Our journey to each other began the super traditional way in October 2017, through a dating app called Minder (Muslim + Tinder). Despite being on opposite sides of the country, Yusef in Los Angeles and Ola in New Jersey, we successfully matched on the app. Yusef’s pickup line was “Hola Ola.” We still don’t know how that worked, but it sparked our first conversations. We spoke exclusively through the app for a few months, learning more and more about each other until an extremely busy time in Ola’s senior year of college forced us to stop communicating in December. At that point, we had never had a phone call, never seen each other’s faces through Facetime or in person, nor were we friends on social media. Naturally, we both thought things were over for us until Yusef found Ola’s Facebook page and out of the blue added her in February of 2018. To our mutual relief, our conversations picked up where they left off in December through Facebook messages. We upgraded to text messages and eventually Facetime calls after Ola finally decided to give Yusef her number. We continued messaging through Facebook and sneaking around to have Facetime calls keeping things hidden from friends and family. We stayed secretive because we hadn’t met in person yet and didn’t want to create any false hopes of a potential relationship. After an additional six months of getting to know each other online, we finally made plans to meet in person. Under the guise of seeing a lifelong friend, Yusef flew to New York, and Ola took the train from New Jersey where they finally met in person on August 23, 2018 in New York City. The rest, as they say, is history.