A Real Story

My sister built my Match.com profile in April, right after my divorce was final, because she said I’d never do it myself and she was right. I paid for the six-month plan out of stubbornness, telling myself I’d get my money’s worth even if the whole thing was a bust. The first two dates were exactly the disaster you’d expect: one guy spent forty minutes reading me his ex-wife’s negative Yelp reviews like they were evidence in a trial, and another ordered my sandwich for me at the counter before I’d even looked at the menu, then seemed hurt when I asked for something else. By June I’d told my sister the algorithm was clearly broken and I was going to let the subscription lapse quietly. Then a message showed up from a guy whose profile mentioned he’d played the Stage Manager in a community theater production of Our Town, and instead of the usual ‘hey, how’s your week going,’ his first line referenced a photo of me at the top of Mailbox Peak and asked if the switchbacks on that trail were as brutal as they looked. Nobody had read past my main picture in two months of this, let alone noticed I was wearing hiking boots in one of them. We met at a diner near Green Lake because neither of us wanted the pressure of a real dinner reservation, and he ordered his own food and asked what I was having before he said a word about his ex. That was almost three years ago, and we split the diner bill that first night the same way we split rent now.