By Kristyna Moore 
In my early- to mid-twenties, everything felt like it was unraveling.
I was depressed, uninspired, dealing with health issues I didn’t fully understand, and carrying the weight of past trauma I didn’t yet have the language for. At the same time, I was wading through a dating pool that felt more like I was unintentionally starring in an episode of Punk’d, all while still carrying the scars of a serious relationship that ended in betrayal—cheating that didn’t just break my heart, but shattered my sense of trust in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
For a while, I stayed there. Trying to function inside a life that didn’t feel like mine anymore.
And then, at 26, something shifted. Not in a dramatic, movie-scene kind of way, but in a steady certainty I couldn’t ignore. I decided to move across the country to Nashville, where my brother and sister-in-law lived.
I didn’t have a job lined up. I didn’t have a plan that made sense. I just knew I needed to leave, and that I needed to go there.
Looking back, I can see how much of that decision was survival disguised as spontaneity. I needed a reset. I needed distance. I needed air.
Nashville gave me that.
It also gave me loneliness. I didn’t know anyone outside my family members, and I was starting over in a place where I had no history, no built-in community. So I did what a lot of people do when they’re rebuilding—I went on Match.com.
I wasn’t looking for anything serious. I was just trying to meet people. And I was cautious. Guarded. Long-distance was something I had already done once, and it ended in a kind of pain I wasn’t eager to repeat.
That’s when he messaged me.
One in a sea of profiles, but something about it stood out. He mentioned our shared love of Buster Posey; he was a Florida State fan, and I was a lifelong San Francisco Giants fan. It was small, but it felt like a thread of familiarity in a place where I had none.
Still, I hesitated. He lived a couple of hours away in Huntsville, Alabama, and I had already decided I wasn’t doing long-distance again.
But after a month or so, something softened. I agreed to meet him.
He drove up on a Friday night after work and met me at a local restaurant. I still remember him getting out of his blue 350Z. It was cinematic in the most unmistakable way—time slowed, my heart raced, and I remember thinking, Why in the world have you been putting him off?
We sat down and talked. And kept talking.
Hours passed without effort. The kind of conversation where you don’t realize how late it is until the chairs are stacked and the staff is waiting to close. We stayed until they finally kicked us out at 3 a.m.
And somewhere in that stretch of time, I knew.
Not in a loud, overwhelming way. But like I had just met someone who was going to change the trajectory of my life.
Two years later, I moved to Huntsville to be with him.
We got married.
And then we had two beautiful children who have completely reshaped my understanding of love, purpose, and everything in between.
Now, when I look back, I can trace it step by step and see how much had to happen exactly the way it did for me to end up here.
The heartbreak. The trauma. The decisions that didn’t make sense at the time. The version of me who was drowning inside it all.
None of it felt meaningful when I was in it.
But now, with distance, I can see something I couldn’t see then: Had any of it gone differently, I may never have left. I may never have started over. I may never have opened that message or said yes to that dinner.
And I may never have met him.
I may never have become a mother to the two tiny humans I now can’t imagine my life without.
Sometimes I think about that version of me, the one who felt like everything was falling apart, and I wish I could tell her this: I believe everything happens for a reason.
Even the heartbreak. Even the detours. Even the parts that break you.
Because all of it led me to him—to them—to this life I almost missed.
by Brea Schmidt 
by Tiffany Nardoni 
by Anastasia Smothers 
