- On our first date, he told me his dad was a top gun pilot.

His sister, a world champion weightlifter on the U.S.

Olympic team.

His mother, a retired nurse and a cancer survivor.

And himself, he survived a brain tumor.

Now, I want y'all to raise your hand if you think he is lying, is in witness protection, or he's trying to sell me some crypto or anything like that.

Raise your hands.

He's even raising his own hand right now.

And if my mom was in this room tonight, she would also be raising her hands because she didn't believe me when I told her about him, and my best friend didn't either.

He ran a background check.

And while my mom actually confirmed that my now father-in-law wears reading glasses through the FAA website.

And honestly, I had my doubts too during this date.

In fact, I ghosted him the first time we talked.

And for people that are unfamiliar with millennial and Gen Z lingo, ghosting is essentially you're talking to someone and then you just stop talking to them randomly.

Could be on purpose and it could be on accident.

Mine's on accident because I do not remember talking to him at all.

But in my defense, we matched right before my second year of grad school.

I was already really deep into my museum work, my thesis drafts and designing maps.

I had artifacts to catalog layers to digitize.

I did not have time for a love life I wasn't serious about, because again, I didn't remember him, but he actually still remembered me.

So months later, after I had my job lined up at the museum and my thesis nearly finished, I started swiping again.

And there he was again, that I didn't remember.

But his profile didn't even have dogs, which for the record is a major requirement in my life.

But he did have a cute picture of him with a bird.

And I guess any animal counts, considering he fooled me twice.

And I didn't think it was going to be all that serious either.

I didn't date before him and I never really dated at all, especially beyond a first date.

And it wasn't because I couldn't, I just didn't for trust, for distractions.

Who knows?

I didn't need heartbreak to build a cage around my heart.

I knew how to be alone because I am an only child too.

And I was just focused on so many other things that I didn't need another person to fill up that space.

I was distracted with goals.

I was focusing on becoming an archeologist.

An undergrad, I discovered lifelong friends.

Grad school, I started my career and career was going to be for having a bunch of dogs.

Romance was optional.

And then I met him and something clicked in that cage, not opened, just unlocked.

And there was something about the way he did ramble at that sushi restaurant, the way he told his stories, how he would still listen to me when I talked.

And I actually am really shy even though I am on stage right now.

And I broke my own rule that night.

The don't go back to his place on the first date rule.

I stayed overnight and I even left my leftovers in the fridge when I rushed home the next morning on purpose.

And that scared me more than any of his family facts because even though we had just met, I knew this.

And my best friend did find something terrible in that background check.

If my mom did uncover, he was in fact in witness protection and selling crypto, my heart would break and that would have been a first.

And I didn't believe that because it was love at first sight.

But it wasn't until a couple months later I realized what I was experiencing was love at first sight.

Because while the world was focused on COVID, I was fighting something quieter.

I've already been to the ER a few times within that year and each time the doctors would say it was something small, "You're just having a stomach bug again, you're just stressed.

It's your IBS."

And I accepted it because I am an archeologist, so you don't disturb the deeper layers unless you have to.

But what I didn't realize was that I was burying myself.

I didn't notice the weight loss, didn't notice how little I was eating, the brain fatigue, how little strength I really had.

I was cataloging all these symptoms like artifacts and if they didn't belong to me, they belonged in a museum until one night I was on the bathroom floor.

And when you're in too much pain to get off that tile, you can't put those symptoms away in boxes.

I stared at my phone for a long time before I texted him, "Can you take me to the ER?"

At this point, we've only been dating for a couple months.

From his perspective, he'll tell y'all it was on our third date.

But from my perspective, it was the first time I let someone see me without independence, without strength.

And I was scared because I was scared because the real reason I had that cage was that I was scared he wouldn't come, but he didn't hesitate.

Instead, he dropped everything.

He helped me into his car.

He stayed in the ER while I drifted in and out.

He answered questions when my brain felt foggy.

He paid attention when doctors once again dismissed things because there was more visits, more tests, more layers pulled back until finally Crohn's disease.

And that was a diagnosis that felt like uncovering ruins I never wanted to find.

And here's the part that changed everything because statistically they say once a diagnosis like this happens, a significant other leaves, but he broke the statistics.

He didn't step away.

In fact, he stepped closer.

He learned the terminology, memorized the diet and even skipped fiber with me.

He sat beside me in waiting rooms and waited with me during the long calls with insurance.

And that was the moment vulnerability deepened everything because I spent my life being capable, independent, then suddenly I just couldn't do it alone anymore.

And when I once believed someone would leave me seeing a broken me and why I had this cage, he stayed.

And when that lock on my heart finally didn't just clicked, it opened despite what an earlier version of myself would have believed and would have imagined.

I used to think that love in first sight was reckless, just something in books and movies.

Slow burn was the way to go.

That stability meant slow.

But what I learned is that sometimes your heart recognizes safety before your brain catches up.

I even made choices that that same earlier version of myself would have scoffed at making, keeping with the Rachel mainsake, stand for the boy, ugh.

But I turned down an archeological position that would have taken me across the southeast, traveling to new places and getting closer to what I thought my dream was going to be, traveling around the world as an archeologist.

But life shifted and I didn't stop being those things.

I'm still an archeologist and I'm still independent.

I still have excavations in one of the coolest historical sites in the world.

And I really, really like my job because I teach kids archeology in a way that I don't think I could do at any other job.

And I became something else too.

I became part of a team.

I became someone who didn't ghost.

I became someone who stayed because in a year when the world felt isolated, when ECU was super empty and going to the hospitals made my future uncertain, I learned that community doesn't have to be big.

Sometimes it starts with one person who refused to leave.

So yes, Top Gun Dad is real.

The Olympic sister is real and the brain tumor survivor is real.

But the most unbelievable part is that the girl who built the cage around her heart unlocked it and let someone stay.

Wow.