by Cole
Cole
I flew out Labor Day weekend to see Savannah, but really I was going out there to hang with Everleigh. I wanted her to get to know me, and I wanted to get to know her. It was one thing to play games with her at The Grove or at the kiddie area of VidCon. Back then I was just a friend spending time with the cutest kid in the world and with her mom. But on this trip I was auditioning as a potential stepdad. Before I flew out for Labor Day, and throughout my dating relationship with Savannah, I talked to godly men about what it means to be a good father and how I could best build a relationship with Everleigh. I didn’t want to overthink things, but I also didn’t want to go into this halfway. I wanted to show both Everleigh and Savannah how a man who loves God loves other people. Especially because men had let them down in the past, they both needed to see that good guys, faithful guys, will love them the way God loves them. For Everleigh at three years old, love means time, lots and lots of time. So that’s what I planned to give her. Like I said, I flew out to see Savannah, but I came to spend time with Everleigh.
From the time I got off the plane until I flew back home a few days later, Ev was my focus. We played games together. We laughed together. We even went to Disneyland together because, what better place to take a three-year-old than the happiest place on earth?
Even though Everleigh was my priority, the weekend also felt very important for my relationship with Savannah. Up until this trip most of our dates had been like something off The Bachelor. Both in San Francisco and Panama City Beach, we vacationed without a care in the world. This trip was different. Now I wasn’t just dating a girl. I was also dating her daughter. This was my chance to show Savannah that I could love Everleigh like my own flesh and blood and that I wanted to be a good dad to her. A lot of guys can talk a good game. This was my time to show her I meant what I said. Being a good dad always begins with the way you treat the mom, so I did my best to show Everleigh how a man is supposed to treat a woman he loves. From the moment I arrived, I knew I had to be on my A-game, especially when it came to boundaries in my physical relationship with Savannah. If it sounds like there was a lot of pressure on me, yeah, I guess there was, but I didn’t feel it as the weekend went on. I knew I already loved both of these girls. I had fun showing it to both of them.
The weekend was also big for us in another way. Savannah and I had already made a couple of videos together. By this time we both had a lot of experience with videos and social media even though most of it was not on YouTube. Vine, where I started, had a six-second limit. Musical.ly limits videos to fifteen seconds. I always did crazy dance routines or funny stunts with my friends or family. Aside from the YouTube video I did asking Selena Gomez to the prom, most of what I had posted was just me answering questions or talking about my faith. I posted a few videos with my brother and John Stephen from our trip to California. I’d never really vlogged, where you do a video log of your life. Neither had Savannah. That was about to change.
When we were in Florida, Savannah and I planned that we would make enough videos every time we were together to be able to post them every Thursday. If we were going to be apart two weeks, we made two videos. If three weeks, then we made three videos. Since my next trip to California was all about Everleigh, we thought we’d include her in the videos we made. On the first one the three of us played a couple of games together. It sort of got out of hand, which we should have expected when we chose games called Pie Face and Wet Head. The first one involved a spray can of whipped cream, and for the other, you had to wear a cup of water on your head. When you combine those with a three-year-old, well, like I said, things got a little out of hand.
For our second video, we vlogged our trip to Disneyland. The Disneyland vlog blew up with almost two million views virtually overnight. That surprised me because I had recorded just our day at Disneyland. Nothing we did was scripted. The entire video was just Savannah and Everleigh and me riding rides and walking around the park. That’s it. But people really responded to it, and the comments were overwhelmingly positive.
That’s when it hit me.
So many YouTubers do extreme pranks or are vulgar and explicit. But here we were, a twenty-year-old guy with his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend and her three-year-old daughter going to Disneyland, and people watched it. I said something to Savannah like, “Wow, it’s amazing how this really works when we’re just being ourselves!” I never thought anyone would care to watch my life, and I still pretty much feel that way. I know that people don’t watch because I’m awesome or anything like that. I believe they watch because people genuinely want to see a good, wholesome, unique family. And while we’re chatting about this, I don’t know why God picked us to have our little family get noticed, but since He did, I figured we should see how far it might go. That Disneyland trip set the tone for the videos we started making. There’s no doubt that without it there’d be no Cole and Sav channel today.
If you wonder what our real motivation is, I’ll tell you. We don’t just want to show people our family, we want them to see Jesus in our family.
13
Long-Distance Love
Cole
School started back up for me at Troy University right after Labor Day. I moved back to the off-campus apartment I shared with three other guys for the start of my sophomore year and tried to get back into normal life. It was a lot harder than I thought. Even though I was dating someone who lived on the opposite side of the country, I still planned on finishing college with a business degree. The plan was that after college, I’d go into sales or perhaps go to grad school. Savannah didn’t change any of that. If anything, she made me even more motivated to get an education and a good job so I could support our family. If our relationship kept going the way I hoped it was, I thought I might propose to her on our official one-year anniversary, July 14, 2017, and then get married right after I graduated in Spring 2019.
