Our Story

The Beginning

Four years. I had been with him for four years. We'd met when I was 18 and had been dating ever since. It was hard to believe that I was finally free of him and all of his emotional manipulation. Him and his family. They were all manipulative and controlling. It had just taken me far too long to figure that out.

I lay in my bed most of the day after the break up. I had worked from 8am until around 3pm. After that, my time was my own, and I had nothing better to do. I fidgeted with the blankets on my bed and tried not to think about going to see him. I knew he would still be at work at that time of day. I didn't eat all day. I wasn't hungry. I just laid there, and eventually I fell asleep. I woke up four hours later and still didn't feel hungry.

One of my college friends had texted to see how I was doing. She'd seen things leading up to the breakup, and she knew what had happened between the two of us. I told her that I had slept and hadn't eaten because I wasn't hungry. She told me that she had "accidentally" made too much spaghetti for her and her roommate if I wanted to come have some. She knew me too well. I loved spaghetti. I couldn't say no; not to spaghetti. "I'll be there in twenty minutes," I texted her back.

That was where my moving on began. Some people could argue that I'd moved on from my ex long before we actually broke off the relationship. I hadn't been emotionally attached to him for months prior to that December.

The hardest days to get through were the holidays. I worked on Christmas Eve and Christmas evening, so my friend on campus asked me to her apartment to spend Christmas morning with her family. That helped a little bit, and a few days later I went up North to visit my family for a few days. I'd told my mom and dad about the break up when it happened, so no one asked about it. The last day of my trip, my ex texted me trying to meet up get his belongings back. I told him I was up North and he started to try and be controlling again. I muted his number and ignored the rest of his attempts at contact.

My best friend, who lived up North by my family, asked me to go out one evening to catch up. It was nice. We hung out, laughed, talked through some stuff that had been bothering me, and had a good time overall. Near the end of the night, she asked if I had thought about dating again. As it had been less than two weeks, I told her probably not.

"Maybe you should look into online dating." I rolled my eyes at her suggestion. She'd been trying the online dating thing for a couple years and it had only just paid off in an actual relationship with a decent guy. "I'm serious," she insisted. "You said yourself that you work too much and go to school, so dating is hard. So why not let a dating app do the work for you and you just have to find a day here or there to go meet someone?"

"That's not really my style," I told her.

Two days after I returned to St. Louis, I texted her on New Years Eve at 10:30pm from my recliner in my lonely little apartment. "Hey, what was the dating app that you used to meet your boy?" She responded a couple minutes later with a list of different apps she had tried and the varying degrees of success she had had with each one.

After scrolling through the list, I settled on the most recent one that had actually worked for her. I downloaded the app, created a profile, and started answering some of the questions to match me to a potential person. An hour or so later, I got a message from someone on the app wishing me a Happy New Year.