This Love Story Suffered the Cruelest Border Restrictions

When I first fell in love with my—now husband—Salem, in Istanbul, it felt like we had everything in common. We were both journalists with a deep hunger to see the world and tell the kinds of stories that we thought were important. But there was one crucial difference: I had a U.S. passport and could travel as I pleased. He was from Syria and, by extension, was effectively stuck in the Middle East.

At first it didn’t matter. But when the Turkish government started cracking down on refugees in 2015—and kicked Salem out, we suddenly didn’t know where we were going to live. Worse yet, I didn’t know if we could find a place to live together—where do you go when your boyfriend’s passport is not worth the paper that it is printed on?

Love Across Borders is the story of what happened next, but it is also the stories of dozens of couples like us. It is the story of Syrian couples who did not have the convenience of a U.S. passport between them, a Yemeni-American couple who braved both the war in Yemen and the Muslim ban to be together, Mexican-American couples separated by U.S. immigration policies, and many others from around the world. But here is how it all began.

Read more at The Daily Beast.