My plan sounded great—until classes started and a week passed without me seeing Savannah. I might have been a business major, but the only thing I cared about was Savannah Soutas. I thought about her 24/7 and counted down the minutes until I could talk to her again, beginning with the moment I climbed out of bed. My alarm went off at 8:10. I’d hit the snooze button one or two times before waking up in a panic. I’d grab my phone, shoot Savannah a quick good-morning text, then throw on some clothes and run out the door for my 8:30 class with my backpack half off my shoulder while eating a protein bar. Some days I wore matching shoes, a lot of days I didn’t. By the time I ran into class, late, I’d be all sweaty because fall mornings in Alabama are pretty hot and humid. I’d fall into a seat and try to concentrate on my class, but all I could think about was Savannah and waiting for her to text me back. With the two-hour time difference between California and Alabama, her good-morning texts usually came around my second class. On a good day I’d sneak out my phone in class without my professor noticing. That worked only in the big auditorium classes. If I had class in a regular classroom, my phone stayed in my backpack, and I had to wait until class ended to finally get a look at it. Those classes lasted so long. I couldn’t focus. I had to read her text even if it said nothing more than Good morning, I love you. Once I knew she was awake, we texted as much as we could between my classes. I don’t even remember what we talked about because it didn’t matter. I just wanted to talk to her.
After my last class of the morning, I grabbed something quick to eat for lunch, then ran back to my apartment to see when she could FaceTime or hop on a phone call. I always wanted to FaceTime because I wanted to see her. A lot of days Savannah just wanted to talk on the phone. It took me awhile to figure out that she didn’t want me to see her until her hair and makeup were 100 percent right. A lot of days I had to wait forever to talk to her, even for just a phone call, because Savannah had a life too. She had to get Everleigh up and ready for the day, then she had to do her classwork. Hours passed when we couldn’t talk at all. I tried to do schoolwork, but every few seconds I checked my
phone to see if Savannah had texted me.
My buddies gave me a hard time because I was so obsessed with her. While I waited to talk to Savannah, I hung out with them at my apartment. We’d play some games, or I did my schoolwork, but the moment Savannah called or texted, I dropped whatever I was doing and ran into my bedroom, closed the door, and talked to her for hours. Most nights I stayed up talking to her until two or three in the morning. Then I’d go to bed and dream about her until my alarm woke me up at 8:10 and I started the whole routine over again.
Every day of the first semester of my sophomore year of college followed the same schedule. Somehow I managed to eke out decent grades that semester—I have no idea how. My major was basically Savannah Soutas. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” they say, and that’s definitely true. Savannah or I flew to visit each other every two or three weeks. Between visits was both the best and worst part of our relationship. It was the best because we missed each other so much and the feelings we had for each other grew that much stronger. We talked so much in between visits that the two of us really got to know each other. Like I said, she was basically my major. I constantly studied her, learned who she was, and loved every bit of it. Being apart hurt, and I hated it, but the way it forced us to talk about everything convinced me that a long-distance relationship would help every dating couple. You have to work at the relationship more and find ways to connect when you can’t hang out and be together.
Doing long distance also confirmed to me why God reserves sex for marriage. Sex before marriage short-circuits the process of becoming one. Everything becomes about the physical, and you never really build a relationship that can survive anything. Our marriage today is so much stronger both for waiting and for learning to love each other long distance.
Long distance was really good for us, and sometimes we still talk about it and kind of miss how being apart made our time together so much more special. Even today, we don’t take a single moment together for granted because we remember what it was like to live more than two thousand miles apart.
The absolute best part of a long-distance relationship was when we finally did get to see each other. Every time we talked we did the countdown. “Only thirteen more days. . . . Only twelve more days. . . . Only eleven more days. . . .” In the beginning we thought we could go a month without seeing each other. We’d set the date that way, but then we’d start talking about how much we missed each other, and then one of us would say, “A whole month. That’s going to take forever. I wish I could see you sooner.”
And then the other would say, “Yeah, me too. How great would it be if we changed our flight to two weeks sooner?”
And then the other would be like, “Yeah, that would be amazing.”
Then one of us would say, “You know, I don’t have anything going on in two weeks,” and then, “Neither do I,” and just like that we’d change the flights and see each other two weeks earlier than we planned. We were both very grateful that we made enough money through social media that we had the extra funds to fly back and forth like that. Not many people can do it. We constantly jumped up our timelines and did things faster than we thought we could. At first, it was our schedule for visits; then it became something much bigger.
The two of us were good about coordinating our visits because of our schedules. We couldn’t really surprise each other completely because we had to make sure everything lined up. However, Savannah did surprise me pretty early on when she flew out a day early and did it with a live broadcast on our YouTube channel. We were talking on the phone about how she couldn’t wait to see me the next day, and then I turned around, and she was right there in my apartment! Then I surprised her in California two weeks later. The funny thing is, I had planned to surprise her in California weeks before she surprised me in Alabama. I’d bought the tickets and worked out the details with one of her friends long before Sav showed up unexpectedly at my college apartment. That just tells you how in sync we were and how much we could not wait to see each other.
