We’re getting married!

Stories of Joey’s college days somehow reached me during my senior year at Tech. He went to Auburn and was a few years older, so I knew him only as someone happened to go to my home church and would do anything to get a laugh. I remember briefly meeting him soon after graduation while signing in at a young adults’ event at the Cathedral. Of course, I remembered the wild college stories and thought, “hey, THAT’S Joey.” (He says he remembers meeting me too, but I think he’s just being polite.) I was definitely intrigued, but nothing came of it, although now he jokes that this was when I called “dibs.” I was just getting my sea legs as an adult in Atlanta, and he was already well-situated in his community. While we did have several mutual friends, none of them had the wisdom and good judgement to connect us. For that, we would like to thank the algorithm behind the popular dating app Hinge. Sometime in summer 2020, a year starved of face-to-face interaction, we both found ourselves trying to make the most of the downtime by scoping out eligible singles in the Greater Atlanta area. We found each other pretty quickly, he liked my photo with Spongebob, and I couldn’t believe it – it was THAT Joey. It was a classic modern love story: boy swipes right, girl responds, they go on an improbably long first date (especially for her first time back at a restaurant in a pandemic), and the rest is history.

In February 2020, I bumped into a priest friend at the Mobile Mardi Gras parade. Don’t let his Montgomery accent and general Bama attitude fool you, this guy knows how to see into the hearts of his friends and has the courage to say what he thinks. He said “Joe, you’re going to find a great Catholic gal who wants to have babies and raise a family and go on regular ole beach trips with the kids.” It was both a very bold and very boring thing to say to a guy you used to drink beer with at bible study. As mundane as it seemed, it was what I truly wanted. A few weeks later, the pandemic began, and the shutdown commenced. As an extrovert, being cooped up didn’t jive well with my social tendencies, nor did it help me get to this beautiful fantasy that the priest at the parade expressed to me. Five months had passed within the Covid sphere, and I had a thought: Now must be the best time to try dating apps, since I can’t meet anyone out in the world. So I downloaded Hinge and gave it the old college try. I saw a girl who looked familiar, but I didn’t know her name or anything about her. I knew she liked Spongebob and was Catholic and guessed that she went to the Cathedral and that’s where I knew her face from. We started talking, and I immediately knew I had to ask her out. In 98-degree weather, we had our first date at Gypsy Kitchen. We drank beer and ate chicken fingers and octopus. The heat wasn’t a problem, but it was getting late, and a date can’t last forever. We got gelato downstairs and talked through the sunset as the evening cooled. We talked about faith, family, and what we wanted out of life. I had a pretty good feeling this girl liked beach trips and kids. Sometimes you can just tell about a person. We had our second date 3 days later. And our third date 3 days after that. Since that first date with tapas in Buckhead, we’ve been to the beach together, played with babies, and a whole lot more. A date can’t last forever, but a marriage can do the trick.