A Real Story

I’d been on Hinge for almost a year in Columbus with nothing but two bad dates and a guy who ghosted after I mentioned I had a cat. Out of boredom one night I changed my location to Lisbon, where my cousin had been posting sunset photos for months, and matched with a graphic designer named Rui within twenty minutes. We messaged for three days before either of us admitted the obvious problem, and then we just decided not to make it a problem.

For the next four months we ran on his clock, not mine, because he had a day job with client calls and I worked nights at a hospital, which somehow lined up perfectly at 11pm my time, 4am his. I learned to fall asleep on video calls with my phone propped against a water bottle, and he learned that I get genuinely mean if I haven’t eaten dinner. We sent voice memos instead of texts most days because typing felt too slow for how much we had to say, and I still have 140 of them saved that I’ve never deleted.

I booked the flight to Lisbon on a Tuesday during my lunch break, $940 round trip, and told exactly one coworker in case I needed someone to know where I actually was. He met me at the arrivals gate holding a sign that just said my name spelled wrong, which somehow made me laugh so hard I cried before we’d even hugged. We’ve since figured out a rotation, three months there, three months here, and I won’t pretend the visa paperwork and the missed holidays don’t wear on us, but I also know I would never have looked twice at someone four thousand miles away if an app hadn’t literally let me pretend the distance wasn’t there yet.