A Real Story

I moved to Denver for a job and didn’t know a single person within 900 miles. Three weeks in, I was eating cereal for dinner alone on a Tuesday and decided that was a rock bottom worth fixing, so I downloaded Timeleft, the app that groups six strangers together for dinner once a week. I picked Wednesday, paid the small fee, got a text with a restaurant address, and showed up in the same hoodie I’d worn to sign my lease, which in hindsight was a mistake.

The table was five women and one guy, R., who spent the first ten minutes insisting Chicago deep-dish isn’t real pizza, which is objectively an insane opinion but he defended it with such committed energy that I couldn’t stop laughing. We split off from the group chat afterward, just the two of us, and kept arguing about pizza over drinks two blocks away until the bar closed and told us to leave.

I want to be clear I was not looking for a boyfriend, I was looking for one single friend so I’d stop talking to my houseplants. But R. texted the next morning asking if I wanted to “continue the pizza debate, this time with actual pizza,” and I said yes, and that was six months ago. We still fight about deep-dish. He’s still wrong.

What I’d tell anyone trying this: go in expecting nothing, wear something you don’t mind being photographed in because someone always takes a group picture, and don’t skip the app’s optional icebreaker prompts before dinner — they’re the reason R. and I even had pizza to fight about in the first place.