A Real Story

I’d had Facebook Dating installed for probably four months before anything happened. Mostly it showed me guys from my hometown in Ohio that I graduated with, which felt less like romance and more like a high school reunion nobody asked for. Then one Tuesday it surfaced a profile for a guy named Rob, and under his photo it said we were both in a group called Cincinnati Paddlers, which I’d joined during a pandemic kayak phase and completely forgotten about. His profile had a photo of him mid-capsize in the Little Miami River, laughing, gear everywhere. I screenshotted it and sent it to my sister before I even opened the chat. That’s how confident I was this was going somewhere. Turns out I was right for once. I messaged him something dumb about how at least he went down with style, and he wrote back within ten minutes with a story about losing his phone in that exact river the summer before. We spent two days trading paddling disasters before he asked if I wanted to actually get on the water with people who don’t fall in as much. First date was a Saturday morning group paddle, which took all the first-date pressure off because there were six other people around and a golden retriever in a life vest. We talked more on the drive back to the put-in spot than we had the entire time we were in the kayaks. The thing that got me was how normal it felt, like we’d been introduced by a mutual friend instead of an algorithm, because in a weird way we had been. We’ve been together for a year and a half now and he still has that capsizing photo saved somewhere, which he refuses to delete no matter how many times I ask.