came to the world not wanting us together in the end. We remained in touch for the remaining 17 years, and only recently did I remove her from my life.
Length of long-distance relationship: 24 months Status:No longer together
Stratford, Connecticut to San Diego, California
We're in the process of meeting—some time in May. The coming together of two intellectuals via an online dating site. It's less than ideal, but it is love. Sometimes it takes you to people and places you never imagined.
Length of long-distance relationship: 6 months Status:Ongoing
Tucson, Arizona to Alexandria, Egypt
We used to chat on Facebook everyday. We incidentally met on Facebook, too. Once some of the keys on my keyboard stopped working and I went to Google to copy and paste the whole alphabet and copied each letter to write his messages. He never felt far away. We used to love the same music and books and listen to songs together on Facebook. He used to sing for me and was a hopeless romantic. That is what mainly kept us together.
We planned on meeting in Spain to catch a soccer game but we never met. He wanted me to marry him but I refused without meeting him first. We broke up because his family made him get married, and I was already in another relationship. I was always loyal to him during that year, but his silence killed the relationship, not the distance.
Length of long-distance relationship: 12 months Status:No longer together
Johnson City, Tennessee to Seattle, Washington
We met online in an AT&T Worldnet forum and exchanged 13,000 emails over three years. We never spoke on the phone, but we were able to collaborate on several web sites. We finally met in Tennessee in February 2002 and were married in April. So he drove a U-Haul truck with his cat Newton towing his car through the blizzards of February. It was well worth the long "courtship" because we knew so much about each other via our private emails and public posting in the forum.
When we finally admitted that we were attracted to each other via our correspondence, we would have Saturday date nights; I was Eastern time zone, and he was Pacific, so we'd agree on a rental movie ahead of time ,and each of us would fix a steak dinner—we synchronized watching the movie and having dinner "together" so we knew we were connected, even though we were 3,000+ miles and four time zones apart.
Length of long-distance relationship: 36 months Status:Ongoing
Edmonton, Canada to Kiev, Ukraine
She was a reporter during the revolution in Ukraine. I was reading her articles and started messaging her. We started chatting more and more and for the next year and a half communicated every single day online and by phone. After year and a half, we finally met for the first time when she visited Canada. Now we're beginning to plan our wedding and deciding whether we will make a life together in Ukraine or Canada.
Length of long-distance relationship: 22 months Status:Ongoing
Austin, Texas to Phoenix, Arizona
We met online on a game zone and had an immediate connection. From Phoenix she moved further up Arizona to the White Mountains. I would fly in to Phoenix and then catch a small commuter flight up the mountain. That small airline folded and I was left to hitchhiking 188 miles from Phoenix to the Show Low area. Other times she flew to Austin, or we would meet elsewhere like Las Vegas. We were madly in love.
When we were together we stayed about an average of 10 days doing nothing but indulging ourselves with each other. I got incarcerated in Texas and was sent to the easternmost part of Texas (almost to Louisiana further away from her), and one summer she drove out to see me. The warden was so overwhelmed with this that he transferred me to an Amarillo facility 588 miles west (closer to Arizona where she lived), and from there she would come visit me during the five years I was incarcerated. Upon my release she came to Huntsville (1,014 miles away) to come pick me up and spend a week with me before starting my new life.
Length of long-distance relationship: 120 months Status:No longer together
We met in Paris. It was platonic. We didn't see each other much at all, except for near-daily Skype calls. He once sent me a whole azalea plant through Interflora just so I could take care of something (a friend of mine had died at the time in another country, and I couldn't be there to comfort our common friends). We would time our sleep patterns to be able to Skype daily. When my mother got out of surgery, he was the first person I told. When he got offered a prestigious job, I was the first person he told. We made plans to move together to Strasbourg. We met in Strasbourg three years in on the dot. He looked at me and realized I hadn't quit smoking. We fought about him being pro-life. He was expecting a true lady. We broke up.
Some days I think it wasn't worth it, but during those three years I was happy.
Length of long-distance relationship: 36 months Status: No longer together
Phoenix, Arizona to Benguela, Angola and Gothenburg, Sweden
I found the relationship worth it because we had the same likes and views in every aspect: food, music, travel spots, political views, sports, child-rearing, literature, animals, art and anything else you could possibly think of. He didn't mind when I took off unexpectedly to photograph something that caught my eye. He was ok with my impulsive nature, and I was ok with his. It is rare to find someone you "click" with like this. Unfortunately, we both have the same tempers and other undesirable personality traits, too.
His impulsive nature led him to quit his job in Angola and move to Gothenburg, Sweden to find a place for both of us to live and work. We had only spoken about it a couple of times, but he decided without consultation to put it in motion. Since I'm still in school earning my degrees, I could not go right away. We had a huge falling out and couldn't repair the damage several months later.
