A Real Story

I’d been on the dating site for about three weeks, mostly swiping through guys holding fish or standing next to motorcycles that weren’t theirs. His profile broke every rule the site’s own blog tells you not to break: main photo was a screenshot from somebody else’s Facebook post, clearly cropped out of a group shot, half his shoulder cut off. Bio was nine words: “Divorced, own my dishwasher, still learning to use it.” I laughed out loud in a Panera. I messaged him about the dishwasher line before I even looked at his other two photos.

He wrote back four hours later, apologized for the bad photo, said his sister took it off his phone because his actual pictures were all “me looking constipated, according to my mother.” We talked for six days before meeting, mostly about a dishwasher he genuinely did not know how to load correctly — he was rinsing everything by hand first and then running it empty out of habit from his old marriage, which is either sad or hilarious depending on the day I tell this story.

We met at a diner because neither of us wanted the pressure of a real restaurant. He showed up in the actual sweater from his bad screenshot photo, on purpose, as a joke. I still have a photo of him in it from our one-year anniversary dinner, held up next to the original screenshot on my phone, both of us looking significantly less constipated. The site’s algorithm apparently thought we were an 81% match, which either means their math works or we got very lucky — I genuinely don’t know which, and at this point I don’t care.