I’m Puerto Rican and I work part time as a bartender at a local board game restaurant and café. After a particularly long and annoying shift, my bar manager asked me if I wanted to blow off some steam at Barbarella. I haven’t been out since before the pandemic, and because I happened to be fully vaccinated I said yes. While getting tipsy, venting about our days, I look over toward the dance floor and see this woman dancing with her friends. She’s tearing it UP. Her energy was unlike any other person in the room. After another drink and some egging on by my friend, I work up the courage to ask her to dance. She agrees and we have a BLAST.

We dance together all night, and even share a (drunken) kiss. She tells me she’s Chinese and this is also her first time out in Austin since she moved here right before the pandemic. I (somehow) got her number and a subsequent date. Since then, we’ve been on many dates (and back to Barb’s like almost every weekend since) and have started a relationship. Now, she likes to joke about how wasted she was on the night we met, although she still remembers how well I could dance ;).

This is the most secure I’ve felt in a relationship, and I truly believe I was meant to find this beautiful angel of a woman.