Length of long-distance relationship: 12 months Status: No longer together
South Pacific Ocean to Seattle, Washington
We met in Seattle in a navigation class. Then I went to sea on the NOAA Ship DISCOVERER, a government oceanic research vessel. It was 1984, and we were able to talk perhaps once a month when our radio officer would patch into phone lines via a ham radio operator in California. We had to say "over," so conversations were awkward. "How are you? Over." etc. I called him from Honolulu on a real phone, and he used that opportunity to break up with me. At the next port, Papeete, Tahiti, I picked up a tourist for some sexual hi-jinx, and was attempting to convince the officer on the quarterdeck that I wanted to give this gentleman a tour of the ship. The officer said that a man with a dark beard was waiting for me in the mess hall. I quickly got rid of the tourist and was reunited with my remorseful love, who had flown in from Seattle.
After a few days, I shipped out for Samoa. I called my love from Pago Pango, and he broke my heart again. Yet, when the ship returned to Seattle, there he was on the dock with a dozen roses. The bosun's mate had warned us about leaving the ship before our watch was over, so I yelled down to my lover from the deck that I would be down to greet him properly in one half hour. One half hour later, he was gone. I went to his house. He threw the roses in my face and told me to get lost. What made this relationship worth it? The romantic locations, to be sure.
Length of long-distance relationship: 8 months Status: No longer together
Novi Sad, Serbia to Donetsk, Ukraine
We were communicating daily on Skype/Facebook/VK for two years, day and night. After we met and spent one month living together, he had to leave because of his visa and country regulations. That was the major hit for me; it couldn't get any more painful, and after he left I didn't think we could ever be together again (no money for traveling was the biggest reason), and there was no future in any of our countries. Then the war in Ukraine started, and I couldn't go there, nor could he leave his parents and family in the middle of that shit. I had some personal crisis and felt alone, needed someone next to me. I started seeing one other guy who was there for me when I needed help and decided to break up the long distance relationship because it was too painful and depressing. Despite it, I still think that this was "once in a lifetime" love.
Length of long-distance relationship: 36 months Status: No longer together
Cleveland, Ohio to New York, New York
I dated a guy long-distance for 9 months when I left NYC to go to grad school in Cleveland.
Long story short, we made it through the first two semesters, and I came home to be with him during my summer break. He broke up with me pretty quickly after I got back (I guess he wanted to do it in person?), claiming he just didn't see our future together anymore. Heartbroken, I immediately made the long haul straight back to Cleveland and miraculously salvaged my spot in an amazing internship I had initially turned down to be with him. Plus, it definitely helped ease my heartache to put 500 miles between me and the breakup.
Since I had spent the first year of my life in Cleveland sequestered in my room on the phone with my boyfriend, I still hadn't befriended a single person in the city beyond my seven classmates (six women and one painfully shy foreign man with a major language barrier). Feeling sad and pissed that I had seriously wasted my prime dating years, I jumped on the online dating bandwagon and within two weeks had met the man who ultimately became my husband. It was a very happy ending, all told, but of course I never did escape Cleveland.
Length of long-distance relationship: 9 months Status: No longer together
New York, New York to St. Petersburg, Florida
We met while working at a restaurant and began dating two weeks before I moved away for college. It felt romantic and desperate, and we would talk every night on the phone for hours, mostly sighing and saying how much we missed each other. He grew increasingly jealous, and would accuse me of cheating on him. I came home for breaks, would spend all my time with him and love every second of it, though it always ended in tears and fighting. The worst was when I left for my sophomore year—as I kissed him goodbye I accidentally let his pet parakeet fly through the apartment door and into the world. I couldn't do anything but apologize and leave. Eventually I began feeling like my mind was always in Florida and I couldn't live fully in New York, so I ended the relationship the way we had spent most of it—on the phone.
Length of long-distance relationship: 18 months Status:No longer together
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Chicago, Illinois and Cambridge, Massachusetts
Medicine does not a flexible life make, but we would fly into each other's cities for whirlwind romantic weekends and spend holidays on beaches or exploring new, distant cities. In the earlier years, we both saw a nebulous finish line where we were both badasses in our jobs and living together. We envisioned making dinner together and dancing around to old records on a humdrum Tuesday night.
After five years of dating and four years of long distance, the strain was evident in every part of our relationship. I handled it a lot worse than he did. Sometimes you just want to eat dinner with someone at night or get a hug after a rough day—impossible when doing long distance. Ultimately, we had to call time of death on our relationship two months ago. We realized we were making each other miserable. It was hard to eke out two perfect days of relationship every three to six weeks. We had created two different lives completely independent of each other.
I don't regret the long distance relationship, but I certainly don't recommend it.
Length of long-distance relationship: 48 months Status:No longer together
Los Angeles, California to Stuart, Florida
He lived in our home town, and I was working on the opposite coast. We got together when I was visiting home for the holidays.
It worked out great—every time we saw each other it was like we were on vacation. One or both of us would have to travel, and we would make the most of every minute. It was all very glamorous. We met up every couple of weeks, sometimes in our hometowns, sometimes at other vacation spots.
When we decided to live in the same town, the relationship quickly lost its glamor, and we broke up.
