I met my current boyfriend while laying on another boy’s bed.

The current date of the time I’ll call Derek (as I really never want to acknowledge I dated him again, and don’t want to share his name). My boyfriend is named Jack.

I met Derek on OkCupid in October of last year, and he was one of the first guys I matched with. I hadn’t really dated too many people before this, so I was super excited to have an ‘adult’ relationship now that I was 18 and in college.

I thought that this new relationship was going to be some beautiful, mature thing where we sat around drinking coffee and going on cute dates, making some sort of intellectual connection I had never had before.

I was wrong about most of those things, as Derek drank coffee black while yelling into his phone about things I wasn’t “in the know” to, ignored me, and when we did speak, he would normally tell me how much he knew about the world by laughing at my comments and saying with all his infinite experience of being a year older than me that he was sure I would be better if I thought the same way he did. He suggested I switch majors and go to parties with him and his friends I had nothing in common with (neither of which I took his advice on).

I had known something was wrong with the relationship I was in if you can even call it a relationship with three weeks of on-and-off seeing Derek and swiping on other guys.

The icing on the cake came when I found out Derek had a girlfriend who he had been dating for almost a year. He hadn’t had the respect to tell me, despite me being honest and saying I was dating around a little and getting to know people.

I was crushed.

Enter Jack: He took me out on a date mere days after I stopped dating Derek, and immediately I felt happier than I had been in a while. I was smiling a lot, laughing more, and never did I feel like being younger was any sort of issue.

He too is a year older than me, but the difference between him and Derek could not be more different. I have taken so many car rides with Jack to nowhere, in particular, snuggled up on his couch to watch Disney movies, and cried about not knowing anything for my exams only to find that he is laughing at me not because I am being naive, but because my hair got stuck to my lipstick again.

We have the intellectual conversations I dreamt of, from politics to things I learned in women’s studies class all the way down to whether “Evermore” from Beauty and the Beast is better than “If I Can’t Love Her” from the musical version.

My friends love being with him almost as much as I do (and my best friend Peter said he is actually dating Jack and I’m the cover-up. I could believe it).

The fateful pre-Halloween weekend that made me so upset last year is now something I will be excited about again. We are both dressing up and going to a party with my friends, and I won’t mind that Derek will be there, too.

I’ve never thought of an online dating site could bring me the best and worst people I have ever dated. I’m glad now to know that some people aren’t pixel-perfect… and maybe that’s okay.