We’ve gotten so many voicemails from you that we had to run another episode of three minute love stories. This week we have a couple trying to work through their changing marriage as they adopt a foster baby born to an addicted mother. Another couple picked up their entire life and moved to Bali to open a restaurant...and, finally, a wedding singer who fell in love with a bridesmaid. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

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Three Minute Love Stories

Today we have an update from an episode we did back in April of last year. In Season Two we talked to Samantha and her wife Laura. The two of them originally fell in love in college. They got married quickly and had four sons. Samantha was born a man, but always felt like something else, always felt like a woman. After thirteen years of marriage Samantha transitioned. When we spoke to Laura and Samantha they were navigating their new relationship as parents, partners and wives. It was an episode about what it takes to stand by your partner as your partner changes into a new person. But relationships are complicated. Marriage is complicated. Last summer the two women realized that they both needed something different from one another. I spoke to Samantha this month about what it is like now for her to navigate her life as a single lesbian woman. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

Update: Suddenly Samantha

We have more little love stories for you...Three more stories that come from our own listeners. They’re short and sweet and all of them reminded us about the many ways we can commit to one another. In one a librarian meets a genuinely nice man online, in another moving into a camper van saves a couple’s relationship and finally two kids figure out how to make long distance work. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

For this episode update we're going back to a show we did with Doree and Matt in season one. Their episode was called Hope is a Dangerous Thing. When we left them Doree and Matt were trying to get pregnant and it wasn’t working for them. They were on their fifth round of IVF and they were both wearing a little thin. That episode aired in August of 2018. Doree and Matt did do that fifth round of IVF and Doree got pregnant soon after we aired...She had a baby boy, Henry, in April of last year. We talked to them last week about what it's like to finally become parents after trying for so long and what they wish they could tell the two people they were when they started this journey. Photo by Stephanie Entin. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

UPDATE: Hope is a Dangerous Thing

Some of the best love stories come in small packages. That’s why we asked you, our listeners, to send us voicemails of your own love stories. We’ll be running a few of them before Season Four starts. So here are three mini love stories to tide you over until we launch Season Four in April. We’ve got a dirty dog that led to love on a camping trip, a couple that learned to meet in the middle over the course of two decades and a middle school relationship that persevered against all odds. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

Marriage is full of challenges and tiny victories. Five years ago our host Jo Piazza decided to test her new marriage to her husband Nick by climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro as a couple. It was harder than either of them expected and had an ending no one saw coming. Jo talked about the trip and the climb on iHeart Radio's new podcast “A Way to Go,” from iHeart and Fathom. We’ve got a little bit of that conversation for you right now, hope you enjoy. For the full episode, please go to: https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/awaytogo Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

Climbing Kilimanjaro

At the age of 26, Katherine Wolf nearly died from a brainstem stroke. She was newly married and the mother of a six month old baby boy. The doctors performed a rare and complicated 16 hour surgery and removed 60% of her cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls most motor function and many essential nerves. Katharine spent two months in a coma, When she woke up she had to relearn how to breathe, talk, eat and move her body. From then on Katherine and her husband Jay were birthed into a new couple and a new family. They’ve had to redefine absolutely everything. But what they’ve come to realize is that on the other side of suffering, you learn that some things are better because of what you've been through. No one wants terrible pain, or suffering, or tragedy to come, but it can have this tremendous effect of informing the rest of your life. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

The New Good

Buffy and Pat’s son Kevin passed away from a brain tumor when he was just nine years old. That was six years ago. The death of a child isn’t something you get through. It isn’t something that goes away. It’s something you live and grow with every day. And that’s...what Buffy and Pat are doing. They've walked through fire and come out alive but forever changed. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

Never Stop Using His Name

Every couple we know has this fantasy of quitting their corporate jobs and finding a way to make a living doing what they love. But for most people it’s just that— a fantasy. Rich and Sara Combs have turned that fantasy into a reality. They quit their big jobs in San Francisco to renovate and rent out two properties down in Joshua Tree. Now they’re working on a second property, an inn right outside of Saguaro National Park in Arizona. They’re living the dream. But is the dream as good as everyone imagines it is? Is the reality ever as good as the fantasy? Fixing these houses has taught them how to be comfortable when things go wrong...whether it’s with a home or with their relationship.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

We'll Always Work Through It

Neal had a classic mid-life crisis on his 50th birthday. He bought a Harley, got his first tattoo, had an affair with a women twenty years his junior. But there’s more to the story than that. He’d gotten caught up in a bad business deal and was sentenced to four years in a federal state prison. He and his wife Allison got divorced. Allison was left to sell their home during the housing crisis since the great depression, take care of her ailing father and get their kids off to college. But that’s just the beginning of Allison and Neal’s story. The real story is how they found their way back to one another. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

He's Still My Guy

Last year Brad and Matt Kirouac gave up their very comfortable and secure lives in a beautiful loft in a gorgeous neighborhood in Chicago to live as nomads in an RV with the goal of visiting all of 61 the country’s national parks. Their new lifestyle challenges every single part of their relationships and they’ve been forced to dig deep to see if they really want to be in this together. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

The Nomads

Military wives are taught early on how to live without their soldiers. During their two decade marriage Anna and Mike have moved 12 times for Mike’s job as a lieutenant colonel in the army, all while giving birth to and raising seven kids. Sometimes Mike is with the family but sometimes he’s deployed far away in a war zone, place where it’s difficult to talk, places where Anna is often scared for his life. The distance makes you realize what's important very quickly. This is a story of how Anna makes their family work without Mike and how they've found ways to build a life together all over the world while Mike serves his country. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

Our Soldier

This is a story of boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl, marries girl. But then…..girl falls in love with another girl. And boy….well he stays in the picture. We hear a lot more about polyamory these days than we used to, but we don’t hear enough about how it actually works, how a family can be crafted with three loving and consensual adults. Today Alex, Paul and Jackie live together and raise a child together and they want the world to know that this is their normal. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

Just the Three of Us

Erica and Spencer met in an online widow support group. They’d both recently lost their spouses. Within months they were married and working to blend their eleven kids together into one family. Today’s episode is about blending families, learning to parent someone else’s children and finding ways to honor the spouse that came before you. It’s never going to be easy or perfect. It’s a journey and a beautiful one. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

What Came Before

After Alexei Brovarnik received a K-1 visa he had 90 days to marry his American fiance Loren. The entire engagement and lead up to their wedding was captured by the reality television show 90 Day Fiance on TLC. For better or worse they lived the beginning of their marriage under a media microscope, enduring constant criticism and judgement and watching their most intimate moments, good and bad, played back to them on the small screen and the Internet. It’s so easy to judge someone else’s marriage, especially a marriage that we’re watching unfold on television, like a soap opera. But Loren and Alex have no regrets about putting it all out there for everyone to see. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

The 90 Day Fiances

Join host Jo Piazza as she delves into the hilarious, heartbreaking and inspiring stories of couples of all kinds who’ve soldiered through unimaginable circumstances, and after the longest of days, still want to wake up next to one another in the morning.

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