Length of long-distance relationship: 18 months Status:No longer together
Victor and I met in university at Tokyo. We were both studying abroad, taking the same Japanese class, and we started spending time together because we found we both have a common interest in urban exploring. Urbex in Japan is arguably the best in the world—the first time I approached Victor was because I had seen his photos from Nara Dreamland, and I'd been dying to go for years. The first time we ever hung out, we explored an abandoned insane asylum on the outskirts of Tokyo. I think that was when I knew he was someone worth keeping in my life, even though we've been doing an international long distance relationship ever since. We both care about the same things—traveling, languages, climbing roller coasters in abandoned amusement parks at 5 a.m.
So, we got involved, spent six months long distance, him in Tokyo and me in Chicago, then six more months long distance, Chicago to Mexico. We've never lived closer than 1,700 miles apart. After graduation, I moved to rural Japan, so once again we're almost 7,000 miles apart.
Length of long-distance relationship: 18 months Status:Ongoing
Bangkok, Thailand to Edmonton, Alberta
We met as children because our families were friends. I was seven and he was nine. At sixteen, I had a debilitating crush on him but was the invisible little sister of his friend. We drifted apart, and I moved from city to city—Mexico, Seoul, Shanghai, Bonn, then Bangkok. He got married and had a son. Life went on. My big brother's sudden death brought me back to Canada in the middle of a cold snap, the first time I had been "home" in 15 years. The day was sad but also happy because he was there and took the time to say hello. It was a two-minute conversation, and we gave it little thought. It wasn't until a year later that he reached out on Valentine's Day to tell me his wife had cheated, he was divorced and he wanted to take a holiday. I offered for him to come to Bangkok, and then it was all love and trying to figure out the distance.
Length of long-distance relationship: 10 months Status:Ongoing
Uppsala, Sweden to Tracy, California
We met at a show when I was in the States in 2012 a little after Valentine's Day, ironically. We became really close and met a few times in Sweden with so many adventures. It was pretty amazing the few times I got to be around her. Later she became more comforting over a lot of mental situations and bad situations. I just finally conjured up the feeling to ask her out, and here we are.
We have a long distance record swap; she and my brother are actually best friends. We seriously swap music as signs of affection. It helps us hold over until the next meeting!
Length of long-distance relationship: 5 months Status:Ongoing
Nelson, New Zealand to Austin, Texas
We met two weeks before she left New Zealand to move back to the States. I also moved nine times during the year, staying with friends to keep my costs low whilst I saved to go overseas too. We were emotionally committed from when we met and used Skype when she left, speaking for up to nine hours a day at first. Then for reasons outside my control I moved to a rural place with no cell coverage and dial up Internet (yes, that still exists!). I arranged to run a high speed cable across paddocks from my neighbor's house on the next farm, and had WiFi, but only had access to a capped 30 mb a day. So during that time our relationship was entirely done through the Heywire app, which is like instant message. Sometimes I was able to drive to a town and use the library WiFi or McDonald's, and we could Skype.
Length of long-distance relationship: 12 months Status:Ongoing
Quang Tri Province, Vietnam to New York, New York
During the year that I was in Vietnam, Carol and I wrote letters and sometimes poems to each other so that we could stay in touch. It was a great morale boost for me to receive her pink envelopes with the perfumed—I think it was called "L'Heure Bleue"—letter.
Except for the time that the North Vietnamese shot down a chopper that was carrying the mail, I received a letter almost weekly. Back in New York where Carol was living in a five-floor walk-up apartment with two roommates would make her friend who had the one key to their mailbox come home at lunchtime to open it up if Carol saw a letter from me in the box. Upon my return to the States, we got engaged after a few months and were married in the following autumn. Sadly, I lost her to cancer a little over a year ago after being together for almost 43 years.
Length of long-distance relationship: 12 months Status: No longer together
England to Texas
We met in central Italy. I was working at a farm/hostel, and he was a guest. I really didn't want a partner, especially a foreign one, because it's a lot of effort, but he was just irresistible. He's magnificent, and being with him is the most natural feeling thing ever. But America is a really hard country to date someone from. I don't recommend dating an American if you're not one yourself.
Length of long-distance relationship: 18 months Status: Ongoing
Chicago, Illinois to Cairo, Egypt
We met in Cairo and got married there (he's Egyptian, I'm American). We were ready to start a life together in the midst of revolution, and then there was a military coup and everything went sideways. Now I can't go to Egypt, and we've been waiting 18 months for a green card for him to come here. What makes it worth it? So much has been destroyed in the Middle East, and we're both too stubborn to let what happened ruin our love story.
Length of long-distance relationship: 22 months Status: Ongoing
Woking, England to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
She was my first love when we were 16 and again when I was 52.
Length of long-distance relationship: 24 months Status: No longer together
We would fly back and forth to visit each other for a week or two at a time every few months. I also was lucky enough to travel to Europe a few times with work, which we considered "free visits." We'd also try to visit new places together (since we were spending the money, might as well make a holiday out of it!).
We have always told our questioning friends or the nay-sayers that it takes a lot of work to maintain this—from both of us. We had to learn early on how to be intimate with one another without physical interactions. We actually had to talk with one another and learn about each other instead of just dating and making out on each other's couches.
