Once upon a time, a guy and a girl met…on Tinder. That should have been a warning sign from the start; people don’t meet their "true loves" on the infamous hook-up app. We both sifted through tens of matches before we matched each other. The conversation was casual and basic: where do you go to school? Where do you live? What do you like to do? Somewhere along the way we learned that we were both writers and that is definitely something I needed in my life.

I was an idealistic, hopeless romantic that believed that no one could fall deeper in love than two writers. I was eighteen and he was twenty-two—warning sign number two. We texted back and forth for a few weeks and shared our writings. Sharing my pieces with him was more intimate than any sexual relationship because I was letting him see who I was behind the façade I lived. Max is unbelievably talented; he had a darkness that I understood, but didn’t know where it came from— warning sign number three. He wrote about death and sadness, something I knew all too well. I didn’t ask why because I thought I already knew. I had always retreated into writing when things sucked and I figured that was where it came from.

One night he said that he had to tell me something serious and I thought he was joking so I made a crack about how I had known he was a serial killer all along—a running joke about meeting strangers on Tinder. He didn’t laugh this time; he was quiet in a way I hadn’t seen before. He and I had had serious conversations before about deaths in our lives and our families, but he almost looked ashamed this time. He finally found the words he was looking for as he told me he was a recovering drug addict. This seemingly normal guy who came from a middle-class family and was very bright was a drug addict. He told me about how for forty-five seconds he had died and it was the day he decided to stop. He had been sober for one hundred days at that point.

I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile the man I had come to know and this past I didn’t know about. I told him how strong I thought he was for staying sober and asked a lot of questions. When he told me that he would understand if I couldn’t see him anymore, I seriously considered running, but I didn’t. I was naïve; I figured I could help him. Max was the perfect guy, the kind you introduce to your judgmental family, as long as you didn’t mention his addiction. I couldn’t help that I really liked him.

He worked forty-five hour weeks and spent at least five hours a week at NA meetings so he didn’t really have time for me, but he tried. I kept telling myself that we could work it out, we could make time for each other. The problem was that I had time for him and was crushed every time he canceled a date or forgot that he promised to call. Disappointment was a part of our relationship, a part that he couldn’t see the extent of but still felt guilty about. Our relationship was glue and tape, constantly being fixed only to fall apart.

It wasn’t the drugs that ruined us. It was the warning signs that I had ignored. He had been on Tinder because he didn’t have time to meet anyone in person, our age difference left us in really different places in our lives, and his past was too dark for me to wade through. He had watched drugs kill his friends and it darkened him. I guess I realized that I spent more time missing him than spending time with me. My naïve heart tore when I learned that loving someone couldn’t make a relationship work, life wasn’t full of “once upon a time”’s.