We don’t know when love will strike and who we’ll end up falling in love with, especially when you go on a date with someone living on the other side of the world. But for Linda Marigliano it didn’t take long to realise she’d met the love of her life when she met her partner, Magnus.
One of her best friends Nina had suggested the two of them would hit it off, so she agreed to meet Magnus when she was visiting LA.
“I managed to go on a date with him when I was in LA four-and-a-half years ago,” Marigliano says. “And after spending a few days together we were like, 'oh! Now we’ve done it!' And that was kind of it. After four or five days together I came back to Sydney.”
The two of them have been in a long-distance relationship ever since, with each of them taking turns to fly across the world to see each other.
“We both have really strong careers that we care about, so it wasn’t a matter of ‘oh I’ve met someone that’s really special I’m going to quit my job and go over there' straight away. We are both just cautious people. We thought let’s just do things right.”
Cut to a few years later.
“2020 was going to be our year,” Marigliano says. “We’d celebrated our three year anniversary and we’re going to be living in our house together that we’d already been half setting up.
“I went to do a job in Japan in March 2020 and then came back to see family for what I thought was a couple of weeks and was meant to be back [in LA] in April. And then everything changed.”
Rather than living in LA, in the house she’d been setting up with Magnus, the pandemic meant that Marigliano had to remain in Australia, which also meant moving back in with her parents, putting an indefinite delay on the plans they had made.
“We thought, wow this would be such a beautiful step forward in our relationship that when we live together we can think about having a family,” Marigliano says.
“[Having kids] is nothing I prioritised or dreamed about. But I thought I’d like to have the option to have kids. Egg freezing gives you the option without the option being taken away from you.”
She wasn’t the only one in her social circle thinking about egg freezing. “A couple of my friends who are the same age as me, in my mid-30s, had kind of been thinking about it. It would come up at dinner and then the conversation would move on because at some point someone would become uncomfortable… But that is fair enough because it is hard to think about.”
A friend mentioned a doctor who’d come recommended, which is how Marigliano started her journey of freezing her eggs, which she documents in the latest episode of her podcast Tough Love.
“It took me out of the dinner party conversations and into something actionable. For me, I like actionable things. I like having a problem and solving it.”
It was one important thing in her life that she could have control over.
“For Magnus it was like we have to be a bit helpless in this situation… We have to be patient through this. OK, I had to make peace with the fact that I had to move back to Sydney and live with my parents… But when it came to thinking about becoming a mum, this [Covid] had taken away the plan I had to have a child in the next year or two. But this [egg freezing] was one way that I could put this on a to-do list and I could get it done and draw a line in the sand.”
But this [egg freezing] was one way that I could put this on a to-do list and I could get it done and draw a line in the sand.
Magnus was with her every step of the way. “Every blood test, every ultrasound, every consultation, he was with me on the phone the moment I walked out of the clinic… It was as close as we could be, which felt really nice.”
The procedure itself, Marigliano says was relatively smooth and she had no side effects.
Once her eggs were taken out, “they were put in a freezer and then you pay rent to keep them there.”
The procedure is of course more complex than that and Linda’s doctor who was with her every step of the way goes into more detail around the process in episode five of Tough Love.
“The day I got it done I felt so relieved and so proud and Magnus was the same. You know what, it was not a big deal… I want more couples and people who want families to know – it [egg freezing] shouldn’t be seen as something scary, it should be seen as a positive way of planning and taking that control back and leveling that playing field a little for you.”
Radio and TV host Linda Marigliano's podcast Tough Love, audio-journals life’s toughest love lessons in real-time, as she navigates the challenges women face together but generally experience alone.
