My husband and I met on JDate in the summer of 2006. Coincidentally, both of us were only a few weeks out of previous relationships. We now joke that we were each other’s rebounds. Dave’s first email to me was a one-sentence question about my photo. Because it was a photo of me sitting on a beach, he asked, “What beach are you on?” I almost did not respond to him because his age was just at the upper limit of the range I was seeking (he is four years older than me). However, I liked the question because it showed he looked closely at my profile, so I answered him back. I later learned that I inadvertently gave him the wrong answer because I always assume that any time I’m on a beach, it’s the beach my family owns a house on, and in that particular photo I was on vacation at Coney Island! That first exchange perfectly foreshadowed who we would become as individuals in a relationship together. Dave examines details carefully with precision. I, on the other hand, have a short attention span. It’s like yin and yang, and it gives our relationship the perfect balance.

We met for drinks on a weeknight for our first date, and had a great conversation. It was amazing how many commonalities we shared. Turns out we had both been vegetarians for 12 years (an amazing coincidence since neither of us had indicated that in our JDate profile), and we both got our MBAs at the same school, in the same program, and we apparently even overlapped by one term (even though we didn’t know each other when we were there). We even went to high school in the same town.

On our second date we did karaoke with my friends. Afterwards, around 1am, we were outside the bar and somehow the conversation turned to handstands. I did gymnastics for a couple years when I was a kid and I had indicated to Dave that I still liked to do handstands. Next thing I knew he was walking on his hands down the sidewalk. I had never dated a guy that could do that! Everyone cracks up now when we walk alongside each other on our hands.

Things moved very fast after that. Three weeks after we had met each other, we were meeting each other’s parents. One week after that, I went to his brother’s wedding in New York City. My cat and I moved in to Dave’s condo four months later. We got married in 2008, on the same date as my parent’s wedding anniversary. Dave had proposed to me inside a fortune cookie. He later explained how he had used tweezers to remove the fortune out of the cookie and had inserted his own slip of paper on which he wrote, “Tonight is the night you’ve been waiting for.”

Our wedding was the perfect extension of us – traditional, yet quirky. We did a choreographed disco Hustle dance to “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” by Andy Gibb for our wedding dance. We spent two months with a private instructor learning the routine. It is now just over four years that we have been married, and we are living in the same condo with our 2.5-year-old son, 15-month-old daughter, and, of course, the cat.

We really do balance each other perfectly. Dave is extremely organized, detail-oriented, meticulous, and focused. I am more messy, forgetful, and impulsive. He keeps me grounded, and I bring the creativity. He helps me to remember my phone and keys, and I help him to remember to put work aside and to play more. He is a Virgo and I am a Pisces, two signs on opposite sides of the zodiac which means we fill in where the other lacks. However, we also share a lot of the same important characteristics that define who we are as people. We both are adventurous, quirky, compassionate, vegetarian, youthful, and, of course, Jewish.

Thank goodness I decided to email him back.

Erika and Dave
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts