Anyone who tells you that falling in love is easy is lying to you. I used to think there was a formula; that if I tried hard enough, hoped hard enough, reshaped myself enough, love would simply happen. I am older now and happily married, but the stories that shaped me still sit close to the surface.

I fell in love for the first time when I was eleven, with a boy named Damien who smelled like baby powder and had the softest hands. He sat next to me in class for a year and I seized every excuse to touch them. I told him that tracing patterns on the back of someone’s hand would bring good luck, so we did, drawing little universes on each other’s skin while pretending to pay attention. It was my first quiet lesson in intimacy.

Ten years later came Brian, a boy with soft hands and sad eyes who made me believe I had felt every emotion a person could feel. There is nothing quite as powerful, or dangerous, as wanting to hand over every part of yourself, body and soul, to someone who does not know what to do with it. I had kissed him thousands of times, trying to mend something that was never mine to fix. If the stars had aligned, he might kiss me back.

After that, there were heartaches and heartbreaks, detours and revelations, long nights, short-lived crushes and quiet devastations. I read the columns, absorbed the advice and, in a world not always kind to unconventional hearts, I went looking for love online, one date at a time.

And now?

I found my person. I am married. I am happy in a way that sometimes feels slightly illegal, like I somehow tricked the universe.

But I am also still unabashedly me. I carry a suitcase of memories and feelings that I have never quite learned how to pack properly. I still overthink things from twenty years ago for absolutely no reason. I am learning how to be an equal half and a whole person at the same time, and I wish there were clearer instructions.

This space is where I am choosing to let everything coexist. The dates that shaped me. The intimacy that has given me the confidence. The loves that bruised me. The love I chose and get to choose again. The feelings that show up uninvited but always teach me a lesson or two.

If you want to share your stories too, write to me at hello@thedateexpectations.com