Episode 1: How I Met Your Mother
January 2, 2026
Dear Daughter,
And here we are: you are just days away from being born. I have thought long and hard about this moment. I don’t know how much time I have with you in this world, or how old you’ll be when you read this. I don’t know if every child needs to understand why her parents agreed to bring her into the world, but you sure do. Girl, do you.
Picture this. It’s late March 2023. I had known your mother for about four months. I decided, with rare spontaneity, to fly to Chattanooga, Tennessee to join her on nearby Lookout Mountain at the wedding of her closest childhood friend. I texted her during a layover in Charlotte and caught her as she was getting her nails done with the girls.
I feel nervous! Leah said.
How come? I said.
Maybe just excited! she wrote. But also hoping the girls will be kind . . . I’m okay though !!
On the connecting flight to Chattanooga, I thought about that.
Hoping the girls will be kind.
Maybe, by now, kids have made fun of you, because of your father. Children focus like lasers on difference, and they call it out with an instinctive grasp of the jugular of shame. Thirty years ago, the Washington Post held a contest in which readers submitted funny titles of imaginary children’s books. You’re Different, began the only title I recall, and That’s Bad. I remember laughing out loud. It wrapped up childhood, and for that matter the human race, so well I have never forgotten it.
Maybe no one will say anything to you, but you will feel their glances, toward your older dad, or you’ll imagine you do. Maybe they will ask you if I am your grandfather and you will want to merge into the wall.
And maybe I will die when you are quite young, and you will be angry at me, and angrier still at your mother, the only one still around to receive your rage. Or I’ll still be here, but you’ll have begun to learn the rudiments of actuarial tables, and math.
“You took a risk with Dad!”, you might yell at your mom some day, perhaps between the ages of 12 and 15. “You’re hoping for the Dad who lives a long time, Mom, but what if we don’t get that? My friends don’t have to worry about that.”
When people see more difference in other people, more difference in a couple, than they’re used to, it makes them uncomfortable. Most of the world’s bigotries, judgments, and lazy assumptions arise from our discomfort with the otherness of strangers. Your mother and I are no different: we see couples on the internet with large gaps in age between them, and our eyes narrow.
Hmm. Could be something going on there. Something off.
We can’t help it, even us.
Your mother sometimes talks about how some people manage their discomfort in life’s situations well (she’s one of them), and some people can’t just sit with the feeling inside them. These latter people are the reactive ones. They want discomfort to go away. They’d like to push the feeling out onto someone else.
She hoped the girls were kind.
At the Chattanooga airport I decided to splurge and booked a little Jaguar sports car. The tiny trunk appeared to be designed for people who never spend more than an hour away from home, so Leah (as I knew her) would later have to hold her large, pink suitcase in her lap. I sped south to Lookout Mountain and zig-zagged uphill to the Grandview, a Tudor-style stone and beam house built in 1930. Out front, at a signup table, Leah’s mother was one of the first people I met. All I remember is that my first words about your mother to her mother were: “Leah is extraordinary.” And your grandmother agreed. Well yes we know she’s extraordinary.
I took a look around the property, and out over the Chattanooga Valley. The leaves weren’t yet on the trees. The view was clear. Lookout Mountain, just over the Tennessee state line in Georgia, is the only place in the United States from which you can see seven states. On the lawn to my right, eleven rows of white chairs waited for the ceremony that would take place under a brown wooden pergola. I watched from the patio above as the wedding party rehearsed. I saw Leah, in a short black dress and a black and white scarf, walking down the aisle next to another woman. They lined up beneath and to the sides of the pergola. Leah smiled at everyone. I took some pictures of them all.
Afterwards, Leah saw me and walked up the stairs to give me a hug. She introduced me to the groom, the bride’s parents, and other guests. The bride, the groom, and all their friends were close to Leah’s age. Their parents were closer to my age. I couldn’t remember ever having felt more self-conscious, not even when Leah had come to one of my Sunday brunches a month earlier, with two dozen of my DC friends and acquaintances already there. I had felt a burning feeling inside me.
At the wedding, someone asked, “How did you meet?.
And that’s how people would bring attention to the elephant sitting anxiously in the waiting room. How, indeed, did I end up with your mother, whose difference in age, to say nothing of her desire for a child, would become two of the greatest challenges standing between me and happiness I’d ever encountered?
* * *
Sometimes I answered the question of how we met by saying, “We met in Philadelphia,” which was both true and prevented further questions. “Oh,” they would say, defeated, because of course they hadn’t been asking about the location, but, having been answered, asking for more specifics could seem to veer into interrogation. Some months later we would just answer the question people were really asking. We’d look at each other (always, I now realize, as if to verify permission) and then one of us would say, “We met on Bumble.”
