On a chilly, February day, I decided to go swing dancing. I also for some reason wanted to go to Grand Rapids and spend the week networking, attending events, etc. 

I should probably mention that I was debating if I even wanted to go to swing dance this day, due to it being Valentine's Day. But I did choose to go, and I'm so thankful that God pushed me. 

Entering the dance early, as I usually do, I start by getting my sticker (the indicator of single, taken, complicated) and of course I grab the single. Anyways, as I go about the dance, I dance with people, talking, trying to learn names, and enjoy the day. Along comes this short, adorable young lady and I don't remember if I asked her to dance first, or if she asked me first but either way we started dancing. We talked but I didn't catch a name. The next two times she asks me to dance I learn her name, and where she's from and I offer to buy her a drink when the swing dance is over. A group of us go to the local bar to karaoke. she says she'd love to but she works in the morning.  Now for some reason as I have thought back to this moment, I realized that she was a genuine person. I didn't know it at the time, but I'm pretty sure it's part of why I remembered her. Just who she is. I'm pretty sure God was there involved. But my point is that I believed her and I let it go. So I finish the dance and figure we're never going to see each other again.  

A couple of days later (not sure actual timeline) I went on Facebook doom scrolling, and happened across Jess as a friend suggestion. I don't remember how I responded exactly. but I remember thinking, wait that's Jess, the girl I met at swing. I added her, and messaged her. It took around a week or so for her to reply, but we started talking, and the rest is history. 

How. The hell. Do I condense this. To a one page thing? I have the story version, the memoir version, with all it's color in my head, I can say a short version out loud, but here? I promise the book will sound better.
So when I was single, I still hung out with my guy friend Jordan a lot, because well, when you have the same schedules and that is the only person who is available for swing dances in your area, this is what happens. We liked to go to the coffee shop after church on Sundays usually, and there was one day, after the shop closed and we didn't feel like going home yet, that we decided to go for a walk and just wander around town for a bit. Jordan was for sure going to the Valentine's dance in Grand Rapids, and I was still on the fence about it. I had just figured out that our friend Lindsay's Galentine's Day party wasn't going to be until that Saturday, so my choices were to stay home after work on Tuesday and be lame, or go to a dance with a friend that looked like it was meant just for couples, and everyone would think we were together, and we would get no dates. Ugh. And we were just both getting into a season where going back out into the dating world was looking less scary, and maybe, just maybe, we'd dip our big toes in the water.
Jordan pulls his phone out to prove me wrong-- there was another part of the descriptor on the Facebook event page that I didn't see before, that called this a stoplight dance. Apparently, at a stoplight dance, everyone wears a color coded name tag: red, you're in a relationship; yellow (or as I found out at this one, blue), it's complicated or you'd rather not disclose; and green, you're single and looking. That made up my mind for me, and we both started planning our outfits right then and there, Jordan recommending we also wear something green in case the tags fell off.