They met in person for the first time that Saturday before Thanksgiving in 2020 outside arrivals at Los Angeles International Airport. Their voices did not sound like they had on FaceTime all those months before. In January 2020, Mitchell and Sañjaya matched on Hinge. So Gen Z. Wait, no, Sañjaya is a Millennial. Oscar Wilde’s rolling his eyes from somewhere six feet under. Sometimes to be gay is to have your heart broken by a hundred false starts. Falling in love with the wrong person, wrong person falling in love with you. But for the first time, Mitchell and Sañjaya felt like something true was about to begin. Their beginning began when everything around them felt like it was ending. Who remembers their pandemic summer? KN-95 masks. Rationing toilet paper. Black Lives Matter protests. Stimulus checks spent on a new flatscreen or past due utility bills. Local curfews, DIY haircuts. Fauci and Zoom and the rise of TikTok. Mitchell moved from Hollywood, home to West Virginia. Sañjaya rented a room from family on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Their Hinge DMs turned into texts and texts into FaceTime. On June 27, 2020, while the rest of the world was six feet apart, Sañjaya and Mitchell asked each other to go steady over FaceTime with three thousand miles between them. No, this did not feel like a Nancy Meyers movie or Whitney Houston verse. Not yet. Sañjaya drove Mitchell from LAX to an apartment he took that July on Flower Street in downtown Los Angeles. Mitchell slept on a blowup mattress on the kitchen floor. Masks were required. Their first night together did not feel like a Nancy Meyers movie or Whitney Houston verse. Not yet. Sañjaya and Mitchell sat for hours in Sañjaya’s Subaru to be test-swabbed at Dodger Stadium sometime during the first of five weeks they would spend together that winter. For Thanksgiving, Sañjaya prepared macaroni and cheese, Mitchell poured wine, and God delivered negative COVID tests. Cheers. Are you taking notes, Oscar Wilde? There’s a Mexican restaurant in downtown Palm Springs where Sañjaya and Mitchell went on their first date “offline" a few days later. They had driven through the desert that day to make an afternoon escape from the city. Cotton candy mountaintops at dusk. Atomic-era neighborhoods. Silver foxes. You can still find Marilyn Monroe near Downtown Park. Strange territory. Sañjaya and Mitchell drove hundreds of miles test driving their relationship during the five weeks they spent together that November through late December. Cruising down Sunset Boulevard, up Pacific Coast Highway. The Grove and Griffith Park. Maybe a dozen trips to Costco and Mr. Fries Man. Their last drive was to departures at Los Angeles Angeles International Airport on Christmas Eve. When Mitchell flew home to West Virginia, he left his heart in Los Angeles. Sañjaya’s apartment felt empty without him. So did everywhere else. For the next several months, Nancy Meyers was busy plotting Mitchell’s return to Sañjaya. If five weeks together in a studio apartment in downtown Los Angeles during a pandemic would not tear them apart then neither would a lease term. They decided to move-in together nearly a year to the day since asking each other to go steady over FaceTime from opposite ends of the country. Two years later, on April 29, 2023, Sañjaya asked for Mitchell’s hand in marriage at the Griffith Observatory overlooking Hollywood surrounded by some of their closest friends. Mitchell decided to return the question to Sañjaya on a ferryboat somewhere between St. Thomas and St. John in the Caribbean on August 29, 2023. Not bad, Nancy Meyers. Cue Whitney Houston. Maybe Oscar Wilde’s still rolling his eyes.