- [Together] Hey guys, what's up?
- My name is Dong-In.
- My name is Farina.
- Yeah, and welcome to... - The show!
- Dorina. - Oh no.
- I think it's Dorina. - It's Dorina, yeah.
I think so. - I think it's better than the other alternatives.
- Definitely, but...
Yeah.
- Fongrina. (laughs)
- But people told me it's a butter brand.
- Yeah, it's fine.
- It's fine. - It's fine with me.
- It's all right.
Recently we had our fifth anniversary.
- Five years already. - We decided to talk a bit about our time from the beginning until now.
- A lot of stuff happened.
- Definitely. - Five year's a long time and we've been through a lot,
a lot of development, I think.
- Even though we made some videos about this topic already, we wanted to make an updated version, for those of you who are new to the community.
- The first video we did was a "how we met" video and it was actually my first appearance on the channel.
Back then I was really shy. - You were.
- So young.
Now I'm a man.
- Okay, let's go to the beginning where it all started.
How did we meet?
We met online.
We met on Facebook, right?
- We met on Facebook.
We were both a part of a Facebook group.
- It was a pug lover group.
- Yeah, we both had a pug at that time.
Farina had Bob, I had my beloved pug, Andrew.
- Andrew. - Andrew.
Rest in peace, my friend.
That's why I was recommended to you, right?
And she wrote to me first. - Yeah, no, no, no, no.
I didn't write you first, but I added you.
- Oh yeah, she added me. - Because I thought,
"Oh my God, his profile looks cute."
- She just added me. - His pictures looked cute.
Everything looked cute.
I thought, why not just add him, right?
- And I thought she was fake.
You had a pretty profile pic,
but you didn't have any friends.
(laughing)
- I think to this day, I only have 150 friends or so, on Facebook.
Just a few selective people. - "Sup girl?"
I was really smooth. - You were pretty cold in the beginning. - Yeah, 'cause I thought you were a bot. - "Who are you?"
-I thought I was getting scammed, so I was like, "who are you?"
"What do you want?" (laughing)
So after a while of Skyping and chatting,
we had our first date. - Well, not a real date.
- It wasn't a real date. - It was our first meeting.
- We lived three to four hours away from each other.
We both lived in Germany, but she was in town for like a day or two for a job,
so we met up for the first time,
and we had like... I think it was 30 minutes?
- I think it was only like 20 minutes.
- Yeah, a 20 minute frame. - Very, very short.
- I had a horrible haircut.
I just went to the hairdresser the day before,
and so I wore a baseball cap.
I was still a teenager. - You were.
I was 19 actually, at that time.
You were like... - 22, I was 22.
- She was 22.
I was waiting for her, then she came out
looking like the model,
which she was at that time.
She just looked so much more accomplished.
- It was just your imagination,
because I was very nervous as well.
- You looked so fabulous, and I was like...
So we were just walking around, talking a bit.
Did we hold hands?
- No, we didn't hold hands. - We didn't even hold hands.
We were sitting down at some point, at the bus station.
- We recreated the scene.
So I'm wearing the exact same outfit I wore that day.
- We're sitting down at the bus station.
I don't know why I was like, why, why did I do that?
I just left a space.
- A seat between us.
- I just left a seat between us.
- I was like, "are you kidding me?"
- I was like, "okay, don't get too close,
"you'll scare her, are you a creeper?"
- And then I asked you why you were sitting so far away,
and then you came closer.
I don't know why, but I was so nervous.
- You didn't look nervous at all, you look just like bored.
- And then I was panicking because we,
we didn't have any interactions, "hi."
- We were talking.
We were just talking. - "What am I gonna do now?"
And I went like this.
I put my head on your shoulder and you didn't react at all.
- No, I was just frozen in place.
(Farina laughing)
I really didn't know what to do,
'cause you looked really pissed all the time.
- No! - And you didn't talk much,
and I was just, "okay,
(dog barking)
"she hates you."
In the end, I was just really confused, and I thought,
"okay, it's all over, man."
I shook your hand.
I gave her a handshake. - "Thank you for the meeting."
- "Thank you, I hope we can stay friends."
- And I was so confused!
- We had a first real date a week after that.
She texted me, she was like,
"okay, I'd really like to meet up and have a proper date."
So we did, it was nice.
- It was really nice. - It was really nice.
- You can watch this video right here.
We recreated this first date.
- And basically after our first date, we moved together.
- Yeah.
- Pretty fast. - And now we're here.
- Yeah, so the big question,
how did we make it to stay together for five years?
- How did we make it work?
So after our first date, we officially became a couple
because we just knew,
it just clicked. - It worked.
- Yeah, that's when you moved in, right?
- Mm-hmm.
- A lot of people around me and also my family,
they were really skeptical.
- Everything just went so fast.
- We were both actually really,
we really have a hard time trusting people, right?
And we don't really open up that easily,
but because it was so easy for us to do that, we just knew.
- It was a sign. - That's right, yeah.
- So I think our main secret
for our relationship is conversation.
Whatever problem we have with each other,
or with ourselves internally, we talk about it.
- When we argue, we talk it out.
We do argue. - Everyone does.
- And we're both really stubborn people,
so we do argue but we always managed to talk it out.
I think the main point is we don't play any games.
- Right. - We don't play games
with each other. - It's important.
- That's the main reason I see other couples breaking up.
- Breaking up or struggling. - Like hiding stuff.
Our first years weren't that easy,
mainly because of financial stuff, yeah.
I was a student.
We didn't have much money. - No, we didn't.
- Yeah, and then there's Mochi, our dog.
- Oh, Mochi, right.
We adopted him in 2016, I think.
We had to because he was so lonely at the shelter
and we couldn't...
