It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind that swept up the streets, rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Two figures appeared in this inky vortex of entropy, drawn inexplicably together by the ineffable forces of fate, destined to begin an unparalleled gay romance unlike any other….. Alright, the slightly less dramatic version involves two guys matching on a dating app called Bumble during the middle of the pandemic. Enter Aaron, whose time on said dating app equaled a grand total of two whole days, while Stephen on the other hand, approached like year three on a myriad of dating apps with a rather underwhelming level of success. In fact, the previous night Stephen managed to scrounge up a date with a fellow he refers to as “Fishbreath”. (I’m sure you can put two and two together on this moniker.) So our tale begins with Stephen on the next morning, demoralized from a horrible date, fully committed to his future life as a lonely bookgeek. He opened the app ready to delete his account when a new match caught his eye. There on Stephen’s phone a total cutie stared back at him, wielding a whisk as a weapon. “What a goofball,” Stephen thought with a smile on his face, “just like me!” A conversation commenced between these two dorks that refuses to cease nearly 5 years later. On the day they matched they stayed up to two in the morning texting back and forth, immediately hooked on each other. Naturally, since lockdown and social distancing was the norm at the time, neither of them wished to risk each other or the other’s family with a potential viral exposure and mutually agreed to get to know each other first. After two months of all day texting, phone calls, and video chats, neither man could wait a second longer, they threw caution to the wind and met in person for the first time at a frozen yogurt mill on Valentines Day. And the rest is history…