Transatlanticism. This is the 165th post on this blog. My wife Katie read every single one of them, correcting my Denglish phrases, adding Oxford commas, and giving me valuable feedback from her unique perspective as a certified genetic counselor with a research background in epilepsy genetics. Today is Katie’s birthday, and I would like to dedicate this post to her by saying thank you and I love you. Katie and I met at the Epilepsy Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia. In 2007, while driving around Lake Alexandrina in South Australia on a road trip, we listened to Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie. This song became emblematic of our relationship for the years to come while we maintained a long-distance relationship between the US (Katie’s Masters in genetic counseling) and Germany (my residency in Kiel). In 2009, after two years of living on different continents, we were finally reunited. If you were to ask me about the main lesson I took away from this time apart, I would sum this up in a single sentence: “Relationship quality equals bandwidth”. This post is a reflection on why quality matters in the communication between geographically separated individuals. It won’t be a purely romantic post. That’s not my style, and that’s ok with Katie – she has corrected this post, as well. Continue reading