Here is a partial list of things I did during that yearning, four-year stretch of singlehood: I read Susan Miller’s horoscopes every month, breathlessly skimming them until I got to my luckiest days of the month for romance—then I’d swipe through Tinder and schedule dates for all of them. I shaved my bikini line before every date, regardless of how I felt about the guy, even though it irritated my skin, because I was too embarrassed to pay for waxing (how mortifying would it be if I forked over all that money and then nobody ever even saw it?). I read the New York Times wedding announcements and calculated how old each bride was when the couple met, just to see if I was falling behind. I dropped hundreds of dollars on brightly swirled bath bombs and pretty candles so I could sit in a glowing tub, skin prickling lobster red under the hot water, and feel desperately alone. I held my phone precariously over the bathtub to snap photos for Instagram, lauding those nights as “self-care,” but that wasn’t true. I only took baths when Sophie and sometimes Carmen and all my other college friends were doing date night or eating takeout in front of Netflix with their significant others. I used to lie submerged in the tub, wondering if there was a magic trick to finding a relationship, and if so, how everyone knew what it was but me.

And then everything changed.

I catch myself laughing out loud, actually laughing, as I walk down a tree-lined block on the Upper East Side to meet Blake. It was so easy to find him. I needed a guy. I spent maybe an hour and a half looking for a guy. And I picked one, it worked out, and here we are—supposedly in love. Has finding a boyfriend been this easy the whole time? Was I simply not trying hard enough all those years? Or was it that I was trying too hard, pouring my entire heart into it, when I only needed to use my brain?

Blake had suggested we meet at Brandy’s, yet another spot in his neighborhood that’s totally foreign to me. According to my Google search earlier that day, it’s a piano bar a half block from Dorrian’s, the nightmarishly preppy bar where Blake and I first met. There are hours of live show tunes and pop ballads every night.

“Just trust me,” he had texted me earlier.