2025 Love List

Lili Hernandez & Ashley Hiebing, Madison, 9 years
Shammara McMullin & Ziggy Odogun-Williams, Madison, 3 years
DJ Nichols & Lee Stratton, Oshkosh, 9 years
Danny Atwater & Sid Richards, Madison, 6.5 years
Mandy & Mel Smith-Tourville & Sarah Barkdull, Menomonie, 20 Years & 1 Year

Whenever people ask how Lili and I met, I can’t help but laugh. It wasn’t through the usual means—an app, at work, or via mutual friends. We met in 2014 on a tiny, obscure online forum for lesbian fans of Girls’ Generation, a Korean pop group. Little did I know that the stranger I decided to private message out of the blue would eventually become my wife.

That she lived in Mexico never felt like an insurmountable obstacle, no matter how incredulous our friends were that we could make it work. I won’t pretend it was easy; we saw each other every few months, and often only for a weekend at a time. But we kept busy—she as a medical resident and me as an engineering student—and got through it with a healthy dose of stubbornness and the belief that one day the goodbyes would end.

In 2018, we decided we needed to take the next step and see how well we could handle a long-term visit. Lili lived with me for six months, the maximum her tourist visa would allow. Needless to say, my marriage proposal at the end of those six months did not come as a surprise. It would take another year of wading through the immigration process (so much paperwork!), but eventually Lili was approved for a marriage visa, and on September 30, 2019, after five years of planes and Skype dates, we were finally together for good.

We assumed things would settle down after that, but life had other ideas. Though the COVID pandemic began not long after our wedding, even that felt minor compared with what would come in September of 2021, when Lili was diagnosed with retroperitoneal liposarcoma, a rare and unpredictable cancer. We spent our second wedding anniversary in the hospital while she recovered from surgery to remove a massive tumor in her abdomen.

The diagnosis upended our lives, but more than that, it completely changed our perspectives. Things that always seemed so important became insignificant, and things we took for granted—health, time, life itself—became invaluably precious. After multiple rounds of chemotherapy and more surgery, Lili is currently in remission, and we’re making the most of it by traveling around the world to watch our favorite K-pop group perform. It’s a reminder of our past and a promise for the future: Treat every day together as a gift.