Love Bites: Revising Our Story

"And the rest is history" has always followed how my now-husband and I tell of the first time we met. Like much of history itself, a fair amount of revisionism was undertaken. We met in the winter of 2014, and the lore of our relationship has always been this: we met at a poetry evening, where I enjoyed pints while he read some of his poems. I did see him read a poem, that’s true enough, but I went on a night out with friends instead. A week or so later, we matched on Tinder. 

The wild frontiers of apps were just beginning to take hold on the dating scene. Back then, I felt that dating apps implied a subtext of transactional and deeply impersonal and cringey romantic encounters. They were generally thought of as a sordid way to get a ride (or in non-Irish parlance: to ‘hook-up’). Our matching on Tinder couldn’t have been further from this. I still contend that we were (probably) the first on that app to discuss the works of Cormac McCarthy. 

This summer, my now-husband and I literally tied the knot, with an ancient Celtic tradition which symbolised our two lives intertwining together. In a more modern wedding ritual, the bridal party interviewed him and screened it at the Hen Party. With that: the truth was out. Jaws dropped – mostly those of the older generation in the room, their belief in our crossing paths at a literary event forever shattered. The revelation that we had created a fable of how we met was tempered by laughter. 

The entanglement of technology and dating is a different landscape now. Everyone is on these apps. I’m no longer embarrassed about our Tinder origins; finding love online is the norm now. I never dreamt that swiping right would lead to adopting a dog and grocery shopping forever with that person, but it did, and the whole thing – it's bliss.