How I pulled my college tour guide...& what happens if the story is better than the relationship

Babe wake up my lore just dropped

If there’s one thing about me, it’s that I love a good story—a good love story.

I know that is super Captain Obvious coming from a sex and dating writer. I’m nothing if not stereotypical.

My personality is based on some combination of the following: Emily Henry rom-com novels, Sex and the City (Samantha Rising, Charlotte Sun), middle child syndrome, Phoebe Buffet supremacy, Snapchat nudes, and my parents still being together.

All of these puzzle pieces have birthed me into a slutty lover girl who wants nothing less than to find the love of her life in a way that would make for an excellent memoir anecdote.

As early as my first crush—first grade, Charlie Morgan—I’ve been a girl who fantasized about the future with every cute boy who crossed my path, from assigned math partners to celebrity crushes. With my head on my pillow at night, I’d fall asleep writing our story in my head, with the meet-cute always being a key plot point.

He was my math partner and gave me the homework answers when I forgot mine. He was my first crush at summer camp, and we kissed on Shabbat. He was the blonde singer of One Direction, recognized me in the crowd, brought me backstage and took my virginity, etc.

You’d think that as I got older, this fantastical way of thinking would have subsided. But just like my boobs and trusty delusion, it only grew. With age, it felt like my romantic love story was actually in reach. I could ask boys out. I could meet someone on the airplane—without my dad sitting next to me. Niall Horan could legally have sex with me. Anything was possible.

Armed with my virginity, random confidence, and desire for my meet-cute, 17-year-old-me was ready to start touring colleges. But true to form, I didn’t just find my dream school—I caught a hardcore crush. On my tour guide.

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It was the beginning of my senior year of high school.

I was pretty sure that Kenyon (a small liberal arts school in Ohio) was my top choice of colleges—my counselor told me it was one of the best schools for creative writing which I was hoping to study, and during my first visit to Kenyon the summer prior, I felt a nice warm feeling on campus. I remember sitting down with my dad after the tour, both of us with shy smiles on our faces. He was usually a man of few words, not one to give an opinion before I expressed how I felt. But without hesitation, he told me, “I think this is a winner.”

It’s the perfect meet-cute, I thought to myself. Me and Kenyon have a good story.

But once it became time to decide if I wanted to apply Early Decision—locking myself in if they accepted me—I decided to visit one last time, just to be sure.

At my first visit, my tour guide was a nice, curly-haired girl who studied something like sociology and seemed like someone I’d enjoy being friends with. For my second visit, I was placed into a group with a male tour guide: he was tall-ish, maybe 5’10, had short brown hair tucked into a baseball cap, a sweet face with rounded cheeks that I was dying to pinch, and a warmth that made me think I’d like to bring him home for Passover.

Immediately I was crushing, trying to catch his eyes as he walked backwards and ask smart questions about class offerings or campus life. As the tour was ending, we all took his card with his full name and student email (perfect for online sleuthing). I didn’t need to go to the info session after to make my decision: I was going to Kenyon.

Back with my high school friends after the visit, we sat in a circle at lunch and I told them all about my crush, using his Facebook profile photo as a visual aid. We discussed how cute he was and how we hoped I’d get to meet him at Kenyon. It was all very hypothetical—the only kind of romance I really knew.

Later that year, I got my acceptance letter, and that summer, I lost my virginity to a fellow summer camp counselor who would become my first love. We cut ties before I went off to college, but it took me a while to get over it. I found myself crying over him a lot during the first semester, wishing we could be together. In active heartbreak mode, my cute tour guide has completely slipped from my memory.

That is, until the first week of second semester, right after winter break. I had finally finished mourning my summer love, and had just confessed to my best friend that “I’m ready to meet someone new.” The timing couldn’t have been better.

I was in the lobby of our campus theater, chatting with a girl named Anna as we waited to see our friend in a play. I was dressed neither cool nor cute, wearing blue striped leggings, an oversized sweater that was randomly cropped, and frizzy hair half-up. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him: The same pinchable cheeks. A new baseball cap. “That’s my tour guide,” I blurted out to Anna, interrupting her train of thought. “I had the biggest crush on him.”

I asked if she’d walk over to say hi with me, but she said no (#fake #wearen’tfriendsanymore). Feeling not necessarily brave or pretty but overwhelmed with the knowledge that this could be a really good story, I walked right over to him, sans Anna.

“I’m so sorry, this is so random,” I laughed, “but I think you were my tour guide. I just have to say thank you, because you really inspired me to go to Kenyon.” He smiled graciously and thanked me back, sharing that he was now a Junior and just returned from study abroad—hence why I hadn’t seen him on campus yet. I chatted with him and his friends briefly before making my exit. I was giddy. My crush had flooded back as quickly as it left me.

A few days later, we matched on Tinder. He claims that he rejoined the app just to find me.

From there, we started dating and never stopped. I was thrilled to text my high school friends and report back that “IM GOING ON A DATE WITH TOUR GUIDE” and “TOUR GUIDE ASKED ME FORMAL” and “TOUR GUIDE AND I JUST HAD THE CUTEST DATE EVER IM OBSESSED.”

As I fell in deeper and deeper, I never really stopped to ask myself—do I like him, or the story?

There was certainly a big part of me that liked him. He was a really good boyfriend to me. He’d always communicate, always make time for me. He was nice to my friends, and would buy us alcohol or let us borrow his car or flirt with his friends. He’d help me with my homework if I fell behind, stay late with me in the library even if he had finished his work for the night.

We were both really good at being in the relationship. So we stayed in it, for almost a year and a half. He met my parents in the hospital when my shoulder dislocated. I stayed at his childhood home with him for weeks during COVID. We fell in love, and it was a very companionate love. He was a great friend to me. But my heart wasn’t in it. The fire—the kind of fire that you need with your boyfriend when you’re 20-years-old—just wasn’t there.

A piece of my gut always knew this, but I never wanted to admit it to myself. So I stayed in the relationship because I was good at it. Because I liked the story and what the story said about me.

It took me months to get the courage to break-up with him. It was especially hard since he was such a great person and hadn’t done anything wrong. But a voice in my head—the voice that now authors Railed—told me that there would be other good stories out there for me that might be worth telling.

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Dating in 2026, everyone is obsessed with how they meet their person.

They want it to be organic, in person, with worst case scenario being a Hinge match that opened with “hey.” Of course, I’m not above this line of thinking, and I totally understand where that desire comes from. But having dated my perfect story already, I think I’ve learned firsthand the drawbacks of the alluring meet-cute—and how it can suck you in.

I know now that the memoir chapter about the love of my life (TBD) will probably be much less about the first 5 minutes or 5 days or 5 weeks of us meeting and much more about the shit they do that annoys me and what our relationship means and how awesome our sex is and what it was like to marry someone who came from One Direction lol okay kidding but you get the point.

And maybe more importantly, my memoir will be about me and the wonderful stories that my single life has given me—an experience I wouldn’t dream of changing.

So, if you’re feeling insecure because you’re dating someone but the origin story isn’t giving rom-com, let that shit go. And just enjoy the story you’re writing together. That was so corny. Bye.