A Real Story

I downloaded Happn mostly out of boredom during a slow month at my old job, the kind where you refresh your phone for no reason every ten minutes. What I didn’t expect was to see one guy’s profile pop up over and over, always tagged as “crossed paths” near the same intersection, always around 8:10 a.m. Turns out we were both catching the 71 bus outside a laundromat in Logan Square, standing about four feet apart every weekday and never once making eye contact like normal Chicago commuters.

I liked his profile after the fourth time the app pinged me, half expecting nothing, because who actually messages back on Happn. He matched within the hour and sent one line: “You’re the one in the green coat who always has earbuds in and looks personally offended by mornings.” That was accurate enough that I laughed out loud on the bus, which is its own kind of small miracle.

We texted for two days before either of us admitted we’d literally been standing next to each other this whole time, then agreed to just talk in person the next morning instead of being weird about it over the phone. He bought me a coffee from the cart by the stop, we missed our bus on purpose, and I showed up to work forty minutes late with a story my coworkers didn’t believe until I showed them the app.

We’ve been dating for about a year now, and I still take the 71 even though neither of us needs to anymore, mostly because it feels like the scene of the crime in a good way. Happn gets a lot of side-eye for being the “stalker app,” and I get why, but for us it just meant the algorithm noticed something we were both too polite to.