Episode 2: Meeting Your Mother Online – and a Wedding
January 2026
My dearest daughter,
As we wait for the dancing and memorable conversation your mother and I had at the wedding (see How I Met Your Mother: Episode 1), let me explain happened when we met virtually.
Bumble had built a billion-dollar company on the dubious innovation of requiring the women on the app to send the first message — It’s empowering! — never mind that women could send the first message on any dating app. On Bumble, women had 24 hours to reach out, else the match would expire. On December 13, 2022, Leah wrote: Hi there Cameron, with a kiss-face emoji at the end.
Why, hello, lovely Leah, I said, with a hug emoji. Some years earlier, I had overcome a writer’s resistance to the laziness of emojis, sensing how much friendlier they were in real-time correspondence than the rude periods people had used in books and letters for the previous 500 years, with their somber endings and Eeyore energy. I’m flattered, I added.
And then I asked the question I had learned to ask early on in an online match to avoid wasting time, What made you swipe right?? Here was the test. If the response was vague or could apply to anyone (You seem interesting!), or the woman didn’t even seem to have read the profile I had crafted (We both love horse-racing!), I would usually move on.
Leah answered, saying she appreciated my commitment to curious exploration of all there was to learn. She said my refined sense of play and intellectual prowess were traits she admired so much in a man.
So that was a good start, if it was not for show. But, after telling her that her response was very attractive of her, I had two other filters to apply: So you’re not swayed by age or some initial distance?
No it doesn’t bother me at all, she said, starting with age. It is very important on my ‘list’ I guess you could say to be with a man who has a defined sense of himself, as I do. And distance, she added, isn’t a problem for the right people. So we scheduled a video call for two days later, a Thursday, on December 15 at 6:30pm.
In our texts over the next two days, she was bright and fulsome and engaging. Playful, smart, funny, open, polite, seemingly effortlessly happy, endlessly thoughtful. She was a breath of fresh air.
On the night before our call, I went on Facebook to inform “about 930 of you” of my surprising return to the law, something I had never imagined would happen. Then, in my journal, I first mentioned what would become an even greater surprise compared to anything I had dreamt of in my imagination: the beginning of my relationship with your mother, and therefore with you, the biggest surprise of all.
Leah, I wrote, then her age, then Jesus H, referencing the first and middle names of our Lord.
Was I saying Jesus H because she was so beautiful? Or because I had just listed her age? Both, I think.
On occasion, I wrote short notes in my journal about the women I met. Carmen, 46, Arlington. Quirky doctor. Venezuelan. Great conversation. Alice, 52, Bethesda, did not think I was funny. I did this partly because I’ve memorialized what was going on in my life since 1986, a poor fix for a bad memory of events. My journals run to thousands of pages by now. (They’ll be yours, some day, and with the help of generative AI that uses my millions of words to answer almost any question you could think to ask about me, what a rich legacy they will be.) Maybe I also mentioned who I was meeting to boost my sense of confidence that something good was likely to happen soon. As in, Look at all the possible reasons for optimism, Cameron.
After making some other notes on what was going on in my life, I added that I was probably wanting connection. I’d been alone for over 12 years by this point. Since my separation from my first wife in 2010 I had had just a few brief if mostly very positive relationships.
Then I wrote about a recent phone call I’d had with one Ilina, whose opening email was overflowing, purple in prose, her profile gushing, but she answered the phone, once we’d both confirmed by text that we were ready, as if she’d just woken up, or was dreading the call. No energy, enthusiasm, warmth, friendliness. When I heard her dour tones on the other line, I knew I was in for rough sledding. Like pulling teeth. No, like getting them pulled.
In the early decades of dating apps, as you made your way through the fresh hell of the apps to get a match, even after you got a love interest on the phone or to an in-person date, you faced an obstacle course of rejection, judgment, ghosting, and other petty indignities. I remember the woman in Denver, who lectured me, during a first date, a few months after my mother’s death, that I was grieving my mother too much. Or the woman in San Francisco who had dropped names of Bay Area movers and shakers and probed what names I could drop, and who slipped out when I went to the restroom, leaving me her bill.
Another woman asked me to call her, and when I did, she didn’t pick up. I left a voice mail. Then I texted her, saying, Left a voicemail.
We’re not a fit, she texted back, goodbye.
Did I miss something? I wrote.
Don’t ever contact me again, she wrote.
This was, all too often, the Sissyphean work of trying to find a life partner. It could be exhausting, discouraging, painful. Most people needed breaks from it. I was on a mission, though, and even when I was feeling my lowest, I bounced back. Hope fueled me, for years and years.
A few days after Leah and I met on Bumble we had that video call.
“Hiiii!” she said, once her video had connected.
Her eyes, brown, were as large as kiwi fruit. She would later tell me a teacher at her private, nearly all-white Christian school had once complimented her full lips, saying she was so lucky to have such bountiful lips without Botox. Her hair was long and black. I knew so little about black women’s hair then that I would not realize for many months that she wore a wig — that black women often wore wigs, and that their hair held mysteries no white man could conceive of. In Leah, everything came together in a face-sized, beaming, glowing, the-world-is-just-fine smile.
I didn’t write about our date in my journal afterwards, and my guess is that I didn’t do so because I still didn’t think it could possibly go anywhere. But I do remember a few things. How self-possessed she was. How grounded. There was no hint of neediness, not even a desire to please or be liked. She was as serene and comfortable in her own skin as the Mona Lisa. She was open, unguarded, generous. What I especially took away was that your mother smiled the entire time. She would not stop smiling. Smiled when I talked. Smiled as she talked. How can someone do that? She was so positive, so joyful, so grateful, so alive and in the moment, so happy.
A hot young black female Eckhart Tolle are words that should never have been put together.
I never once saw her eyes wander to other parts of her screen. Most people on a video call, especially on a date, glance frequently at the image of themselves. It’s almost impossible not to, though studies during the 2020-21 pandemic showed it was exhausting to monitor oneself. (I keep my image turned off). You can see their eyes flicker between looking at you and looking at themselves. What am I looking like? Am I okay? Not your mom.
She was intelligent and curious — and she was interested, to my amazement and nevermind my disbelief, in me. We had ended the call with agreement that we should meet in person.
* * *
At the wedding your mother smiled and hugged and greeted people as if the wedding were her own. She was one of the bridesmaids, and as the bridesmaids and groomsmen all gathered behind us to await their walks down the aisle, I turned around in my seat now and then to watch her. How friendly and open she was. That smile that never went away. She just radiated warmth.
The vows were imminent. A wedding, like a funeral, is a place to ponder your life. Did I wonder if I could ever find myself under a wooden pergola again, or even awaiting your mother’s appearance? I do not recall. It can’t have been far from my mind: Leah had made it clear in her dating profile that she was looking for marriage. And children.
She stepped into the aisle on one side of a bearded young man in suspenders, with another bridesmaid bookending him, and began to walk. She carried flowers. She beamed. Without turning around, I took pictures of them, over my shoulder. She would tell me later that she wondered if she looked like a bride, a possible wife, to me. She was looking for a husband, not a boyfriend. Was I the one?
Next Up: How I Met Your Mother: Episode 3 – An Intriguing Date in Philadelphia.
