I Agreed to Be Her Fake Boyfriend for One Night and Now She’s My Wife
I reached across the table and took her hand.
“Your mom’s pretty smart.”
“Don’t tell her that. She’ll never let me forget it.”
We flew home and moved into our apartment as a married couple. We hung our wedding photos on the walls, including the ones from the bar where we met. Friends who visited always asked about those photos. We told the story every time, and it never got old.
6 months after the wedding, Sophia got a call from a podcast that focused on unusual love stories. They’d heard about us through a mutual friend and wanted to interview us.
“Should we do it?” she asked.
“Why not? We’ve already told everyone we know.”
We spent an hour on the podcast telling our story. The host kept laughing in disbelief.
“So you just grabbed him without any plan?”
“Without any plan,” Sophia confirmed.
“And you just went along with it?” he asked me.
“I did.”
“Why?”
I thought about it.
“Because life is short and boring things happen every day. And when something interesting shows up, even if it’s weird and makes no sense, you should probably say yes.”
The podcast episode went viral. We started getting messages from strangers telling us they loved our story, that it gave them hope, that it made them believe in taking chances.
One message stood out. It was from a woman who said she’d been at that same bar the night Sophia grabbed me. She’d seen the whole thing.
“I watched you two at dinner through the restaurant window across the street. I was waiting for my own date who never showed up. I was feeling sorry for myself, but then I saw you two and I thought, ‘at least someone’s having an interesting night.'”
She continued.
“I had no idea what I was actually watching. Reading about how you ended up married made me realize that sometimes what looks like chaos from the outside is actually the beginning of something beautiful. Thank you for sharing your story.”
Sophia cried when she read it.
“We affected a stranger.”
“We did.”
“That’s insane.”
“Everything about us is insane.”
A year after our wedding, we went back to the bar on our anniversary. It had become a tradition. The bartender saw us coming and already had our drinks ready.
“The anniversary couple,” he said, setting down a beer for me and wine for Sophia. “Year 1. How’s married life?”
“Weird and wonderful,” Sophia said. “Same as everything else about us.”
We sat at our usual spots and toasted to surviving a year of marriage.
