an even crazier time while working at Amex, a lot of memories in this valley of the sun. I was looking forward to my time in SF. My first official ‘city city’ where I will be residing. But I had this feeling that there is something or someone waiting for me in the Bay Area..

The date is Jan 21st 2020. My mom has been pestering me to talk to this girl who matched on a matrimonial website. I was already talking to like 4 other girls from that same website. It was alright. I was at the time looking for someone to share my life with but it wasn’t as easy to find someone who you can connect with. It was much easier to date someone via some random dating apps. Before I moved to SF I thought let me just finish this dating scene so I went all out and went on 6 consecutive dates on 6 days. My personal best :p. After that I deleted those apps. Thought I would turn a new leaf in Bay Area while exploring around. After the first 7 days I was back to it. Downloaded all those damned dating apps back. Sometimes when you are in a new city its easier to meet new people that way. Dating is easy but maintaining conversations after a date isn’t . Before that day I had already been to 2 dates over that week. It was all meh. Nowadays it had become like a routine so when my mom asked me to chat with someone who was connected I wasn’t really looking forward to it as I knew how it usually ends.

So I called her up. She was this Jain girl from New Delhi and me being from Mumbai the first thing we all mumbaikars do is let people from Delhi know how unsafe Delhi has become especially for women . Can’t resist that Delhi bashing haha. She was a bit defensive on her stance for a city she grew up in and tried to highlight the pros but accepted the cons.In the end we went for a good half hour just talking about Mumbai v/s Delhi. I thought she would be pretty pissed at me who tried to get into an argument with her right off the bat but she wasn’t . She was actually pretty chill about it. Weird flex but okay. Then I told her about my dating experiences which spanned across continents, race, religion etc. I told her I metaphorically traveled to London, Paris and Japan like from that song in the movie Pardes by dating people from those places. I was just kidding though. I only traveled to Japan in that sense. Yeah she wasn’t much pleased about it but she took it all rather well . So I thought to myself yeah probably I can be all honest about my past. And that night we talked for 3 hours straight. Doesn’t even come close though to mention all about my past but I think that was the first time in a while I felt I could actually connect with someone. Out of all the dates I have been with this is the one with whom I was looking forward to talk to again. And inadvertently from that night itself I couldn’t help but find myself being a little attracted to her.