Why I Moved to Mexico City for a First Date

This month marks Mexican Independence Day, but also five years since I moved to Mexico. Well, sort of. It started with a first date and a pandemic love affair.

Here’s the story + a song that feels like a soundtrack of this time. Please subscribe and comment below if you want more personal narratives like this from my life.

I. The Match

In 2020, the world shut down. My travel filmmaking career hit a wall, ostensibly because of the pandemic but mostly because my working relationship with my brother had become so toxic I had to choose between my dream career and my mental health. I made the difficult decision to leave my YouTube channel, with no idea what would come next.

After over a decade of nonstop travel, I suddenly found myself back in my childhood bedroom in San Diego, quarantining with my parents. For the first time in my adult life, I had nothing to do. No flights. No shoot days. No edit deadlines.

Just stillness.

The moment I slowed down, I fully collapsed. The combination of constant travel and the endless pressure to feed the insatiable algorithm had pushed me into a state of terminal burnout. I knew the only way to recover was to stop everything causing the burnout—not just creating social media, but also consuming it. For the first time since creating my Instagram account, I deleted it from my phone.

For a month, I deliberately did next to nothing—just sat, read, and stared at the ceiling like a Victorian poet with Wi-Fi. I saw it as a unique opportunity to deliberately cultivate stillness and test Blaise Pascal’s theory that all of humanity’s problems comes from our inability to sit alone in a room quietly.

My father saw it as proof of everything Tucker Carlson had warned him about in his nightly monologues on Fox News: an entitled, avocado-toast-eating millennial, Burning-Man-surviving Leerjet Liberal collecting stimulus checks instead of going back to work.

But when the mental noise cleared, something rose up from the silence: Before I was a YouTuber, I was a writer. I needed to write a book.

But where? LA was too expensive a city for unemployment and quarantine. My communal-living-pods-in-the-desert plans with friends fizzled out. The only place in the world that felt normal was New Zealand, my dad’s homeland, which was COVID-free and only open to citizens. I’d never lived there before and felt almost entirely disconnected from Kiwi culture. But with my friends urging me to take advantage of my passport privilege, fall of 2020 felt like the perfect time to get back in touch with my roots.

I bought a one-way ticket to Auckland for the day after the US election, gave myself permission to start over, and started closing down my life in LA.

To kill time before the move, I started dating. Not just swiping, but dating intentionally. Maybe it was because I knew I was leaving, but I felt myself opening up to love in ways I’d never allowed during my jet-setting days as a travel YouTuber.

I opened up Raya (a leftover from my LA era) and found the remnants of my previous emotional unavailability. Hundreds of matches that began with fire and fizzled out when I inevitably had to take off for another film shoot overseas.

Sure, Raya was full of influencers and social climbers. But it also showed you a mixture of people from around the world. With in-person dates mostly impossible, I decided to use Raya’s global reach to challenge myself to date with no expectations beyond getting to know more about who I vibed with. With sex off the table, I was able to focus purely on emotional connections.

So every time I matched with someone, I suggested a FaceTime date. No more dead-end convos. No more ghosting. Straight to pajama coffee dates in Sydney, London, Tokyo.

Then came Andrea. A Mexican designer who’d just moved to Mexico City. A polyglot with a Paris-Milan-Madrid fashion pedigree and the smoky, Lebanese-Mexican glamour of Salma Hayek. Her Instagram was all moody light and tasteful restraint. I swiped right. A notification popped up:

"You’re out of likes. Come back in 12 hours or buy more for $9.99."

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Fuck that! I refused to pay. If it was meant to be, the algorithm would deliver.

Sure enough, the next day, her profile reappeared. Out of likes again.

The app knew. It was dangling her in front of me like a carrot, and I refused to salivate on command.

The third time I saw her profile, I swiped with a silent prayer. We matched.

YES!

We jumped on a video call. Two hours later, I was hooked. She’d just moved to the city to start a design studio. Staying with a friend in Condesa. I told her I knew the neighborhood. I’d visited in 2016. At the time I’d dreamed of returning one day to write a book.

Now, talking to her, that didn’t feel like a fantasy. I had time. I had savings. I could see Mexico from my bedroom window. And now, a third reason: I wanted to meet her.

Every day that week, we talked for hours. It felt mutual. Curious. Light. I hadn’t felt that in years. I sent her the 36 Questions to Fall in Love. We took turns asking each other each question over the coming weeks. By the time we reached the last question, she added her own:

Entonces, ¿qué pedo? Nos vamos a conocer en persona o no?

Yes, I told her. I wanted to meet in person. I offered her the white lie that my friends were going to Mazunte and maybe I’d stop by CDMX on the way.

She invited me to stay with her for a few nights on my way to Oaxaca. I quickly admitted my friends were flaky and that maybe I should just visit her instead.

She agreed. She had just moved into a place in Condesa and told me to come shortly after Mexican Independence Day. I booked my flight that night.