Ric was leaving a dating app that I had hesitantly decided to join. By nature, if anyone smiled at me, I would smile back. This was my version of not being rude. I had a distance parameter and was not interested in dating someone outside of the Houston area. Ric was tethered but not anchored to Chicago as far as his search criteria was concerned. I had met several different individuals, but none appealed to me. On a late Saturday in June Ric, days before his subscription was due to expire, sent me a smile. The next day I politely smiled back. He asked about my favorite activities and that began a conversation that hasn’t stopped. During our first interactions I thought that he could just be a long-distance friend. I was not expecting to have a long-distance relationship, to my surprise, neither did Ric. The greatest distance between two people can be an emotional one, we quickly learned there was truly little distance between us. We each shared the pace and the rhythm of our lives between each other. Ric had several family trips planned and I voiced my love of travel. Wanting to have dinner with me Ric offered to meet me in Houston while visiting newly found old friends in Baton Rouge and Dallas. At that point, "the ball was in his court" and Ric did what he so effortlessly does. Ric pointed himself in my direction and became the arrow, the target was "us". Ric took great pains to make sure that no more than 2 weeks would go by between us seeing each other, even though we talked to each other every day. Eight months later Ric asked me to marry him. I instantly said “yes” because neither of us could imagine our lives without each other.