On the same roll of film:

One of these photos I took when I was not alone.

I did not ask to take it.

'Please stay just as you are,' I asked silently. And they did.

One of these photos I took when I was alone. 

I asked to take it; I was told, 'Yes.' 

'Please stay just as you are,' I asked. And they did.

When I first moved to Houston I worked at a real-time dating service. People came into the office building between ten a.m. and seven p.m., sat in front of a video camera and answered questions posed by an off-camera interviewer about themselves, filled out a profile that included a laminated photo and then were (mostly) matched by the employees of the service based on, well, you know that part.

No internet, no sitting at home in the dark and putting words together to explain who you think you want someone to think you are, no drinking a glass of wine to get brave enough to press Publish, no checking your email every five minutes to see if anyone returned your interest or sent a more current snapshot of themselves.

My job was to help each client write and edit their handwritten profile before I typed and filed it into a specific black binder. These black binders sat on shelves that covered the length of one very long wall, the height so high the binders on the top shelf had to be reached by a ladder. But like the other woman who shared my job (Valerie), I played a lot of matchmaker as well. After all, she and I read and re-read every word written by every client. Because we navigated them away from catch-all sentences (as in, I love taking candlelit baths and long walks on the beach), two profiles were unlikely to share many specific details; however, occasionally we could match clients by their sentence structure and abstract reasoning. For  instance, a few people would make jokes in their profiles (that, to most, were probably not recognized as jokes), so when we would run into two people who had made puns or cheeky remarks in the same place, we would bring their folders into the office of an official Matchmaker and argue for their set-up.

Of course it didn't always work. But more than once it did.

Still today I have a double fascination with online personals -- though I no longer use them myself, I love hearing about others' interactions on / from dating sites. Mostly though, I sincerely love thinking about why and how two people might find a source of enjoyment in each other. I can fantasize whole interactions between them; it's more interesting than getting in the way of a fantasy world that directly involves me.

Louis C.K. jokes that because all relationships end in sadness (eventually), when you meet someone to whom you're attracted, you're pretty much saying to yourself, 'Welcome, Sorrow.'

This day I saw two people who might have been nothing to each other or might have been all.

It was so beautiful. It was the beginning of a wonderful relationship that never began. 

Yes, Welcome, Sorrow.