The hardest part of our long-distance relationship was realizing how long we were going to have to live this way. When we first started dating, my plan was to finish school before I got married, but that was going to be three years. The longer we dated, the more I knew that was not a doable plan. We needed to live close to each other. Sometime in October I said, “What if . . . what if I moved out to California in May, after this school year?”
Savannah got really excited. “Would you actually do that?”
“I think so. We’ve been doing long distance for only three months now, and honestly, it’s eating me up. I can’t focus on school. I can’t focus on anything,” I said. The two of us talked about how awesome my moving out would be, not only for our relationship but also for Everleigh. She’d never had a full-time dad in her life. With me living in California, I could spend so much more time with her. I loved that idea.
We also went on to discuss our social media following that kept growing every week. When our YouTube videos started getting more than a million views every week, I realized this might be something we would want to pursue more aggressively. It felt like an opportunity God had dropped in our laps. But making videos consistently when we only got to see each other every couple of weeks was becoming more and more difficult. Planning, shooting, editing, and promoting our vlogs ate up more and more of our time together. At first, we just shot a quick video of the two of us in the car on the way to or from the airport. While that worked for a while, the response to our more thought-out videos let me know that we had only begun to scratch the surface of what we might be able to do. But planning and producing really strong videos was time consuming. I wanted to spend that time with Savannah, not producing videos. Yet our following kept growing. I wondered how big it might grow if I pursued social media as a full-time job.
I never imagined I could make a living making videos for YouTube. When I posted those first goofy videos with my buddies on Vine, I didn’t even know it was possible to make any money from social media. We just did it for fun. Six months later I received my first check and thought, Yay, I can quit my minimum-wage job at the ice cream shop. I saved my money like crazy and devoted more and more time to what was then my part-time job. My buddies dropped out after a while. Social media takes a lot of time to do it right. I bought them out, then started working to expand the brand. I figured I’d pay my way through school with it, then get a real job after graduation. I made decent money, but it was more like a really good job for a college student, not a career path that would allow me to someday support a wife and family. The growing number of subscribers to the Cole and Sav YouTube channel made me rethink it all.
Savannah and I started praying a lot about me moving out there. The more I prayed, the more convinced I was that, yeah, I should do it. Now I had a new plan. I would finish my sophomore year at Troy and move to California after the second semester ended in May. I’d finish my degree online and work social media as a full-time job. My parents had some hesitation, but, overall, they supported my decision.
Setting an actual end date to the long-distance part of our relationship was such a huge relief. May 2017 felt so much closer than May 2019, which was when I had originally planned to move to Cali after graduating from Troy University. That relief lasted maybe two days. Then it hit me: I still had to wait seven or eight more months before I could see Savannah every day.
14
One Last Secret
Savannah
Right after the MOTION conference Cole bought me a Bible, which was the sweetest thing any guy had ever done for me. He didn’t just give me a Bible, though; he went through and circled all his favorite verses and labeled them with Post-it Notes. He also wrote out a list of verses that could help me get through different situations, like when you are down, read this one, or when you are happy, read this one, or when you are tempted, read this. No one had ever done anything like that for me. Circling all those verses had to have taken him forever.
His timing was perfect. God really touched my life through the MOTION experience. When I got home I had a real hunger for God. I wanted to read the Bible. I wanted to pray. I wanted to go to church and worship. This was all new to me. Even though I’d grown up in church, I’d never really read the Bible that much. Now I couldn’t get enough of it. Cole and I talked about the Bible together on the phone and when we were together. Obviously, Cole had a little more experience in this than I did. Everything was so new to me, so I had a lot of questions, and he was always so patient to answer them the best he could.
Cole
I had been a Christian a lot longer than Sav, and I was pretty familiar with the Bible, but wow! Some of her questions really challenged me, and it wasn’t just the questions. God used her excitement about Him to convict me because I sometimes took my relationship with Him for granted. Her excitement about God reawakened my faith, and her questions made me step up my game. I mean, sometimes she stumped me. She made me dig deep and really think about what I believed and why I believed it. I loved our times talking about God’s Word and what Jesus was doing in our lives. I still do. We grew so close through it.
Savannah
Growing as a Christian is great, but it can also complicate your life, especially when God tells you to do something you really don’t want to do. When Cole and I first met, he obviously knew I was not a virgin because of Everleigh. During our talk at IHOP, he asked lots of questions about Everleigh’s dad, and I answered every one honestly. I didn’t want to hold on to my past, and answering Cole’s questions about it was a good way of turning loose everything. Then at MOTION I wrote the words, “My past,” on a piece of paper, wadded it up, and gave it completely to God by throwing it away. I felt so free after that. My past was now His. Giving it to Him gave me the freedom to talk about it without shame, just as I have in this book. I could now thank God for my past because it let others see how awesome God’s love and grace really are. He forgave me of everything and not only gave me a fresh start, but He now uses my story to help others find freedom in Him.