I will never forget the night my parents asked me to go to Ristorante One41, which I know they would never go to on a normal Wednesday. They are more of the Zaxbys or Kikos type with the occasional celebratory dinner at Longhorn. Reluctantly, I pulled myself out of my bed, popped the cork back on my bottle of red wine, paused my juicy Lifetime movie and dumped my popcorn in the trash. They picked me up 10 minutes later. We found three seats across at the bar, and my dad asked what the special was. I was thinking, I was perhaps in a dream. Those who know Big Daddy also know he would give anything to be young enough to eat only off of the Kid's Menu. The bartender shares the fancy schmancy seabass special, and Big Daddy said "that sounds nice, I'll have that." Wildly confused, I turned my attention to my mom. She was sitting between the both of us. Mom was being cute. She was trying to pretend like this was just the way they rolled these days, perusing the menu and babbling off ideas of what she may order. As she glanced at me, she spotted a cutie over my shoulder about 10 seats down. As subtle as she tried to be, she whispered loudly "There is a REALLY cute boy at the end of the bar." I channeled my inner teenager and said "Mommm-uh stop it- shhhhh!" Anyway, I snuck in a peek, and she wasn't wrong. Of course there's a cute boy (40 year old man) at the bar the one night I am there with my parents. A few minutes later, he walked by and snuck a glance of his own at me on the way the the bathroom. I didn't see it, but mom made sure I was aware that he checked me out. About an hour went by, dad finished his fancy seabass special, which I was certain was going to cause a heart attack at time of check presentation, mom was finishing her meal, and I had successfully pushed my food around enough that mom didn't ask why I wasn't eating. Scott was sitting next to this guy who is ALWAYS at One41, so I knew him well enough to say hello. He is also one of those who the casual hello is translated in his head as "she said hi, I should go over there and sit with her for the rest of the night." Luckily this night, I had the parental buffer. Believe it or not, the buffer didn't work, so here he came. He got right out of his seat and moved to the seat next to my dad and started yapping. With this bar seat shuffle, it left me and 9 empty seats between me and Scott. Awkward. You know me, I don't normally do awkward, so I just looked at the hottie, and said "you can move down here." Though this was pre-Covid, the knucklehead moved down but still left 2 seats between us. Even I didn't know what to say here. Instead, I ordered another chardonnay, and then decided my next play. I was torn between talking abnormally loud to reinforce his dumb seat choice or talking extra quiet forcing him to come closer to truly being an active listener (which he is). I chose the latter, and he moved on over. We got to talking and he was bragging about his Delta and Marriott status blah blah blah. I gave him a quick status check and won, and then I noticed he had the Workday app. Boom- I had found conversational content. From there, we chatted pretty comfortably discovering he knew Jeddy and Jeff along with many other common connections. Within an hour, I'll say I was pretty smitten. I decided to go ahead and filter the likelihood we could actually get along without wasting time. "How old are you?" 40 "Do you smoke or do drugs?" No "Do you have a wife or girlfriend?" No "Are you lying?" No Ok, I had the information I needed. Adorably, he asked my parents if it was ok to give me a ride home after we had another drink. I knew that day, that I was going to try to push him away, but fall in love with him at the same time. Thankfully, he weathered my psycho phase storm, balanced me out and has now become the critical piece of the health and happiness of our family.