I am the luckiest man on Earth – a lot of guys say that, but I think I can actually prove it. The story of how Jessica and I met is a combination of ordinary luck mixed with the type of magical happenstance seen in a Hallmark-channel movie. To begin with, I’ll admit that I’m somewhat introverted and not prone to putting myself in situations outside of my comfort zone. Downloading a dating app called Bumble would thus qualify as being out of the norm for me. But after several of my friends met their spouses through similar means, I gave it a shot and eventually matched with Jessica and struck up a conversation (she must have been mesmerized by my food and travel photos and inadvertently matched me back). Now anyone who’s spent any meaningful time with Jessica knows that she has a level of genuine kindness and humor that is infectious, so it’s understandable that I was immediately captivated by musings such as “I’ve never met a fry I didn’t like.” At this point Jessica and I were at the point where meeting each other would make sense. However, I was at a personal and professional crossroads that led me to a significant life change; specifically, I resigned from my job, sold my house, and decided to travel abroad before figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. Knowing that I was about to embark on this path, I decided to tell her what I was going to do and why we shouldn’t meet. Still, I gave her my number before deleting my Bumble account and told her to text me back just in case I returned to Charlotte one day. Amazingly, she sent me her number. I’m still grateful; I’m still amazed. Seven months later I found myself spending the month in California deciding what to do next. I had a few job offers in different cities but ultimately decided to move back to Charlotte. Here’s where the story turns even more interesting: At a pier in Redondo Beach I quite literally lost my phone in the ocean and had to purchase a new one. It turns out that my old phone saved new contacts in one of two ways: 1) directly to the phone itself or 2) to the “cloud” using my gmail account. Therefore, when I turned on my new phone only the contacts saved to the cloud were imported to my new device. Out of all of my old contacts, only 20 – 25 were uploaded to the cloud… and one of them was Jessica’s (saved as “Jessica – Bumble”). To say that it felt like a sign would be a tremendous understatement, so I vowed to reach out to her when I returned back to Charlotte. Roughly two months later, I sent Jessica a text wondering if she remembered me and if she’d like to finally meet. To my utter shock and delight she said yes to both questions; so here I am, feeling quite literally like the luckiest man on Earth.