It ended, as a love story should, happily ever after. I thought I'd reassure you in advance, because my road to happiness in the Faroe Islands was paved with cancelled flights, red tape and a golf ball with a bad toupée.

It started at the University of Prince Edward Island, which was hosting a conference on small island states. All the major microstates had representatives there: the Åland Islands, Iceland, the Isle of Man. I'm a journalist and was doing a series for BBC Radio on the world's smallest countries. Radio budgets being what they are, it made more sense for me to go to Charlottetown and conduct interviews there than to try to visit all the world's microstates.

I first saw him at the opening reception. He was an economic policy adviser from the Faroe Islands, a set of 18 small islands (population 48,000) isolated in the mists of the North Atlantic between Iceland and Norway. And he was very cute. I made my way across the crowded room, bursting with questions that had suddenly occurred to me about Faroese fiscal imbalances. I caught his eye, and he glanced at my badge. The "M" for media led him to jump to a fortuitous conclusion. He assumed it stood for Malta, and it just so happened he was doing a comparative industrial- policy study that included the Mediterranean island.

He kept talking to me even after he realized that I knew almost nothing about Malta. A few weeks later, I travelled to the Faroes for a visit. After flying over many long kilometres of empty seas, I found the sight of the islands from the air spectacular. Precipitous, treeless, grass-covered peaks jutted up from the dark, grey ocean and disappeared into white clouds above. From the ground, the feeling of being on a slender link between the waters of Poseidon and the storm clouds of Zeus was even stronger. It was raw and touching.

Three months after that visit, Jens Christian moved to Canada. Then, on a research trip we took to another small country, the Maldives, he proposed. We decided to get married in the Faroes. And that's when our lives got complicated.

top