We actually visited the shelter
to just look at some of the dogs, and just feed the dogs,
and just go for a walk, and there was Mochi.
We fell in love at first sight, but we were like,
we didn't want to adopt a dog 'cause we already have one,
and it's already expensive for two broke students.
We kept an eye on him and for four months,
he didn't even have a visit.
No one wanted him.
They told us he was there for a few years already,
and we adopted him.
He has a lot of allergies and health conditions.
- His very, very expensive food.
- We spent more for Mochi's food in a month,
than for us. - Than we spent on our own.
- Than on our own, yeah.
- Dong-In supported us at that time,
working two part-time jobs.
- At that time, Farina was doing the Miss Germany thing,
and got some media attention.
People thought I was rich for some reason.
- I don't know why.
- I worked two part-time jobs, cleaning and at the cafe,
later I would be doing like, at the supermarket,
working as a cashier. - And at the waffle store.
- At the waffle store, I was selling waffles.
Waffles and ice cream.
With ice cream? - Mm-hmm.
And I had a few model and promotion jobs from time to time,
and I also worked at the airport
and did some promotion there, but we saved everything
I earned from that for our first Korea trip.
And at some point, I started the YouTube channel,
which always was a big dream of mine,
so we just wanted to give it a shot.
- At some point, the channel started growing and one video,
we talked about this before, got a lot of attention.
Yeah, basically we attracted a bunch of racist people
who were against us being together.
- It was pretty brutal.
- Yeah, it was pretty rough,
but over the years I grew kind of numb to racist comments
directed to myself.
But at that time, I was still very sensitive
about people questioning and judging our relationship,
because it's like the most important thing of my life,
and then there's some idiots coming
and legit believing that it's wrong.
- So how did we overcome it?
We just stopped looking into it
and we just dumped our phones and all social media accounts
and everything for awhile,
and realize that it's just all not real,
like with all kinds of internet hate.
- Yeah, you just have to realize what's online
mostly stays online, and once you put away your devices
and just don't look... - It's gone.
- Yeah, it's gone, but at that time,
a few of them were actually Nazis,
neo-Nazis in Germany, and that kind of scared us.
At some point we were getting paranoid.
- Yeah, and we also disabled the comment section
of this video.
It was just too much.
- I think that experience at least helped us deal
with all the internet hate,
and lies and stuff that are being spread online even today.
- Yeah. - I think it's inevitable.
It's something that comes along with being a YouTuber,
or active on social media.
That doesn't mean it's right. - No.
It's really toxic.
If you do this kind of stuff,
you should be really ashamed of yourself,
but you probably are
'cause it's like projecting your own insecurities
on other people online.
- But I think you have to realize
that they don't have any power over you.
What they say about you doesn't reflect who you are,
so it doesn't matter at all.
But I think it all helped us to become more confident.
- Care less about what others think.
- Right. - That's definitely true.
You learn that you can't necessarily
change their way of thinking, or at least it's very hard
and most likely not worth your time,
so you should spend your time and energy doing other things.
- Yeah, just proceeding with your life.
It doesn't mean that you should be blind
to constructive criticism,
but the way the internet works nowadays is people judge you
before they know you or the full story,
they just decide to hate you. - Yeah.
- And the truth doesn't actually matter to them.
- Yeah, that's right.
- Anyway, the way our channel has grown
is really overwhelming for us,
and to be able to make a living with YouTube
is like a dream come true, and we're really grateful for it.
- Yeah, definitely.
Doing all this stuff together,
'cause we built this channel together, kind of,
so we've been working together a lot.
So from the beginning of the year,
I still have other stuff going,
but I mainly focus on our business.
In case you don't know, apart from the YouTube videos,
we also go film for other companies.
Working together brings a whole lot of other challenges.
- Yeah, it's actually pretty hard
to separate work and private life,
to find the work life balance.
So Dong-In has some more business knowledge and experience,
so he has to teach me a lot.
- And it kind of hard, because no one wants their partner,
you know, their romantic, their life partner,
to be bossing them around. - Right.
- And then work and private life get messed up,
things get kinda messy.
- So we started to argue
about work related things sometimes,
and we brought these fights into our private life
until we decided that we had to change something.
For this problem, we decided to get an office.
Like I told you already in my last video,
I really hope that will help us separate work
from our private time.
- Yeah, 'cause you kind of start to,
even if we're not arguing about something,
we noticed that we talk a lot,
like 90% of our conversations were work related.
- Right.
- Even if it's like exciting news, you have to stop.
You have to know when to stop talking about work.
In the past weeks, Farina was really stressed out.
I actually dislocated my ankle
and I couldn't walk for a while.
Also, a very good friend of mine had passed away
and the funeral was actually just yesterday,
so I struggled a lot with that
and Farina had to carry all the work stuff,
and you know, take care of the household,
like walk the dogs. - The zoo, the whole zoo.
- We realized that we should probably expand our team,
get some help.
- Yeah, I think it's important to have someone else
on the team as well, so they can bring in their own opinion,
since we both can be pretty stubborn
once we both think we're right in a business decision.
- Yeah.
- But we're still working on that,
and we can hopefully finally make it happen very soon,
and finally relax a bit,
and even have weekends, maybe.
- Oh, weekends would be nice. - Oh yeah.
Yeah, we have many exciting projects
and all that stuff planned for the future.
I really hope you keep up with our journey and stay tuned
because there's a lot to come hopefully next year.
- I have a TikTok now. - Oh yeah.
You have a TikTok now.
- Follow my TikTok.
- Okay guys, I hope you liked this video.
Leave a like if you did,
and don't forget to subscribe for more videos.
I'll see you in the next one, bye!
(relaxing music)