We're due to be married next week, and I will be returning to Ireland with him for good!
Length of long-distance relationship: 60 months Status: Ongoing
Austin, Texas to Sheffield and Widnes, England
We met at a Dallas Greyhound station. He had an English accent. There was an instant kinship, and about as well as you can get to know someone in 10 minutes, we did. He said he’s headed up to Denver next, but his bus got cancelled. I was tempted to stay with him but my bus to Minnesota finally arrived.
So, somehow we were on the topic of books, and he says he finished with his books as well. (I finished 2/3 of my books at this point.) Then he says, “Would you like to trade?” "Of course!" I said. We ripped our luggage apart and gave each other our finished books. Then we had to go our separate ways. I stood in my line for a bit, then ran back to him and got his Facebook information so I could send the book back (that was my excuse anyway). He happily obliged.
Thousands in visa costs later we're still together. We're moving back to my Texas to get married this spring and save up a little money for our next adventure.
Length of long-distance relationship: 17 months Status: Ongoing
Sligo, Pennsylvania to Tokyo, Japan
We fell in love without seeing each other face to face. We were pen pals (this was in 1987). We carried on a relationship without meeting in person for 10 months, then I flew to Tokyo to meet him for the first time. We have been married (very happily) since 1989 and currently live in California.
Length of long-distance relationship: 12 months Status: Ongoing
Berkeley, California to Chengdu, Sichuan, China
I met my wife of 11 years online through a relationship web site, though we only exchanged one email using the service of this China-based web site, and then we began to email on our personal Yahoo email accounts daily for about a month until my wife taught me how to instant message.
I asked her to marry me after we'd been in daily contact for 4 months, she accepted, and after an understandable mutual feeling of hesitation we reaffirmed our decision and without ever physically meeting each other I flew from San Francisco to Chengdu and arrived after 15.5 hours of flight. I got to Chengdu at about 11 p.m. on Feb 2, 2005.
She and I were married the next day at an administrative office where we showed the forms and had pictures taken; documents had to be taken for translation into Chinese, but within 1.5 hours we were lagoons and Leopoldo (husband and wife) and had our red marriage booklets from the Chinese state.
Length of long-distance relationship: 24 months Status: Ongoing
The Bush in Northern Alberta to New York, New York
We met at Burning Man. Jenna would fly to Edmonton every six or eight weeks for a long weekend and come trucking with me. An NYC girl who can tolerate riding around the woods in an old Peterbilt and squatting to pee in a snowbank at 30 below zero has got to be a good chick. We're married now, so yeah, it was totally worth all the schlep and flights.
Length of long-distance relationship: 36 months Status: Ongoing
Austin, Texas to San Francisco, California
We both work in the toy industry and met at an inventor's show. We both have kids, so he was grounded in San Francisco, and I was tied to Austin. We took turns flying every weekend to see each other for seven years. Once his kids graduated and left for college, he found a job in Dallas (three hours from Austin) which was as close as he could get to me. We were married this last December and continue to live apart on the weekdays. The distance is rough. But I'd rather have the right person two days a week than the wrong person seven days a week. He's worth every mile logged!
Length of long-distance relationship: 84 months Status:Ongoing
Northeast Ohio to Southeast Florida
He drove 1,200 miles to see me. We were sweethearts when we were ages 16 and 17. At ages 51 and 52 years old, we found each other again, connected through his sister. He had lived in the Pacific Northwest and the Southeast all of his adult life; I'd been in Boston. I re-settled in our hometown area before the relationship was rekindled. He invited me on a date after speaking on the phone and exchanging long email love letters for a month. He said he'd be driving to Ohio to see only me, no relatives, no museums or movies, just us. Oh, and it'd be a five-day date. I agreed, so long as we had separate rooms.
We booked in at a country club and he rented a two-bedroom suite in the lodge. The five days were the happiest of our lives; we barely slept. He returned to Florida after the fifth day, but it was very difficult to part. He drove up to Ohio every two weeks or so until I moved to Florida to be with him six months into the relationship. We were married 2.5 years after being reacquainted. To find that he had not changed much, had only become a great man with all kinds of strengths layered onto the character of the boy I knew in high school, was truly amazing.
Length of long-distance relationship: 6 months Status:Ongoing
Limerick, Ireland, then Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, then Maine, then Glasgow, Scotland to Syracuse, New York
I met my (now) husband while we were in high school. We were each other's first everything. When it came time to go to college, we knew it would be difficult but it had to done. I selected a college four hours from home while he remained there.
We tried our best to see each other ,but our relationship was primarily via AOL instant messenger. We celebrated our three-year anniversary in different time zones with a Skype date.
Come my junior year, it was time for me to travel again. I flew off to study at the Glasgow School of Art. This was such a hard time. I was depressed and just waiting for April when he could visit me. Those were the best two weeks of my five years of college. I returned to school the following fall and we celebrated our seventh anniversary, against a lot of odds.
That spring, being a metalsmith, I fashioned emerald engagement rings and I proposed June 1st of that year. He accepted—or at least said "of course." Good enough.
