AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I swear you are the least romantic matchmaker in all of Boston.” Becca rolls her eyes.
“I’m romantic enough,” I retort. “Besides, it’s all about the data, really. And we crush at that.”
“No,youcrush at that.” Becca laughs. “I’m the kind of girl who lives and breathes the world of rom-coms and meet-cutes. Far more romantic than spreadsheets and data analysis. That’s your area of expertise, not mine. I still prefer to believe in the fairytale kind of love.”
“Whatever gets the job done.” I smirk with a wink.
“Speaking of which, we have a busy schedule today. With the holidays fast approaching, this place is going to be jam-packed.”
“It always is this time of year.”
After everyone has had their fun with hot-girl-slash-hot-guy summer and autumn begins to approach, people start getting lonely and depressed. They get tired of all the apps that only offer quick hookups, desperately craving for real connections.
That’s where I come in.
Love Moore Matchmaking Agency’s sole focus is to find these lonely souls, Miss or Mr. Right, so they can finally wave their single days goodbye and start a new life with their perfectpartner. With a boastful ninety-four percent success rate, Love Moore has slowly climbed its way into becoming one of the most successful matchmaking agencies on the East Coast. It’s gotten to a point where I’ve had to turn people away or add them to our extensive waitlist of clients who are just dying to find their perfect match.
Love is hard.
Especially in our jaded age.
Not everyone is willing to put in the time or compromise their way of life to include someone else in it. Still harder is finding someone you feel safe enough to be vulnerable with. Not everyone has that capacity since the world has taught them that displaying such emotions is considered a weakness.
Luckily, I have been able to code a formula that has made matchmaking almost effortless. Almost being the keyword here, since there is a lot of work that goes into findingthe one. Still there is no greater joy than bringing two hearts together and watching them fall in love against all the obstacles this apathetic world holds.
Of course, if you told me this would be my life’s work ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I always assumed that after graduating from MIT, I would move to Silicon Valley and get involved in a start-up.
But when the time came, my heart wasn’t in it.
I love everything that has to do with coding and high tech, but it’s the personal one-on-one relationships that really give my life meaning.
And besides, I could never leave Boston.
This is my home.
My own soulmate, if you will.
Unfortunately, not everyone agrees.
My gaze slides off the computer to the old picture frame of Cooper and me at his parent’s summer home up in Nantucket a few years back.
We’ve been high-school sweethearts since we were sixteen years old, but after graduation, I stayed here to go to MIT, while Cooper went off to NYU Stern School of Business. After we got our respective degrees, he got a job at a prestigious hedge fund and private equity firm while I busted my ass trying to get Love Moore up and running. It’s been five years since we made the decision to continue with our long-distance relationship so that we could focus on our jobs, and to my bitter disappointment, I don’t see it ending anytime soon.
In the beginning, when Love Moore was still trying to find its feet, Cooper would beg me to move in with him in Manhattan, saying that my business had a better chance of succeeding there than it would here. But when the agency finally began making a name for itself, he stopped making such requests.
I admit I was relieved when he ceased to badger me into moving because that meant he finally understood how important it was for me to stay in Boston. Uprooting my whole life to be with him just when things were starting to shape up with the business, seemed impractical to me.
Not because I didn’t love Coop, I did. I do.
I just wanted to succeed on my own turf first before thinking about opening an agency in the Big Apple. My game plan has always been to open affiliated offices in all the major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. But these things take time and don’t just happen overnight.
One of the things I loved about Coop was that he understood the hustle needed to make a mark on this world. He was just as driven as I was. Early on in our relationship, we made it clear to one another that we would spend our twenties focusedon building a career, so in our thirties, we would be established enough to start a family.
On paper, it all added up perfectly.
But lately, I feel we’ve become complacent in our long-distance relationship. Whereas before we used to spontaneously do little things to keep the spark alive and see each other every week, now I’m lucky if I get a quick text every day or spend a full weekend a month with him.
We’ve been dating for ten years now, and sometimes I wonder if I even know the person I’m supposed to be in love with anymore. There’s no denying that I’ve been feeling restless with our arrangement. Maybe it’s seeing all these couples find their happily ever after that has me so disappointed that my own happy ending feels like it’s permanently pressed on pause.
