It's the oldest story in the [modern-day] book.
Boy meets girl — online.
NOPE. Not like that.
There were no dating apps involved. No one slid into anyone's DMs or stumbled upon a “thirst trap” photo on a mutual friend’s wall and thought, well, hello there. There were no singles forums and no chat rooms for partnerless hopefuls "seeking a connection." None of the usual suspects.
So scratch that — maybe it's not the oldest story in the book after all.
Because Alyssa and Theo…(wait for it)…met on a Zoom call.
But hold on, it gets even more romantic than that.
The meeting was entirely about cryptocurrency.
(Cue the songbirds.)
So how exactly does a group of crypto geeks rattling on about blockchains and dApps from their squeaky desk chairs, collectively dreaming of going "to the moon" with their group investment in a crypto hedge fund, eventually lead us here? Pondering wedding outfits and room blocks and hoping the DJ doesn't play the Cha Cha Slide? (Spoiler: he won't. He's great.)
Well, friends — tuck in. It's a nearly five-year story.
Just kidding. We’ll summarize. You have enough reading ahead of you on this site (which, by the way, Alyssa would really appreciate it if you did, so she doesn't have to field 2,369 questions that are already answered here. But don't tell her we told you that.)
Actually, someone did think, well, hello there, on that pivotal call that day. It just wasn't followed by a DM, or a “hook us up” nudge to a mutual friend, or any follow-up whatsoever.
It was Theo. Theo thought it. And Theo refrained from any follow-up.
Here's what happened:
The Sunday night hedge fund meeting was led by two group leaders, cameras and mics mostly off throughout. Then came time for questions and comments.
Naturally, Alyssa had questions and comments.
On went her camera. On went her mic. And she launched — excitedly, passionately — into her vision of the future: all of them, one day, living as neighbors in sprawling houses right on the edge of Lake Tahoe, just as soon as their fund went "parabolic."
Cue Theo's well, hello there. He made a mental note: cute girl who’s into crypto and lake living, is super upbeat and bubbly, could be future wife.
And that was the gist of it. Their kinda-sorta “meet cute” minus the “meet” part. Theo’s camera or mic never went on. Alyssa had landed on Theo’s radar (with a loud thud), but for Alyssa, Theo simply did not exist yet. Not for some time after.
Fast forward a couple of months — don't worry, you didn’t miss anything. Er well, just a world pandemic — no big deal. But literally a whole lotta sitting around doing a whole lotta nothing.
After one too many continuous days of bad attempts at sourdough, doomscrolling, and Zoom sing-alongs with old camp friends in her pajamas at 2pm, Alyssa packed a bag and left her New Jersey beach town for Phoenix — to stay with her sister, see the one friend she had there, and wait out whatever the hell was happening to the world.
One afternoon, she and that Phoenix friend were hanging out poolside, sipping watermelon margaritas, and catching one another up on the latest season of their lives, when the friend slipped inside to take a FaceTime call with a business associate. Their voices drifted faintly from the house while Alyssa swung on a hammock, soaking up the sweet desert heat and contemplating a second marg.
"Oh crap, it's 3 o'clock — I have another meeting!" the friend shrieked from within the kitchen.
Then she came rushing back out, shoved the phone into Alyssa's hands, and demanded: "Here. Chat with my friend, Theo. I gotta go!”
Alyssa brought the phone up to her face, flustered and perplexed, and stammered: "Uhhh — hello? Whooo is this??"
However flustered Alyssa was, Theo was a hundred times that.
Because it was the girl — that girl. He'd thought about her since she'd appeared in a little square on his screen months before. He'd thought about reaching out. He'd thought about Lake Tahoe, and strolling through farmers' markets hand-in-hand, and geeking out about crypto together. All just thoughts, until this moment.
To this day, no one knows why the friend handed Theo off to a stranger instead of simply saying goodbye. Not even the friend. She just shrugs and says, "I dunno — that's just what I thought to do."
Fate. Wearing a sundress. By a pool. In Phoenix.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
So — clearly, they hit it off. (I mean, we're here, right?)
Now, a small but important detail worth backing up for:
The mutual friend who so unceremoniously shoved that phone into Alyssa's hands? She was also one of the two leaders of that Sunday night crypto call. Which means Theo wasn't some random stranger on the other end of that FaceTime — he was someone she'd brought on to freelance for a separate crypto project she was running. Small world. Smaller than a Zoom grid, even.
So when Theo mentioned, somewhere in that first bewildered ten minutes of conversation, that he recognized Alyssa from the fund meeting, she found it interesting, mostly because she had zero memory of him. (He left out the part about the mental note. And the Lake Tahoe daydream. And the future wife thing. Smart man.)
