When you strip immigration of flags and forms, what’s left is love.

Love of the children you don’t want to raise in insecurity.
Love of parents you’re sending money to every month.
Love of yourself—the version of you that believes you deserve safety, opportunity, soft life, or at least softer stress.

We talk about relocation like it’s a PowerPoint slide: Better healthcare. Better schools. Better currency.

We forget to talk about the ache.

The ache of a mother who kisses her child through a screen.
The ache of a husband who sleeps beside his wife but feels like they are on two different continents emotionally.
The ache of friends who quietly unfollow each other when life stages no longer match.

Love in diaspora is not just romance. It’s architecture.

It is the auntie who runs a Saturday jollof kitchen in her small apartment because she cannot stand the thought of fellow immigrants eating sad, unseasoned meals alone.

It is the Sikh uncle in Brampton who shovels his neighbour’s driveway without asking, every snowstorm, because “this is community.”

It is the queer Nigerian student in Vancouver who throws potluck “found family” Christmas dinners for anyone whose blood relatives are too far—or too unsafe—to sit with.

Love is in the tiny gestures we almost miss.

The bus driver who waits an extra five seconds for the newcomer running in the snow.

The classmate who prints an extra copy of the assignment instructions because the professor’s accent is hard to follow.

The janitor who opens the courthouse door before the clerk freezes outside.

Love is also in the messy, painful stories:
the wife who made desperate choices to secure a future;
the husband who feels abandoned by a system he trusted;
the friends whose bond bent under the weight of a loan.

We can pretend these things are separate—immigration over here, relationships over there. But really, they are braided.

Immigration policies decide who we can love openly, where our marriages are recognised, whether our children grow up hearing their grandparents’ laughter in person or only through shaky WhatsApp calls.

This is why Gather cares about your love stories as much as your tax guides.

Because when the government announces a new cap, or a province changes its health rules, it is not just paperwork that shifts. It is someone’s proposal timeline, someone’s reunion date, someone’s ability to finally say, “Yes, come and join me.”

So if you’re reading this with a tired heart—maybe nursing a breakup, or a friendship that died somewhere between Lagos and Toronto—hear this:

You are not foolish for loving across oceans.
You are not weak for wanting partnership in a place that keeps asking you for proof of funds, proof of language, proof of everything.

Love is the one thing that doesn’t need a visa to cross borders.
The challenge is learning how to nurture it in a land where everything else feels temporary.

And that’s why this corner of the internet exists—to collect your stories, laugh with you when love is sweet, hold space with you when it’s bitter, and remind you that even here, even now, in a country that sometimes feels cold in every sense of the word, your heart is still allowed to stay warm.