We were both in grad school at the time I had been hired to wait tables at a restaurant and had just gotten a tutoring position at the campus writing center. We instantly had not one but two jobs together. She initially thought I just wanted to be friends and didn’t clue into the fact that I wanted a lot more for a couple dates. I felt so attracted to not only her outer beauty but her amazing personality - and it happened almost instantly. I always felt a little bored with other people and often couldn’t wait for dates to end. With Allie, things were totally different than anyone else I’d ever dated. I also thought she was hilarious and hung onto her every word - which she loves, because she also thinks she’s hilarious. I thought she was so cool and intriguing, and I wanted to learn everything about her. We went to an annual art festival in our city and spent hours walking around and chatting. I really did think she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, and I was so excited when we matched and quickly decided to go on a first date. I remember the first picture I ever saw of her perfectly, though. I feel like people always expect some crazy romantic story from us, but really we met on Tinder. I started to think, Hmm…maybe? Everything changed when we got drunk one night and made out at a bar. When we moved in together, we always had really great conversations, though. I felt at ease with him, but there was not even a blip of romantic interest. I remember he was nice, welcoming, funny. I met my husband and his friend, my eventual roommates, the same night. We fell into a relationship pretty quickly and got engaged two years after that. I thought it might be my now-husband calling to say he had a good time, but it was actually the other guy! Something clicked for me in that moment, and I knew I was completely over him and moving on to something better. After my date, at around midnight, my phone rang. At the time I was sort of seeing this other guy who was very hot and cold with his attention. For one, he was Canadian, and he was almost nine years older and just felt solid and mature - more relationship-minded than a lot of guys I’d met, but not in a weird, clingy way. We ended up talking for over four hours, and he just seemed different than the typical L.A. I was like, WOW, he is way better looking than I expected! I felt instantly relaxed and happy. I walked through the lobby and into the bar, sort of looking around for a guy sitting alone, and then in the back room I saw a dark-haired man on a bench looking up at me with sort of a sly look on his face. I’d been single for five years when my husband and I met for a blind date on a Sunday night at a hotel bar in L.A. From weird vibes to excitement, easy camaraderie to absolutely nothing, here’s what they told me. To get a flavor of the many shades on that spectrum, I asked women in thriving relationships what they felt when they met and started to get to know their current partners. All I can say now is that I’m no longer convinced of anything at all, except perhaps that love has about a million incarnations. We talked all the time, and he was clear about his feelings from the start - quite a different trajectory than the spark-filled phenomenon I’d replicated many times before him.īefore all this, I’d toyed with a lot of personal theories about “the spark” - whether great love can exist without it, if it was a manufactured product of my anxious attachment system, etc. He never made me wait or wonder, though, for the record. Too shy to do anything about it, I didn’t make my interest known for another six months after that. I came to recognize his character, emotional intelligence and kindness even later.Īfter we met, I didn’t see him again in person for a year. I didn’t start to fall for him until much later though, through a series of stories my friend Jordan told me about him from when he used to live in Ann Arbor and dated her roommate. But I do remember that he made me laugh in spite of myself and that a seed of something was planted that night. Maybe anger and passion are similar enough emotions…I don’t know. I also noticed he had the well-timed wit that all my womanizing exes had shared. I felt irrational anger toward him for showing up to town and (innocently, unwittingly) enabling one of my close guy friends to get back with a toxic ex - just before he was set to fly back to the West Coast and completely avoid the aftermath. He first time I met my boyfriend, I felt absolutely nothing.
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