LifeisXbox | Valentine’s Day Interview

LifeisXbox’s Valentine’s day interview |

Ahh, it’s that time of year again. No not Christmas. Halloween is closer but still way off. It is Valentine’s day I speak of. Day of Romance and celebrating those you love with good food presents and affection where appropriate. Oh, and I can’t forget chocolates now as a Belgian can’t I?

It’s also a day celebrated in a lot of video games nowadays. In Persona your girlfriend will give you chocolate, Final Fantasy XIV has its Valentione’s day celebration where House de Valentione puts on some festivities and I even remember Dungeon Defenders holding their Etherian Festival of Love back in the day. Yet today’s focus won’t be on the games but rather on the players. Two of them specifically who go by their online handles Slicebananas and Kittypls. I’ve known them for a long time and saw them go from meeting one another online all the way to marrying back in 2021. An ocean apart these gamers made it work and have agreed to sit down with me to tell you all about it.

Onto the interview:

Please tell us a bit about yourselves:

• I’m Kitty, and I’m a teacher, part-time streamer, and very, very bad at writing my own introductions. Thanks.
  
• I’m Slicebananas. I work in the telecom sector and am an avid e-sports enjoyer and MMO player who likes to cook.

How did you two meet?

We met through an online gaming website called Twitch. Slicey caught my stream one day, stuck around and made me laugh. Eventually, I made him a mod, which I regret from time to time given his antics. We then continued to get to know each other over Discord, before eventually meeting up in person. We fell in love almost immediately. We just clicked, there was no two ways about it.

A long-distance relationship must be challenging. How do you make it work?

Open dialogue and being honest with our expectations. That honesty and openness helped a lot in the beginning. Neither one of us wanted to commit to something unless we both wanted the same things in the future. So we had to have those hard conversations from the get-go. But setting that foundation of open and honest, and never cutting off a conversation, no matter how uncomfortable, has really helped us the past few years. Just lots and lots of talking and communicating are key. This goes for any relationship, but in long-distance relationships, it becomes all the more critical.

What are some games you like to play together?

• It Takes Two
• Warframe
• Final Fantasy XIV
• Stardew Valley
• Minecraft
• League of Legends
• The Borderlands games
• Divinity: Original Sin 2

What other activities do you regularly do besides gaming?

• Movie dates & anime watching
• Cooking together over Discord
• Watching the League of Legends European Championship games and Worlds.

Did you influence each other’s tastes in games, shows and music or other significant ways?

• Slicebananas: She’s mostly shifted my English accent from the British end of the spectrum towards the American end. It’s ruined I tell you! How will I ever recover from this?! 
  
• Kittypls: Well, I made his English accent more American than British, which I think he hates to this day. So for the most part, yes. We’ve both influenced each other in a lot of ways. He’s the one who really introduced me to anime. I especially like the slice-of-life genre for how comforting they can be when I’m having a rough week. And I’ve introduced him to the large selection of American cereals in our grocery stores.
  

Having an ocean and time difference between each other must create some issues. How have you overcome them?

• Swimming lessons, obviously. ( I’m leaving it in smartypants)

It does, especially with the time difference. Noon for me (Kitty) is 18:00 for him. Being six hours ahead of me puts a huge strain on our relationship. I’m a teacher, so sometimes I get home late after school. But getting home at even just 16:00 means it’s 22:00 for him, and he has to be at work the next day. I (Slicebananas) do try to stay up late, even when exhausted, just to sneak some time in with her. Kittypls sometimes feels guilty about supposedly keeping me up, but I much rather spend a little time with her than none at all. If we’re lucky, we get an hour or two a day with each other and that’s it.  We’ve had a lot of growing pains trying to adjust to things like this, but what’s helped the most is making Sundays “our day.” I don’t make plans, he doesn’t make plans, and we spend the day together just catching up, enjoying each other’s company, and not feeling the pressure of the time zones.

Kittypls, you’ve started learning a second language. How is that coming along?

So, as I’ve been repeatedly told, Dutch is an incredibly difficult language to learn. It’s not going great, but not going terribly either. It’s hard being around his friends and family sometimes because they speak Flemish, and the only Dutch I can learn on my own is the Dutch found in textbooks and language apps. So, it happens occasionally, that the things I do learn, don’t really help me in my day-to-day conversations with them.

You two made it all the way to the altar IRL, but what couple’s things have you done in the virtual space?

• We got married in Final Fantasy XIV.
• We built a dream house in Minecraft, so we don’t need architects for our future home together.
• We got married in Stardew, too.
• Finished It Takes Two together, and loved it.
• We beat all of the Trine games together as well.

When you do physically meet, what do you like to do together?

• Kittypls: We love to cook together, and by cook I mean: plan a meal, purchase the ingredients, and then attempt to help Robbe without getting in the way. He’s an incredible cook, and honestly, I’m not too shabby either, but it’s something he loves to do, so I enjoy letting him show off from time to time.
  
• Slicebananas: It’s tradition that, no matter who visits who, we spend one day together at a movie theatre. We haven’t missed a movie date once in all our trips to one another.
  
• Kittypls: Spend at least one day just laying in bed, binge-watching something together. People who aren’t long distance, I feel, forget sometimes how lucky they are that their person is just there all the time. We hold hands & hug & kiss & all those small little things as much as possible when he’s here or I’m there. Because at the end of the day, there are plenty of moments when we need a hug, and the other one is across the ocean. So we take advantage where we can.

Got anything else you’d like to say to our readers?

Please don’t use us as an excuse to treat Twitch as a dating website. Respect the healthy boundaries your streamers set. We often say we are the exception, not the rule.

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