They exchanged numbers as potential colleagues — Alyssa was considering jumping onto the same freelance project — and left it at that.
Or so she thought.
What followed was a FaceTime a day. Sometimes two. Each one running a half hour, an hour, longer. They made each other laugh. They got each other's idiosyncratic references and dry jokes. They had the same taste in everything that mattered and clashed in all the ways that turned out to be interesting — Alyssa loud and wired and all-in, Theo laidback, measured, a little quieter, a little harder to read. Yin, meet yang.
And then, about a week in, Theo floated an idea.
A wild idea. Impractical, ballsy even. (Apparently, knowing her was already changing him for the better.)
See, he'd been tapped to attend a crypto conference in Miami — officially for the startup, unofficially for a good time. The conference was called, and we are not making this up, Shitcoin Conference 2020. And he wanted Alyssa to come.
He didn’t just ask. He campaigned. He made his case over multiple calls, video chats, texts, and emails across multiple days, dismantling her objections one by one like a very charming attorney. It was Covid. She wasn't working (in the regular sense anyway — anything she needed to tend to, she could do so quickly from a laptop). Flights were cheap. She had the means. He had the accommodations, the tickets, the VIP access to the open bar, a built-in excuse to be there — it could even be a tax write-off, for crying out loud.
Each call, her "no" got a little softer. A little less convincing. Mostly to herself.
But before she said yes, she had one condition.See, Alyssa's love language is play. Fun. Whimsy. Silliness. The kind of childlike, full-body laugh that makes you snort. And she needed to know if this guy had it in him. So she told him:
"OK, fine. But our first night out, we're wearing onesies. Silly animal onesies. I pick. What's your size?"
He paused a few seconds to process the strange request, and then a resounding: "YOU'RE ON."
The next day, a lemur onesie in size large arrived at his door in Nashville. Alyssa packed a green dinosaur one into her suitcase — already half-packed, since this was essentially a vacation within a vacation — and headed to Phoenix Sky Harbor, bound for Miami, stomach and heart done things they hadn't done in a while.
Neither of them could tell you what the in-flight movie was or if they sat next to someone. All they felt and thought about was their rattling nerves. The good kind. The kind that means something big is coming.
At baggage claim, she spotted him first — sauntering toward her from across the terminal. And when he got close enough, she giggled and squealed, "It's you! Hi!" — because what else do you say?
He scooped her up. Hugged her tight. Gave her a hard smooch on the cheek, then the forehead.
And then, before either of them had a chance to be awkward about it, Alyssa turned around, pressed her back into him, held up her phone, and took a picture, because something inside told her she’d want that later. A snapshot of the first seconds. The first real hello. The first kiss — sort of — right there in the airport, two people who'd secretly, quickly, completely fallen for each other over FaceTime, about to walk into the most absurd first date imaginable.
A crypto conference. In Miami. In onesies.
Romance doesn’t always look the same for everyone. Sometimes it shows up in a lemur costume.
And Miami? Miami delivered.
It felt less like a city and more like a stage — like some unseen director had dressed the whole set just for them. The conference by day was a full-on playground: blockchain toys and tech demos at every booth, late-night dance parties that somehow made the crypto nerd world feel cool, VR adventures through digital jungles, new foods around every corner, zipping through town side-by-side on scooters, and one time even popping into a prom boutique to try on snazzy attire and pretend they were going to prom together. Their first real dinner date was at a “creative cuisine” food truck, eating what can only be described as the most transcendently scrumptious, but most structurally unsound sandwiches either of them had ever attempted to shove in their mouths — zero grace, a total sloppy, silly mess, absolutely perfect.
When tech talk and futurism got a bit much, they'd slip away to the beach to just feel human again. No blockchain. No buzzwords. Just warm, blue water and cool, dry sand and the comfortable ease between two people who are starting to feel like home to each other.
But the onesie night. Oh, the onesie night.
They ducked out of the conference early (don't tell their former sponsors) raced back to the hotel, and wrestled themselves into a green dinosaur and a lemur with the barely-contained energy of two children on Christmas morning. Alyssa may or may not have also packed a light-up glow wand. (She did.)
No plans. No destination. Just: let's see where the night takes us.
And the night was prepared.
At the very start, they stumbled upon a rogue shopping cart just sitting there on the sidewalk, abandoned, waiting — as if the director had written it in on page four. Theo didn't hesitate. He gestured grandly at the cart, "Your chariot, madam." Alyssa, in her dinosaur onesie and glow wand, climbed in without a word of protest. And off they went — a lemur pushing a dinosaur through the streets of Miami at midnight, utterly unhinged, completely at home, ready to take on the town.
