Meeting a paladin

I suppose I should be grateful that my life is fairly without speed bumps these days, but it seems to reduce the amount of silliness I want to post here. Perhaps I need to rethink this. 

Something I just realized is that I have never mentioned the new, improved boyfriend here. Earlier this year, feeling unhappy about Reed's situation, I decided to grow a spine and look for someone who was unattached. After a few weeks of unhappy swiping on the Bumble app, someone caught my eye. 

Instead of telling the world exactly what sort of woman he wanted, or telling everyone how wonderful he was, he said that he thought that kindness was more important than intelligence. And he hadn't described himself as Christian conservative as 99% of local men on dating apps tend to do. 

I could see why his appeal could be limited. He didn't have children or want any, he didn't have a high-paying job, and he wasn't particularly educated. He was scruffy and badly-dressed. But he had a lot of lovely greying hair, wore glasses, had kept his shirt on, and was taller than I. So I swiped in his direction. 

It took a while for us to finally meet, as he lives some 45 miles south of me, and our first date was stymied by his testing positive for covid. But we finally met and he was wonderfully weird. He presented me with a compass as a gift and had put on a clean MTV t-shirt.

And here was the real shocker: I met him at his usual dive bar where there was a karaoke night going on, and others kept nagging him to sing. When he finally did, I realized he had a beautiful baritone voice. 

And he didn't even ask if he could kiss me until the second date, and when he did, he did what I had been waiting for: he held my face in his hands while he kissed me. And he was a wonderful kisser.