Bumble was a dating app for smartphones. Online dating, which had begun about 25 years earlier, had lost most or all of its stigma by 2022, but there was still some residue of stigma available for an older man and a much, much younger woman.
If you know what a dating app was in the 2020s, you might know the apps had a simple process for matching people. For years, the swipe had been the only innovation in all of online dating. A company called Tinder was so proud of their invention, they patented it: swipe right and indicate you are interested in someone; swipe left to tell the app you’re not interested. Swiping became a part of culture. A person not even using the app might see someone out in the world and say to a friend, “My goodness, I’m swiping right on that!” Or someone might suggest watching a certain movie, and you’d say, “Um, I’m swiping left.”
If you swipe right on someone and he or she swipes right on you, the app lets each of you know that the other person has swiped right on you. Wonderful news. They like you! This could be just as addictive as it sounds. When apps wanted to addict you, they gamified your interactions with them. They made dating a game. You might get a half-dozen matches in ten minutes of swiping, before the app cut off your supply for the day. But if either of you swipes left, nothing further happens, and no endorphins are released to your brains.
Most of the time, I searched for women in their 40s and 50s, and that’s who I had conversations with, and who I met with in real life. (IRL, people write these days. Do they still say that, when you are?). In late 2022, I usually searched around the greater Washington DC area.
After a few minutes on the app, though, I’d run out of matches in a particular geography or age range. No more matches today, the dating app’s message might say. But I’m not done! I might think. I’m still bored. Still lonely too.
If you want more endorphins, the app could have answered, you’ll need to either choose a different City, push the Age slider down to a lower number, or change some other filter.
I might choose a different city. Usually that meant New York, and sometimes San Francisco or Los Angeles, which were no slouches. In late 2022, I had just returned to private law practice for the first time in 23 years, and I often traveled to Houston, where my partners were, so sometimes I also scanned the savannah in Houston. And sometimes I might change the age range I was looking for: usually down, where there was more room, down to 45, 40, 35, and sometimes up.
I’ll be honest. Matching with women brought a temporary rush of endorphins much like any other digital activity. But maybe a match with a beautiful young woman could also make a man enduring the advancing indignities of age feel, for just a moment, younger, more virile, still relevant, further from mortality. Still got it! Or, Maybe I have it now? Yes, of course that makes me a bad person. But nothing ever happened.
The lack of anything to talk about with much younger women almost always torpedoed conversations within a handful of text messages. Just as you’d expect. It couldn’t have been a favorable sign that I believed the whole enterprise was ridiculous, absurd, impossible, and a little embarrassing. At least for a real relationship. I was so suspicious, so skeptical, that I chose to spend valuable time after the match, even during the few dates I went on, probing why the younger woman in question was interested in me. I must have come off as untrusting, which is a strange way to fail to take responsibility for one’s own actions. Either way, the titillation of the taboo usually trickled to nothing within a few texts. Besides, I wasn’t looking for a relationship with a much, much younger woman. Before I met your mother I had little history of dating women more than, say, ten or fifteen percent younger than me.
And in the dozen years after my divorce in which I persevered at online dating, that is how it had always been. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould once referred to the entirely separate domains of science and religion as “nonoverlapping magisteria.” Well, very young women and I were just nonoverlapping magisteria.
I wouldn’t explain all this to most people. They were probably still wondering, Why Philadelphia?
Well, somehow, on that fateful day in December 2022, I decided to do something I hadn’t tried before: to look for matches around Philadelphia. Philadelphia was only half as far as New York. The train from Union Station, in Washington, DC, could get you there in under two hours.
And there, just outside of Philly, in Burlington, New Jersey, was your mother.
Those pictures! That smile! She had an incomparable smile. In every picture she was smiling.
In my defense here is one of the pictures she had on Bumble.
Dear daughter, Nature does not equip men to swipe left on that.
I don’t actually recall whether I had set the Age search low and saw your mother’s profile, listing her true, absurdly younger age, and swiped right, like a bad person. Or did I use a feature, for which I had paid extra, that allowed me to see that she had already swiped right on me, and I didn’t do the right thing and stomp my phone to pieces under my feet? It doesn’t matter. Either way, you’ll be asking the question, What on earth, Dad, were you doing swiping right on someone of Mom’s age?
Speak of the devil. Back at the wedding venue, your mother emerged from the changing room. And she was luminous. She was effervescent. She wore a shimmery grey-blue satin dress. Her hair was up. Her smile so bright. She hugged me and gave me a kiss. “I’m so glad you’re here!” she said. She introduced me to several of the young women around us. “This is Cameron,” she said. I felt the burning. She squeezed my hand.
Next up in Episode 2: Meeting Your Mom Online.