The night became a string of perfect, unplannable moments. They lay down together on a lush patch of grass and in the middle of it, a gold star was embedded with a quote that read — "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be" — and looked at each other and laughed, because obviously. Obviously the director put that there. They made friends with a vegan hot dog vendor who bumped EDM jams from the truck speaker so they could bust a move in a sandy little lot under bistro lights. They shared stories and life experiences on a street curb with a security guard, still on the clock at 7-Eleven, D’andré, who was genuinely delighted by their whimsy and onesies (they actually stayed in touch with him for quite some time after). They struck poses in front of towering, vivid murals Miami is so famous for. They had impromptu dance parties on street corners while cars honked in enthusiastic solidarity. They raided the shelves of the nearest gas station for a midnight snack — a spread of candy and wine, a suspiciously large pickle and greasy chips, which they then demolished on plastic patio furniture outside the hotel like two people who never heard of bedtime.
And then, somewhere in the small hours, when the sugar and the giddiness had softened into something calmer and more tender — Alyssa began to read to him from her journal, at his request.
(Fair warning to the unsentimental cynics and eye-rollers: you may want to skim this next part.)
It was about her late mother. And somewhere in the middle of a particularly beautiful, heartbreaking piece, she looked up — and found Theo quietly wiping a tear from his eye.
That was the moment. Right there. That was when Alyssa decided: this one should stick around.
They stayed up until the morning’s first clips of light splintered through the blinds, talking about everything, laughing until they cried about something else entirely, and slowly, without either of them naming it yet, falling into something that felt a lot like the rest of their lives.
And then, their perfect weekend had the gall to end. (So rude.)
They shuffled drearily through the airport on two hours of sleep — if that — quiet and heavy in the way that has less to do with exhaustion, more so with the looming goodbye.
Alyssa’s boarding call came first. They looked at each other and winced with heartsickness. And then they hugged the way you hug someone you’re not ready to be done with yet but have no idea when you’ll see again — hard, and tight, and too long. Both of them welled up with thick tears as they let go, reluctantly, and turned to walk away towards their gates.
That goodbye didn't stick for long.
By the time their planes had landed, they were already texting. By nightfall, they were on FaceTime. And by the following week, Alyssa was booked on a Southwest flight to Nashville — which, as it turns out, was the secret weapon of their entire summer.
Southwest, bless its flexible little heart, lets you change your return flight anytime, for free, no questions asked. So when a trip to Nashville was winding down and neither of them was ready to say goodbye, Alyssa would simply...not. One call to rebook, and suddenly she had another week. Then another. Stays that were supposed to be a long weekend quietly stretched into two, three weeks at a time. She did this three or four times that summer, and not once did Southwest complain.
She was, it should be noted, uniquely positioned for this kind of romantic spontaneity — no lease to speak of, remote work, plenty of savings, and zero compelling reason to be anywhere in particular. The universe had been setting this up for years, apparently.
Nashville came through. Of course it did. They did it all — distillery tours, escape rooms, live music (c'mon, it's Nashville), festivals, day trips, weekend getaways, yoga workshops, new restaurants (Theo had a mission to show Alyssa all of Nashville's best hot chicken joints), hidden gems, hole-in-the-wall bars with incredible bands, a particularly sweet trip to the famed milkshake place, Legendairy, for National Ice Cream Day. They met each other's friends. They met each other's families. They made new friends everywhere they went, because that's what happens when these two are together — something about their combined energy, playful and warm and wide open, makes people want to pull up a chair.
They endezvoused in Fort Lauderdale, at his family's homes in northern Pennsylvania, and — perhaps most perfectly — he came to her at the Jersey Shore for her birthday weekend. Which, in summer, at the shore, is about as good as birthdays get.
In Atlantic City, they played in the waves, strolled the boardwalk, rode the rides, and hit the casinos (Theo is a gamblin' man), where Alyssa got "bankrolled" by a somewhat famous stranger at the table — one Joe Gatto of Impractical Jokers fame — who then promptly put them on his show's VIP list. Just a normal Tuesday.
They watched dolphins from a boat. Swung in the sky on parasails. Toured local farms. Explored an insect museum with a butterfly park (yes, really, and yes, it was magical). Rode bikes along the coast. Stayed in a rotating cast of charming Airbnbs. Danced — a lot, always — and saw so many concerts and shows, they lost count.
And in between all of it, they were never really apart. Nonstop texts, calls, FaceTimes, DMs, emails, Zoom meetings — now with both cameras very much on.
One summer. That's all it took. They were hooked.