We spent our eighth anniversary in great celebration as we were finally together and about to embark on our lives. At our ten-year anniversary, this past October, we finally got married and, boy did we make people cry! We bought a house, and here we will live, happily ever after, together.
Length of long-distance relationship: 60 months Status:Ongoing
Wappingers Falls, New York to Allahabad, India
We met when we were both in college at Allahabad University. Our families vehemently opposed our relationship, so I went back home to New York to finish school and get a job. We got married when my wife completed her PhD. We did not meet for two years exactly and only communicated via letters since she did not have a phone and in any case I could not afford $3/minute phone calls when minimum wage was $3.35/hour. After that trip was when I got my job. We married nine months later. Guess we were in love. This year is our 30th anniversary.
Length of long-distance relationship: 36 months Status:Ongoing
We met in senior high school in Guanajuato, so we were together only for a couple of months before each one had to leave to a different part of the country. We used to eat dinner quesadillas over Skype, write each other every day and send pictures of everything around us. Every couple of months one of us had to take a bus for like 10 hours to spend a weekend together. It was rough, but it was worth it.
Length of long-distance relationship: 48 months Status:Ongoing
Virginia Beach, Virginia to Los Angeles, California
We were both playing a show at a venue in Norfolk, Virginia. My old band opened up for his band, Silversun Pickups. We hardly spoke at the show, but after, he found me on Facebook and gave me his number. We texted every day, spoke on the phone often. We were great friends. Then we began meeting up on the road here and there. Then it became "official" after a few months of meeting up here and there.
Now we see each other at least once a month. We go back and forth from Virginia to California and sometimes go to different cities for little vacations. My family and friends love him. I love his family and his friends. Things are great. In the summer, I will be moving out to Los Angeles and we will finally close the gap.
Length of long-distance relationship: 36 months Status:Ongoing
Santa Fe, New Mexico to Quilpue, Chile
Even though we are different people, we wanted the same things—travel, a satisfactory career, a desire to do something worthwhile with our lives. I've always wanted my life to be an adventure, and being with him is just that. It's taking the road less traveled. It's jumping across a void together. It's having faith. It's also crazy expensive, time consuming,and exhausting, but just like in a normal relationship, you put up with all the baggage because the person on the other end of that Skype call or plane flight is your special someone, and they make you feel good about yourself. They bring out the best in you.
Length of long-distance relationship: 36 months Status:Ongoing
Edmonton, Alberta to Belleville, Ontario
We met—and dated for a while—early in high school. He was the first fellow I said, "I love you," to; I was 15. We were also friends and classmates for three of our five years (grades 9 through 13 in those days). Life took different turns, and for 52 years we had not seen each other or communicated at all. Then four years ago, I had an email from him. (He had been separated from his wife for a number of years; my husband was quite ill and died three years ago.)
The old feelings came swarming back for both of us. How wonderful for people in their 70s to fall in love all over again, after all these years! He has visited me, and we have toured the Rockies and Alberta's badlands and dinosaur preserves and museums. I have gone east a couple of times each year. We communicate at least three times every day—lengthy emails, by phone and Skype each evening.
In fact, I am moving back east—not only because of him; I've many old friends and cousins back east—but it will be terrific to be in the same province and only an hour's drive or so apart.
Length of long-distance relationship: 48 months Status:Ongoing
Utah to Virginia
I met Lenny in high school over 30 years ago. We met because of the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921. Because of those riots, Tulsa developed a magnet school funded by the government to help in the desegregation of America. I am white and Lenny is black. We sat next to each other in Mrs. Carnegie's math class and became close friends. But Lenny graduated a year ahead of me, and we lost contact with each other after high school. With the advent of Facebook and Classmates.com and other social media websites, I searched for Lenny for over 28 years and finally discovered him in Nottoway Correctional Center in Burkeville, Virginia.
Lenny committed eight "grab and dash" robberies in a seven-day period while high on alcohol and crack cocaine. He did not have a gun. He did not murder anyone. In fact, he didn't even physically injure anyone, and not one person filed against him as a victim. He needed help with his addiction. What he got was two life sentences plus 100 years with no chance at parole.
I began writing everyone I could think of trying to bring awareness to Lenny's situation. I am still writing everyone I can think of—well over a thousand people and organizations by now. We also began writing each other. Lenny, while incarcerated, has not wasted his time. He served in the church for over 10 years. He works everyday in a position of authority. He lives in the Honors Dorm. During the entire 20+ years he has been in prison, he has not received a single infraction for anything—rare for lifers. Together, within the last three years we have written and published a book called "Love Conquers All."
When I began writing Lenny, and catching him up over the last 28 years, I realized what bad shape I was in and began walking and eating better. Within four months I lost over 60 pounds, so much weight that I was able to feel the lump in my left armpit. This turned out to be Stage IV triple negative breast cancer with the discovery of a tumor at the base of my skull, the top of my spine, threatening to paralyze me from the neck down. Seven surgeries, radiation, and a year and a half of chemo later, there is no active disease in my body, although my oncologist tells me I am "incurable." Reuniting with Lenny when I did spared me a life of paralysis and death—a true miracle. Now, I am trying to create a miracle for Lenny.
