When Emily and I met, I was still living in the eastern suburbs of Indianapolis. We planned to get dinner after work on a Thursday which meant I would drive the hour to work and then proceed another hour and a half onward to Cincinnati. I was very nervous to pick her up but when I arrived to the house where she lived, I was even more nervous… and confused. The house was old and run down. The wooden stairs up to the front door were coming apart and the paint was peeling - not the place I expected her to be living so I wondered if I was given a fake address! Luckily for me, when I knocked on the front door, this was the right place!While we were waiting for our reservation time, a man walked up to tell us that we were a “cute married couple” and asked us for change. Little did we know at the time that this would be foreshadowing for our future.During our meal, we laughed and swapped stories - one of which is a staple of mine: the time Blockbuster sold the toilet in the back and cost me a coveted video game. To make a long story short, I had hidden a video game by taping it to the back of the toilet in the manager’s office of a Blockbuster I was helping to shut down. When the pricing finally fell enough, I went to retrieve it and the toilet was gone - the game had been sold. This led to the question: WHO BUYS A 20 YEAR OLD USED TOILET FROM BLOCKBUSTER IN WESTERVILLE, OH???And with that, we were off! Off to the nearest Home Depot, which was in Covington, Kentucky, to find out how much a brand new toilet would cost! Using The Price Is Right Rules (closest guess without going over), we were both wrong but Emily was closest! We laughed at how absurd of a date this had become and there we shared our first kiss: in the toilet aisle of the Home Depot 10 minutes before the store closed. Finally, Emily showed me around the University of Cincinnati campus, her home for many, many years. When I finally walked her to her door, it was 1:30am and time for me to make the 2 hour drive back to Indianapolis so I could be up in time for my 6:30am carpool. Needless to say, not much work was done that Friday… but that Saturday, I saw Emily again!

It was April 21st, 2016, David drove all the way from Indiana to pick me up for our first date in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was very much a gentleman, coming to the front door of my very run down college house. We walked to his Ford Edge, his soccer mom car, which was in immaculate condition inside and out. Looking back this said a lot about him and his personality. We drove downtown to Rockbottom cafe, a restaurant recommended by my friend Logan, who still is claiming rights to the success of our first date. It was a very normal first date, we had a drink, we ordered, and then the food came. Being a starving college student, I ate most of my meal while David kind of moved his Mac n cheese around without really eating any, another foreshadowing into the future of our relationship. The conversation continued with the normal questions and information started presenting itself. David started telling me this story about when he worked at blockbuster, a very old timer thing to admit on a first date. I’ll let him tell the story, he does a much better job. But it ends with the used toilet being sold out of the back of the store. This lead us to question, how much does a new toilet really cost that you would resort to purchasing one out of a blockbuster? We decided to place bets, price is right rules. The only way to know the answer was to visit the toilet section of the nearest Home Depot. We set off to the closest Home Depot, which happened to be in Kentucky, which was the third state David had visited in the day for this date. We arrived, I was obviously right! It was right there in that very section of Home Depot that David and I had our first kiss (very romantic, as I’m sure you can all imagine). David drove me home and went on his way back to Indiana. Needless to say, the date went splendidly.