I want to be very clear about something before we begin: I was not on the apps.
I said I was done and I meant it. After Jake — and if you missed the Jake issue, please go read it immediately, I’ll wait — I made a promise to myself and to this newsletter and to my own nervous system that I was stepping back from the chaos of app-based romantic pursuit. I kept that promise. I have been living my life. I bought a house. I have been getting settled into my upgraded existence. I have been, by every reasonable measure, minding my business.
And then Edward flew in from New Jersey.
Let me back up. There is an app — not one of the major ones, not one you’ve heard of, not one I’m going to name here because it is genuinely difficult to use and absolutely overrun with bots. I found it because it caters to people who, like me, did not fall for the propaganda of the covid era. People who think about health and wellness and what we put in our bodies with a certain level of intention. My people, theoretically. In practice: a lot of people who are not my type and also possibly several fake profiles from eastern Europe.
I had been chatting with Edward last October. He seemed nice. He saw the world the way I do — health, wellness, skepticism of systems that profit from keeping people sick. He lived in New Jersey which I mention only to explain why I was not taking it seriously. The conversation stalled the way app conversations do, which is to say naturally and without drama, and I forgot about him entirely and went on about my life.
Then in the same week I pulled Jake off of Facebook Dating — a sentence I cannot believe I just typed — I happened to check this clunky, bot-riddled app for the first time in months. There was a message from February. Edward, asking if I’d like to chat sometime. A phone call or something.
I shot back a “yea, let me know what works” and never checked for a response.
I forgot about him again.
This is important context for what happens next.
It was a Wednesday evening. My favorite double of the week. I was setting up the studio, fully in my element, when a man walked in with the specific nervous energy of someone who has made a decision they are no longer entirely sure about. I asked if he’d ever done hot yoga before. He said it was his first time. I chalked the nerves up to first-timer dread — we get a lot of that — assured him he would survive, and sent him to set up in the back of the room.
One of my regular yogis came out to the desk right before class. She told me the new guy seemed nervous and had asked her whether he should be wearing sweatpants.
Reader, he was wearing sweatpants.
She had steered him toward shorts. We giggled about how he was about to get absolutely humbled by the heat. This is, I want to be clear, a completely normal Tuesday. Wednesday. Whatever. This is just yoga.
About fifteen minutes from the end of class I opened the studio door — something I do when the room is particularly juicy and my people need a little motivation to finish strong. The new guy stood up and started walking toward the exit. Without thinking I said, loudly, to the entire room: “The open door is not an invitation to leave.” He turned around and got back on his mat. He finished class. He stayed for the second one too — the Yin, which is slower and gentler and a very well earned change of pace after the inferno he had just survived.
I will be honest: I had completely forgotten he existed by the time I started cleaning the hot room.
He showered. I cleaned. He emerged from the men’s locker room freshly showered and dressed well — which I noted — and waited in the lobby while I went to shower myself. I came out to find him sitting there, phone in hand, having already pulled up a nearby spot to take me.
He had a plan. Edward always had a plan, it turned out.
“Do you recognize me?” he asked.
I did not.
“Please don’t be mad,” he said.
And there it was — the sentence that makes every red flag in your entire nervous system stand at attention simultaneously. I watched his face very carefully as he explained that we had matched on the app. That he had looked into me. That when the conversation stalled and things weren’t really progressing in the chat, he had decided to fly down, take my class, and meet me in person.
He had pre-registered for both classes. This was not an impulse. This was an itinerary.
I stood there for a moment in the lobby of my own studio, keys in hand, doing a rapid internal threat assessment. And here is what I landed on: I was not actually creeped out. Maybe a little. But mostly — and I surprised myself with this — I was impressed. I am always saying out loud that men do not approach women anymore. That nobody shoots their shot. That the algorithm has replaced the grand gesture and we are all worse off for it.
And here was Edward. Who had flown from New Jersey. In sweatpants. With a backup flight booked in case I screamed at him to leave. Which, to be fair, I had already kind of done once that evening.
That takes either enormous bravery or a particular flavor of insanity. I was not yet sure which. I said: “Well. I guess we should get a drink somewhere.”
He had already pulled up Clyde’s.
Edward works for an airline. He has been at the same job for sixteen years. He has a wonderful relationship with his family. He thinks about health and wellness the way I do — with intention and a healthy skepticism of systems that profit from keeping people unwell rather than healing them. Over a giant pretzel and a MAGarita — mezcal, skinny, spicy, for the uninitiated, my signature and non-negotiable — we talked about all of it. He is a genuinely nice man. Thoughtful. Present. Brave in the specific way that people who know what they want tend to be.
He had planned to fly straight back to New Jersey if things went badly. He missed that flight somewhere around the second drink.
At the end of the evening I asked where he was staying. He told me he had a good friend who lived nearby — a DC native, as it turned out, easy and warm in the way that DC natives tend to be with each other. I drove him there. I felt good about that. I had made a real connection with a genuinely good person and he was not sleeping at the airport waiting for the 6am flight back to Trenton.
Before he got out of the car he asked me something.
“If I could put you on a flight tonight — anywhere — where would you go?”
I said Rome, because I always say Rome.
He pulled up the available flights on his phone. Rome was open.
Here is what I have been sitting with since Wednesday: Edward did everything right. He showed up — literally, from another state, in sweatpants, with a backup plan. He survived the heat. He waited. He had already found the bar. He missed his flight gracefully. He pulled up Rome like it was nothing.
And my gut told me, somewhere over that giant pretzel, that he is a wonderful person who is just not my person. Not because of anything wrong with him. But because the fit wasn’t there — and I have learned, slowly and at some cost, that the absence of wrongness is not the same as the presence of rightness.
I keep coming back to the Rome thing though. Not because I am reconsidering Edward — I am not — but because of what it means that he asked. That he had the flights pulled up before I answered. That for one completely unhinged Wednesday evening in Washington DC, Rome was genuinely available and a man I had forgotten about twice was sitting in my passenger seat making it feel possible.
I am not on the apps. I meant that and I still mean it.
But I think the universe was trying to tell me something on Wednesday. Not about Edward specifically. About showing up. About the grand gesture. About the fact that love — or whatever comes before love, the possibility of it, the reaching toward it — still exists out there in the world beyond the algorithm.
It flies in from New Jersey sometimes. It pre-registers for the hard class. It waits in the lobby freshly showered with a bar already pulled up on its phone.
It asks you where you’d go if you could leave tonight.
Rome is always open. The question is whether you’re ready to go. I am working on being ready. On the mat and off it. Mostly. Ish.
Edward made it back to New Jersey. Two days later I got a text. His dad was in the hospital and he was dealing with that — but he still found a moment to message me two words that I think about more than I expected to: ‘Holy soreness Maggie.’ He is a good man. I hope he finds his Rome — with someone who is ready to board the flight.
— Maggie
Centeredish | Hot yoga teacher. Single in DC. Ish.