Lane and I met on a dating application.

The name of the application is called Hinge. My friend from New York City recommended it to me at the start of 2015.

“I’ve been on a couple of good dates,” she said. “They have jobs. Real jobs.”

It’s sad to think that a ‘real job’ is a thing you find yourself looking for in a partner these days.

 

I downloaded the application on the floor of her living room on January 1. We’d just come back from a diner where we mapped out our year and I was feeling lucky and ambitious. I set my search settings to Atlanta and I started to scroll.

Mind you, I was in the middle of thick depression when I downloaded that dating app. My feelings and emotions were a jumble of really high and rock-bottom low that winter. Me being on a dating application was probably not the healthiest choice and I soon realized that a couple of days later. I deleted the application.

It’s not that I didn’t want to meet someone. I just knew in my gut that the words I needed to repeat to myself were, “not now.” Not now. Get healthy. Get happy. Get sane. Get better. Get “anything” before you start believing a guy with a full set of teeth and a real job is going to fix you.

I ignored the idea of that dating application for another nine months.

 

My first year out of college, I wanted to be in love. I thought I would be one of those people who got married young. I’m happy God didn’t have the same plan for me because my husband would have starved to death in wrinkled clothing during our second month of marriage.

I don’t want to say I wasn’t in touch with reality back then but I really wasn’t. I saw everything through the eyes of a dreamer. I believed I would meet someone in a romantic clash of serendipity. I wrote this really whimsical blog post about how I didn’t support online dating because I believed I would meet someone in a more unexpected fashion. Somewhere like aisle seven of the grocery store where we would bump carts and then exchange awkward words before he asked me to dinner.

I remember getting a blog comment from a reader who was offended by my piece. She told me she and her husband had met through online dating and there was nothing less magical about their story than the idea of two people meeting in the oatmeal aisle.

 

I sat down to write this today because I know there is a stigma floating in the air about meeting online. I don’t know why the stigma exists but I think it’s because we don’t watch people in the movies meet online and fall in love. Rarely. We consume the unexpected crossings. We consume the scenes where two people end up in the same place at the same time and everything changes.

I wrote this because your love story is great and important, even if it hasn’t happened yet. You aren’t wrong to want to try out a dating application or make a profile on Match.com. That’s not crazy. You can do it. But I wouldn’t be a good friend to you if I didn’t ask you a more important question: is this what you need right now? Are you healthy and are you ready?

Relationships change things. Hearts are fragile. Humans are no different when you fall in love with them– no matter if we meet in a grocery store or in a chatroom. Make sure you are ready enough to bring your heart into the relationship before you swipe right.

 

Love stories happen everywhere. It’s important to note that. If we have a scale of what’s more magical and what’s more deserving of our applause then we are missing the point of love. The most beautiful thing that happens in a love story is two people choosing one another. I don’t think we should care how that happens, or where that happens, so much as we should be expectant and praying that it happens for the people we love. We should be more invested in people’s daily fights to keep one another, not the “how we met” story.

We become entitled. We get jealous and it’s hard to want good things for people when we haven’t yet seen them for ourselves. I think we miss the point we start to believe life is a story all about our expectations being met.

 

 

I remember one of the former contestants on the Bachelor telling a story about how she met her last boyfriend on a plane. It was such a serendipitous moment. For years, as they dated, she kept waiting to fully fall in love. She wanted things to click. She said she finally left.

“I was always waiting for my feelings to catch up to story of how we met,” she said.

Maybe it’s more dangerous that we ask the question so often, “How did you two meet?” Maybe it’s not important that you meet on a train or a bus or a coffee shop. Maybe the better question we could ask people is, “How do you stay in the fight for one another? How do you keep your love fresh? How do you sacrifice?”

 

Lane and I met on a dating application and I think the most important detail of the story is that my heart was ready to meet someone. My heart was ready to treat someone not like a crutch or a savior, but an equal. I knew what I wanted.

Fireworks never exploded in the sky to spell out LANE in big letters. He didn’t march up to my door with a bouquet of sharpened pencils. I made the first move. We talked for a week on the application before Lane asked for my number. I remember the messages were the best part of my day. In a week of traveling to three cities and watching my brother get married, this stranger on the other side of the screen was the best part of my day. He asked questions. He sent back paragraphs. We’d wait until 8 or 9 at night and then write back to one another until we fell asleep at night.

We found out, in piecing together our histories, there were a dozen or so places where we should have met already. We attended the same parties. We knew the same people. We lived 8 minutes apart. We were in the same places at the same time and I am still convinced I served that boy a corn dog and a coke at one of the parties. I just didn’t notice him.

“You wouldn’t have liked the girl you met if you met me any sooner,” I am confident enough to say to Lane. I needed to change before I was ready for a love story. I needed to become someone different and I am proud to say I did the hard work required of me.

 

It doesn’t matter where we meet. We are silly and insane if we get caught up in the “how we met” story that we forget the rest of the details. What will matter in 5 years from now is how we thought to build one another. How we thought to lay our hearts on the line. How we showed up. How we emboldened each other. How we met? That’s just the first part of the story. If you ask me, it hasn’t even gotten good yet.