I married Lenny in August of 2015 in Nottoway in Virginia, traveling across the United States from Utah. We manage because of the unique and true love we have developed for each other over the past three years. We still write each other, email each other and talk on the phone to each other every single day. We may not be the furthest apart in distance, but in a different regard we are far apart. I can only hope that I live long enough to secure Lenny's release.
Length of long-distance relationship: 336 months Status:ongoing
...and a Long Beautiful Story for the Road.
Chicago, Illinois to Logan, Utah
It was a setup. We met in a restaurant called the Jib Room in Marsh Harbour on the island of Abaco in the northern Bahamas. I'm from the Bahamas, but I'd recently moved to Chicago for grad school and was back visiting over the Christmas break. The friend who invited me was annoyingly persistent, though, so I came out anyway and ended up spending the dinner talking across the table to a handsome-but-humble entomologist from Utah. We swapped email addresses at the end of the meal, and I wrote him a month or two later to clarify the difference between a mosquito and a cranefly. We hit it off in text and kept emailing each other, almost daily as I remember, but strictly as friends.
The next August I was visiting Abaco again, and so was my entomologist friend. We arranged to have lunch together, but it wasn't until I saw him walking across the parking lot towards me that I suddenly realized, "Holy cow, this is a date! How'd that happen? Wait a second, he's a nice guy, and I'm kind of crazy. Is this going to work?" I was flung into a mild state of panic. Add to this, his father (who had retired to the Bahamas years before) was the local meteorologist and his stepmother ran a popular radio network over the VHF, and the situation suddenly seemed much more stressful. Particularly when the stepmother in question found out about our lunch date and innocuously suggested we extend it to dinner, at which time we could join them at the Jib Room (again) for a steak.
Lunch was cute and awkward. We sat on the beach and drank a couple of beers and didn't know what to say to each other when not separated by computer screens. That evening I put on my best face to attend steak night at the Jib Room, but I was nervous. Really nervous.
So nervous, in fact, that a few bites into my meal I forgot to chew properly, tried to swallow, and got a big wad of steak jammed in my throat. I tried to swallow again. No dice. I tried to cough it up. That wasn't working either. I ran through the symptoms in my head: "Can't swallow, can't cough, certainly can't speak—airway completely blocked. This is what choking to death feels like, and I have four-and-a-half minutes before brain death unless somebody in this restaurant knows the Heimlich maneuver!"
It seemed to me that my date was such a nice guy that if anyone knew how to save lives, he probably did. I stood up, poked him in the chest, and started making flailing gestures with my arms. After a vexing few seconds he figured it out. It's funny, but I have about a three-second memory lapse at this point. I remember turning around and him putting his fist up against my diaphragm... and then I remember being able to breathe again, turning back around and sitting down and drinking my beer and eating about half of the rest of my steak and cutting it up very, very small and chewing it very, very well. I don't remember the actual Heimlich maneuver, and I don't know what ever happened to the steak that was caught in my throat—it just went away.
That was a pretty effective ice-breaker. Up until that point I had serious reservations about getting into a relationship with this handsome-but-humble entomologist. It would be long distance. He's a nice guy. His parents were a big deal in my hometown. I'm kind of crazy and I don't have a good history of being able to maintain relationships. But I could be dead. Or I could at least try dating this rather nice man who just saved my life. Because I could be dead! And he still seems interested in me, even after having had to apply the Heimlich. And you know, I could be dead right now. We finished the dinner, went back to the place I was staying, and had hot monkey sex for the next 48 hours.
When I went back to Chicago and he went back to Utah, we started figuring out how to work this thing. I was a little less than a year into a two-year master's degree, so there was going to have to be some adjustment. It turned out there were plenty of direct flights between Salt Lake City and Chicago, and he was able to fly out and visit me every six weeks or so. I'd take the blue line out to O'Hare and meet him, and then he'd come stay with me for a long weekend in my tiny expensive efficiency apartment in Lincoln Park, we'd have hot monkey sex and order delivery food the whole time and I'd send him back to Utah sore and satisfied.
I think what kept us going was the fact that we are both natural text communicators. I still wrote him almost every day, and my emails to him became a journal of my life. He wrote back less often, but still fairly frequently, and I figured he was a good sport to read the reams and reams of verbiage that I obsessively sent him. We were a good intellectual and emotional fit, at least with 1,500 miles between us. When my father died in the UK during my last semester as I was trying to write my thesis, my long distance Bug Doctor was the rock that kept my sanity from washing out from underneath me.
