Transcript (Jesu): Hi, my name is Jesu. I'm a journalist and I'm 24.

Joaco: I'm Joaquin. I'm a physicist and I'm 26.

Jesu: We met 5 years ago at WYD in Panama. We started dating 4 years ago, and 3 months ago we had the good luck to go to WYD in Lisbon, Portugal, and there Joaco gave me a ring, so now we're engaged.

Joaco: Why do we want to get married? It's a two-part answer and the first part is personal, for each of us, and also an answer that we discovered together. For both of us, marriage is a vocation and we feel called to it by God, each of us personally, even before we met each other. It was a gift to meet at WYD in 2019. And in our story it's clear that God wanted to take us by the hand and He loves us now and in the future.

I found my home in her. I went out of Chile for a month this year and it was challenging to be long-distance. I saw that an important part of what "home" is to me, is Jesu. It's being with her. And she's my best friend, I feel deeply loved by her and I want to love her every day, love her better. And somehow I feel that with her I'm called to be a better person, to smile every day, to keep growing, professionally and personally, and it brings me a lot of joy to think that we're going to form a family together.

Jesu: We met in that World Youth Day, which is a space to search for your vocation so, as Joaco said before, we see God's hand in that first meeting and we see that He's calling us to the next step.

Joaco: Then there's the question: why not live together? Why get married? The reason the world gives for living together now is seeing living together as a test of love. You have to live together to see if you're compatible, our lives, our problems, if we're going to fight… I honestly think that our image of this vocation is that we're called to marriage together, and living together before, to test the relationship, wouldn't give the answer we're looking for. When you walk calmly, in God's hands, with time to discover and know the other person and see what you like. All the problems that can come up after you live together are things you already know and you can work on them.

Jesu: The truth is that when I think of living together before marriage, what Pope Francis says makes a lot of sense, that we're in a throwaway culture. And I feel that putting the person I want to spend my whole life with to the test… That's not what I want to do. Love means risking yourself. The Pope said that too at WYD in Lisbon. Love takes risks. And we want that. We don't need a test or a practice run.

Joaco: Our love has changed a lot over time, from falling in love over the first few months, not wanting to be apart and all those initial questions when you're discovering the other person, their story. It's changed and at the same time stayed the same. We're deeply in love and don't want to be apart and we really enjoy the time we spend together. But we've also deepened in the relationship, like when you make a friend and the friendship gets deeper, dating is similar. You discover the other person and trust them, and they becomes custodian of that trust which you give, and share your story, your sorrows, things that are difficult, and see how they receive it, and how they receive you.

Jesu: So when we started going out, because we were dating at the start of the pandemic, there's a saying, "Love doesn't depend on circumstances: it uses them." And our first year of dating, we were far from each other, me living with my family in a different city. We saw each other 2 or 3 times that year. We grew in love from a distance, adapting to the circumstances, and not long ago Joaco went away for 6 months and I'd just started working, my first job, and it was a time of a lot of change, difficult changes, and we thought, how can we be creative in this situation and turn it around to continue building our relationship? It has always been growing and in the future... As Joaco said, our story shows us and guides us, in the present and the future.