A Real Story

By January I’d sent probably 300 opening messages across two apps and had exactly six first dates to show for it, most of them over by the check. I wasn’t bitter exactly, just tired, so I deleted both apps and, out of pure boredom, showed up to a free Tuesday-Thursday run club that met outside a bike shop at 6:30am. I am not a morning person. I am not even really a runner. I mostly went because the flyer promised bagels afterward.

The guy who eventually became my boyfriend was the one always stuck pacing the slow group with me, both of us gasping through the same 11-minute mile while faster people disappeared ahead. Third week in, he told me his dog had eaten an entire stick of butter off the counter the night before and he’d spent two hours googling whether that was an emergency vet situation. That’s the whole story of how it started — not a bio, not a bar, just a guy talking about his idiot dog while we jogged past a Waffle House at dawn.

We didn’t exchange numbers until week five, and only because he needed someone to hold his phone during a group photo and mine was already out. The actual first date was getting bagels after run club like we always did, except we sat down instead of eating standing up, which somehow felt like a huge escalation. Nothing about it was efficient the way an app is efficient — it took over a month of showing up at an ungodly hour before anything happened. But five months later I still hate mornings and I still go, because now there’s a very specific, very good reason to.