Our story began on a rainy and frustrating Thursday night in San Diego. At the time, Lauren had a coworker who hosted weekly Thursday Night Football watch parties and always invited her week after week. In addition to not caring about football at all, Lauren also had a strict “early night on work nights” rule and never went out if she had to teach the next morning. However, after weeks of politely declining, Lauren realized her constant no’s might eventually close a friendship entirely, so she finally decided to attend. That particular evening, it was pouring rain (which, for San Diego, makes this pretty dramatic). Lauren showed up with a six-pack in hand—only to discover that the coworker was late to his own party and no guests were there yet, except for the roommates who lived there. She stood outside in the rain with no umbrella or raincoat, ringing the doorbell and frantically texting her coworker, essentially a stranger hoping to be let into a house full of roommates she didn’t know. Upstairs, one of the roommates had just wrapped up a long, exhausting meeting. When he finally took out his earbuds, he heard the doorbell ringing nonstop and came downstairs to answer it. As Zaid opened the door, the two locked eyes for the very first time. It was love at first sight. From that moment on, Lauren suddenly became very interested in football and made sure to attend every watch party she could. She joined three fantasy football leagues, talked her best sports talk with the guys (probably really impressive, too) and found any reason she could to start spending time at the house. After weeks of this, Lauren got up the courage to host her own game-day outing at a local bar… where only one person showed up: Zaid. The rest, as they say, is history.