The Italian Diaries: A Bumble Date in Italy

I want to be honest with you about this week because that is kind of the whole point of this.

I have been in my happy place and I have felt completely disconnected from it. Not from Italy, Italy is doing its job. From myself. It hit me like a ton of bricks and I did not see it coming.

Before I left the US I lost a contract I had been counting on. My mom is still navigating her cancer treatment. The political climate is something I genuinely do not have words for anymore. And there are some other things going on that I am not ready to talk about publicly yet but they are there, sitting on my chest. I showed up to Salento carrying all of it and then wondered why I felt heavy.

So I did what I always do when I do not know what else to do. I read. Nine books in less than a month. The month is not even over. Candles lit, boys curled up next to me, rain on the windows, and my Kindle. There are worse ways to process things and honestly it has helped. I can feel my nervous system slowly remembering that it is allowed to slow down. That is always the recalibration that happens when I come back here. It just took a little longer this time.

But here is the thing about sitting in your feelings in a beautiful medieval town in southern Italy. Eventually the town wins.

And since I have been promising you this story, and since I have had plenty of quiet evenings to think about it, let’s talk about the Bumble date.

This happened back in December, my last trip, a few days before I flew home. I want to be clear that dating was not the plan. It was never the plan. But after six total months here across two trips, feeling integrated, feeling settled, feeling like this place was actually mine, something shifted. I got curious. So I downloaded Bumble because it felt like the safest option and I opened it up and truthfully, I was a little dismayed.

I had to expand my age range just to find anyone halfway decent and even then I matched with someone who was 35. I was a few months from turning 50 and I could not wrap my head around it. He apparently could, because