In the Spring of 2005, both Dave and Torrey were active JDaters®. Dave lived in Berkeley and was a graduate student at Cal, and Torrey was living in San Francisco while in graduate school at SFSU. When the summer rolled around, she had graduated and moved back down to San Diego temporarily while she hunted for jobs, and he had accepted a summer internship at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto.
Meanwhile, their JDate profiles indicated they were both living in San Francisco. Why, you ask? Dave’s theory was that the dating pool in SF would have more viable prospects than the dating pool in Palo Alto. Torrey’s reason was simple carelessness — she had forgotten to update her profile when she moved away from the area.
Lo and behold, their profiles matched up one day due to the proximity of where they supposedly lived.
How we met? Her version: Just after the 4th of July, I got an email from Dave through JDate saying that I spelled everything right (thank you spell-check) and would I like to have lunch? My initial reaction was complete horror that I forgot to update my profile and I had been misleading the entire JDate community for the last month about my location! I replied simply to say sorry, I could not have lunch because I was in San Diego, but perhaps we could chat on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) some time.
After chatting online and bonding over topics like our love for the Bay Area and shared childhood experiences of shopping at Old Orchard in the Chicago suburbs, he asked me for my phone number. He needed some advice and asked if I was good at giving advice! Ha! Nice pick-up line buddy, I’m a professional counselor.
The following week he offered to fly down to San Diego to meet me. If you knew him, you would know how out of character that kind of offer would be. However, I didn’t really know him yet. Initially I thought this was creepy, but my friends told me to let him fly down. So I did. I asked what his friends said about his plan and he told me he didn’t even ask them because he didn’t want to be talked out of it. Therefore, only 10 days passed between our initial emails and our in-person meeting at the San Diego airport. For our first date I took him to the world famous San Diego zoo and we went out for Mexican food.
We’ve been together ever since and now we have a beautiful daughter!
Torrey and Dave
Palo Alto, California