I flew to the UK for what would turn out to be the last couple of weeks of my father's life, but Dad stubbornly refused to die while I was there. Spring break rolled aroun, and Mum sent me home to Chicago so that I could keep my plans of flying out to Utah to see my guy over the official vacation. I flew back to O'Hare, spent a night in my apartment and was back at the airport the next day waiting on my flight to Salt Lake when I saw I'd missed a call from my mother. My father had died 45 minutes before. She said I should go see my man, and that the funeral would be the following weekend. I flew to Utah, hitched a ride down to Capitol Reef National Park where my entomologist was on field work, spent a week hiking and crying in the jaw-droppingly beautiful red rock desert, flew back to Chicago for a night, then back to the UK for two nights and the funeral, and then back to Chicago to try and figure out why the hell my thesis was still relevant to myself or anyone else on the planet.
I took a two-week extension, finished my thesis, and then hung out in Chicago until my entomologist had finished up his field work. He flew out, helped me pack my life into a U-Haul, and we drove back to Utah across the Great Plains to figure out if we could make a go of it living in the same town.
The short answer is yes, and we're still together 13-and-a-half years later, happily married. The long answer is a lot more involved and features a talented relationship counselor. My Bug Doctor and I have talked about how we managed to somehow sidestep or overcome our individual damage to become a functioning couple, and in truth it seems like the long distance portion of our relationship was key to that. I really was kind of crazy... but so was he. We were both really damaged and frightened, and we both had developed reflexes to jettison anyone who got too close before the iron vise of commitment could shut its jaws around us. Being long distance (and going through so much non-relationship drama) kept those reflexes from being triggered. The Heimlich maneuver episode helped both of us bypass our doubts and fears, and the space of the Great Plains between us diluted them into a non-issue. By the time they kicked in with a vengeance we'd already been married two years, and it just seemed like good sense to try and salvage the investment rather than break things off and move on.
These days we are a very close couple, with a level of trust and communication that I don't see in many other relationships. I feel really, really lucky—and it was definitely worth sticking with it across all those miles.
Length of long-distance relationship: 18 months Status:Ongoing
(Some submissions have been edited and condensed.)
It's the ultimate battle of the brides. Every June, at the height of the wedding season in Estonia, women dressed in bridal gowns hike up their skirts, lace up their tennis shoes, and compete for the title of the “Most Runaway Bride.”
The annual bride racing competition, which this year took place on June 4, features foot races and group dances, all done in a blizzard of white silk, satin, lace, and taffeta. It all goes down at Narva Castle, a 13th-century fort, where blaring pop music amps up the event.
Grooms wearing a suit and tie are welcome to participate in a couples race. At the 30-second mark, you can see the well-dressed duos running hand-in-hand down the track.
The organizer of the brides race said the women were racing to run away from the hum drum of their daily routines, Todayreports. In addition to becoming the “Most Runaway Bride,” past winners have received a free weekend at an Estonian spa and a golden ring with a precious stone.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Julie Stroyne Nixon was walking out of her own wedding reception in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, still in her dress and heels, when she heard someone cry out for help. "Does anybody know CPR?" the voice called. "Is anyone a doctor?"
Nixon had already taken one new name that day. But as her instincts took over, she earned another: Bride Hero. Without stopping to think, she approached the injured party—a young woman who had lost consciousness—kicked off her shoes, and immediately started chest compressions. After a few minutes, the collapsed woman regained her heartbeat, began speaking, and tried to get up again, reports KDKA TV. She was quickly rushed off in an ambulance, and Nixon her husband, and the rest of the wedding party continued on their way.
Over the past few years, a number of Bride Heroes have proven that dresses and special occasions do not keep people from doing impressive stuff. Last fall, one recently married paramedic left her reception to head to the scene of a car crash involving her extended family. A couple of years previous, a woman saved a child from drowning during her lakeside engagement photo shoot.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Off the northern coast of Australia lies Bramble Cay, a lonely, tiny island that just pokes out of the ocean.
It is only around nine acres, and, for years, was the site of shipwrecks, before authorities built a lighthouse in 1924.
It was also the home of Bramble Cay melomys, a rodent isn't found anywhere else on earth.
But in recent years, rising ocean waters have at times inundated the cay, which sits just a few yards above sea level, likely wiping out the melomys population.
Scientists from the University of Queensland visited in 2014 to be sure, and they could find no trace of the mammals, they said this month.
They're now calling it the first extinction of a mammal due to climate change. Melomys, they said, could've died from any number of reasons, whether by drowning or just the simple destruction of their habitat.
Some local fishermen last saw some melomys in 2009, the scientists said, but when they exhaustively searched in 2014, they found nothing.
“A thorough survey effort involving 900 small animal trap-nights, 60 camera trap-nights and two hours of active daytime searches produced no records of the species, confirming that the only known population of this rodent is now extinct," Luke Leung, one of the scientists, said.
Leung did leave one hopeful possibility: melomys are thought to originate in the Fly River delta, in Papua New Guinea, and its possible, he said, that they or a very similar rodent lives on there.
A comical portrayal of all of the people involved in an 18th-century wedding night. (Photo: Isaac Cruikshank/Public Domain)
While weddings are full of happenings and rituals, a wedding night usually only has one connotation. But some cultures partake in wedding night activities that involve many more participants than just the bride and the groom.
Period-film aficionados may be familiar with the wedding-night rituals of the 18th-century royal betrothal, in which a group of somber priests, ladies-in-waiting, and gentlemen of the bedchamber gather around the new couple. But there are plenty of other, far more jovial games and pranks that bridal parties around the world play on newlyweds before they finally get some privacy for the night. Here are some of the most awkward, funny and downright weird wedding night traditions.
According to the book Marriage Customs of the World: From Henna to Honeymoons, there was once a Scottish tradition involving cheesing up your bed for good luck. As the book describes, a newlywed couple might spread a pound of Limburger cheese between a pair of towels, which they widely practiced, and whether it is still observed today, is unclear.
Indian Bedcovers
A wedding night game sometimes played in India involves the bride hiding under the bedcovers in the bedroom, surrounded by family members. The groom walks into the room with his family members and attempts to determine which side of the sheets her head is under. As he makes a decision, he is goaded by the bride’s family members, who attempt to throw him off with false clues and jeering. If he ends up correctly determining where her head is, the superstition goes that the groom will be on equal footing with his bride throughout the marriage. If he accidentally picks the side containing her feet, he’s doomed to serving her (and falling at her feet) for the rest of his life.
Apples are the fruit of temptation, and certainly an attempt to tempt the couples into intimacy in this Chinese wedding game. (Photo: Peter Janzen/CC0)
Chinese Nao Dongfang
In societies that cherished virginity, wedding games that eased the newly married couple’s anxiety around their first night in the bedroom became popular. The Chinese custom of Nao Dongfang, put in place during the Han Dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD), is still practiced today. It teaches the couple about intimacy through a series of dirty jokes and games played by the families of the bride and groom. One such game sees an apple tied to a string and dangled in front of the couple by a friend or family member. The newlyweds both have to try to bite the apple, eventually leading to a kiss—often expedited by the friend moving the apple away at the last moment.
The French may have been a step ahead of the Japanese with this tradition. (Photo: riNux/CC BY-SA 2.0)
French Toilet Soup
A tradition in France called “Le Pot de Chambre” dates back to the days of chamber pots, when wedding-goers would unite after the newlyweds departed to their room. The bridal parties would take a chamber pot and fill it with leftover alcohol and food scraps from the reception, and then present it to the bride and groom to serve as "fuel" for their long night ahead. The party would typically stay in the bedroom to ensure that the couple would drink the whole pot.
The tradition continues today, though it's been updated to meet modern hygiene standards. While the bridal couple is still presented with a toilet bowl as a prank, more often than not it’s filled with chocolate fondue or champagne—although some choose to throw in a couple of scraps of toilet paper or bananas covered in chocolate for added authenticity.
U.S. and Canadian Shivaree
Shivaree was an old French custom in which townspeople shamed marriages between adulterers and other matches they disapproved of by making a loud racket and causing a ruckus outside their homes on their wedding nights. The tradition was brought over to the United States and Canada with French colonization. However, instead of using shivaree to express disapproval of the marriage, bridal parties would instead simply gather around the newlyweds home and create a ruckus by banging pots and pans and singing loud songs to tease the married couple in the form of a friendly—albeit irritating—prank.
Corvina fish, which are used to slap the Korean groom's feet prior to his big night. (Photo: 思源如宁 /CC BY-SA 3.0)
Korean Fish Slapping
In Korea, sometimes the groom’s friends get together to lend him a helping hand in case he’s worried about not performing on the wedding night. In the book Wedding Bells and Chimney Sweeps, Bruce Montague describes a post-wedding ceremony game in which the groom’s friends remove the newly married man’s socks, tie his ankles together, and beat the soles of his feet with fish. Specifically, with dried corvina fish, a yellow species that can grow up to three feet in length.
During the game, the groom is subject to interrogation, and should his answers be unsatisfactory, the beating with the fish becomes more severe. Though Montague writes that the game is meant to “acclimatize the new husband to his first night of matrimony,” other sources are more explicit and say that the process is thought to act like Viagra, to ensure that the groom doesn’t disappoint on his wedding night.
For 65 years, a museum in Leicester, England, was in possession of a bunch of unidentified dinosaur bones. They appeared to be a reptile of some sort, perhaps related to ichthyosaurs, dolphin-like creatures that were alive in the age of the dinosaurs. But no one had been able to say exactly what they were.
One academic, Robert Appleby, a former curator at the New Walk Museum, had even studied the fossil for years, but never published his findings.
So when Dean Lomax, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester, saw the bones on a visit, he was intrigued.
It turned out, Lomax discovered, that the partial skeleton was not related to ichthyosaurs, but was in fact a new species of ichthyosaur itself.
New species are described regularly, but this one was particularly significant, since it's one of just a handful of ichthyosaur fossils from 200 million years ago.
Lomax published his findings Tuesday in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology. He named the specimen Wahlisaurus massarae after two prominent paleontologists.
One reason it might have taken so long for the fossil to be recognized as the remnants of a new creature is in part because its bones are scattered. Why? For some reason, Lomax thinks, the ichthyosaur nosedived into the sea floor before or after dying.
“When I first saw this specimen," Lomax said, "I knew it was unusual."
This story was co-produced with 
