April 2019
Matchmaker: Your thoughts on chest tattoos?
Me: okay sign emoji
It wasn’t long after I sent that half-hearted emoji I paused the service before my date with chest tattoo guy. It wasn’t fair to anyone to invest in a relationship in DC when Dallas was a-callin’. But three months passed and I felt optimistic I could remain in DC and travel to Texas for work when needed.
June 2019
Me: Avoiding Dallas move for as long as I can. Let’s resume the service.
Matchmaker: rock on!
My extremely earnest matchmaker would go on to set me up with Sean, Lorens, and Theodore. All fine fellows, none of them fire starters.
September 17, 2019 would be my last arrangement with the matchmaking service. I was all of out patience, men (I paid a pretty penny for six matches), and time. The Dallas move could not be held at bay any longer. I was approaching 40 years and a memoir’s-worth of romantic faceplants. It was time for this old broad to pack it up and admit defeat.
Redemption is for the unworthy, but it’s also for the souls that refuse to stay down. When it comes to love, you must come and take it. It is not a thing that happens passively to you in a divinely scripted rom-com. It is the risk you actively take despite your many bruises. What follows is the comeback story that began September 29, 2019.
After some cajoling from friends, a girl walked into a Washington, D.C. pub to watch an NFL Browns game and to meet a boy that had been sold as her perfect match. She was not daunted by either improbable challenge. At 39 years old, she had an intimate knowledge of life's comical fourth quarter fumbles. She dated just about every above-average fella to the left, right, and libertarian of politics, hired a professional matchmaker to find 'the one', and still come up Sahara dry.
Unbeknownst to her friends, the girl had verbally accepted an offer to move to Dallas for a promising promotion. There was no logic to continuing the hopeless romantic search effort in D.C., but what was the harm in humoring her friends, who wanted to play matchmaker, and humoring Fate, who was good at playing coy?
The day the girl stopped producing--er trying--to find 'the one', is the day a suave, politico-turned-professional bartender from New England ruined all of her plans to write off dating in the Swamp. The boy and the girl were, indeed, a match. Fate and her friends smiled in smug satisfaction. The Browns probably lost that day but no one cared to keep score of that game. The more high-stakes game was afoot.
Instead of resigning herself to finding a lesser cowboy in Texas, they broke all of the rules of modern dating.
In two weeks, 'I love you's' were exchanged. In one month, he moved her across the country. In five months, with a pandemic nipping at his heels, the urban cowboy moved himself across the country to be with the girl fretting about a dangerously low supply of toilet paper and a Chinese virus on her doorstep.
They loved each other through multiple lockdowns, family tragedy, isolation from friendships, professional upheaval, and they only fought a little. Mostly about how to keep the girl out of the kitchen.
In fourteen months, the boy quieted her mouth (for once) and her soul, and put a ring on it.
And that is their story. The boy may tell it differently, but that is why God gives grooms receptions.
They hope you will hear his recounting of their tale soon.