Matthew.

It is so much easier to fall in love with a mind and not a face when you don’t get to meet someone in person at first. I understand that this is how we end up with cat fishing and such, but just hear me out.

If I had met Matthew before I had started talking to him we probably wouldn’t have started talking in the first place honestly. Just looking at him he isn’t the perfect ten that everyone expects him to be, he’s not unattractive by any means, but he just isn’t what you would expect to be the type of guy I’d fall for. He’s tall and skinny as hell, blonde hipster hair, and very pale. If I had met him in person I would have thought that he was a 6, maybe a 7, decided I could do better, and just kind of moved on.

I know this makes me sound insanely superficial and purely concerned about looks, but aren’t we all to some extent? The difference between you; the person reading this article, and I; the one writing it is that I am willing to own up to my flaws.To say that I was wrong.

Fortunately, that’s not how we met.

I knew he was the person he said he was because we had several common friends and so I took the initiative to message him online. He was entering a poetry slam that I was in charge of and I figured it’d be nice to know someone. Once we started talking we couldn’t seem to stop. He spoke in poetry, weaving verses in and out of his sentences and the rhythm of his words somehow beating through our messages. he was clever and kind, talented and humble. Matt was perfect in my mind.

Since I had met him through social media and I had seen pictures of him, I had a vague idea of what he looked like but it wasn’t the same as seeing flesh and blood in front of me. Eventually, I ended up going to one of his improv shows and watching him perform. He was even more himself right there on the stage than he even had been over text message and it was it’s own kind of amazing. Every joke he made, every awkward pause, and sweet smile in my direction became real, not something hidden behind a phone anymore. And when the first words out of his mouth upon seeing me were, "Wow.. So you're the pretty girl I've been talking to," I knew that meeting him after knowing him had been the best decision I could have made.

Seeing his soul before I saw it’s casing allowed me to see him as the perfect ten he is truly. Or the perfect ten he is to me, at least. It doesn’t really matter if my friends think he is a one hundred or a zero on the outside because I’ve met the Matthew that lies underneath the surface and that is the Matthew that I love.

Once you see what’s inside, the outside tends to match.

So to me, maybe risking being cat fished is kind of worth it in the long run, because you get to fall for the personality and not their appearance. I’ll conclude with my favorite Doctor Who quote of all time, which is fitting because Matthew loves the Doctor almost as much as I love him;

“You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful, and then you actually talk to them, and five minutes later they’re dull as a brick. But then there’s other people, and you meet them and you think ’not bad, they’re okay’, and then you get to know them, and their face sort of becomes them, like their personalities written all over it, and they just they turn into something so beautiful…” ― Amy Pond, Doctor Who