A Real Story

I’d deleted Hinge twice before this. Both times I got tired of matches who just said “hey” and vanished. So when I saw a guy’s answer to “the worst advice I’ve ever received” — he wrote “my dentist told me flossing is optional, and now I have three cavities” — I almost scrolled past because it was so dumb. But I commented on it instead of liking it, something like “your dentist should lose their license,” and he wrote back within an hour asking if I was a hygienist doing a wellness check.

We texted for four days before meeting, mostly about food, because his other prompt was about being convinced cereal counts as dinner. I picked the place, a ramen spot near my apartment that’s always too loud to have a real conversation, which in hindsight was a terrible choice for a first date. He showed up twelve minutes late because he’d circled the block twice looking for parking, and apologized so much I told him to stop before I started feeling bad for him.

The date itself wasn’t smooth. We had to shout over the guy next to us who was clearly on a date going much worse than ours, and he knocked his water glass into my lap around minute forty. But he laughed at himself immediately instead of getting weird about it, grabbed a stack of napkins, and kept talking like nothing happened. That’s the part I remember most — not the ramen, not even the conversation, just how unbothered he was by his own mess.

Four months in now, and he still brings up the flossing thing every time I complain about a dentist appointment. I’ve stopped being embarrassed that a joke about cavities is basically the origin story of my relationship.