Our love story was a mistake. Some people may use the word accident or glitch, but truly there was an error in the code that brought us together. Rory had just broken off an engagement and moved back to her family’s home in Northeast Ohio.

Living down the hall from her teenage brother, arguing about who ate the last bag of fruit snacks, and trying to adjust to being a single mom to a toddler were not a part of the plans Rory had made for herself.

I had just quit my “dream” job, after realizing that being a present father was more important to me than any career could ever be. I was entangled in a web of romantic relationships that I knew were heading nowhere, but was still fueling the embers that remained warm for fear of the cold of being alone.

I wanted to meet other queer people in my area, so I joined an app that was marketed as a sort of LGBT+ social media site. I set my location parameters to meeting people who were within 50 miles or less of where I lived in Long Beach, California, which is a coastal industrial city in Los Angeles County.

I talked to a few people, most of whom were more interested in asking me personal questions about my transness or trying to meet up for casual sex, hung out with a few people for coffee, and eventually received a message from a girl whose dimples were the first thing I saw. Her smile was genuine. It had a light about it I couldn’t quite describe yet.

Her first message asked me what my favorite movie was. I told her about my love of Forest Gump, and then we talked about our lives. We talked about our kids, our dreams, our hopes, and I was enthralled with the idea that someone who had so much in common with me was so close to me.

“I’d love to take you out for coffee, sometime. What part of L.A. do you live in?” I asked.

“I don’t live in L.A.” she explained.

I knew it was too good to be true.

She explained that she lived in a little town nobody’s ever heard of about 2,000 miles away from me. Both of us were shocked. She had set her location preference to under 100 miles from her Dad’s house, thinking that worst case scenario, she would have to meet someone near the border of Pennsylvania. She definitely hadn’t planned on talking to someone multiple time zones away.

We kept texting, though. We started talking on the phone, and eventually we began FaceTiming. We became friends and it seemed as though we were doing life together, just virtually. I listened to her flirt her way out of a speeding ticket, argue with her little brother the way only siblings can argue, and listened to how she interacted with her toddler. She heard me snore when I fell asleep on FaceTime with her, laugh so hard I snorted when my 9 year old tried to twerk and fell off the couch, and she watched me cook, even cooking chicken flautas with me one night. Eventually she decided to come to California on a vacation.

The day Rory flew out to California, there was a hurricane, the power went out after two underground explosions caused by the back up of water, and my kids accidentally knocked over one of the candles we were using for light, spilling hot wax in her waist-length hair, and igniting a wall in our dining room.

The world around me felt damn-near apocalyptic. I worried that Rory would get the wrong idea of California. It wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always a soggy mess, and my kids didn’t always have Polly Pocket-stiff hair, and the house wasn’t always pitch black. Rory saw none of that. She handed me her sleeping toddler in the airport, hugged my kids like a mother reunited with her own babies, and saw only palm trees in L.A.

Rory came to visit, to see what California was like, to see why that silly app had matched her up with someone she would’ve never sought out before, and she fell in love. We fell in love. We fell in love so fast, that Rory never flew back to that teeny town a few hours from Cleveland where she had grown up. Her brother could eat all the fruit snacks he wanted again, because Rory and I were building a new life out here in California together and a brand new, very neurodivergent and chaotic blended family.