How it went
Most people fall for someone over dinner. You two did it over calendar invites, matcha runs between Office 2 and Office 4, and a running argument about whether a pink Fiat 500e counts as a car.
It opened with a lake
He sent Lake Zurich with snow on the mountains, because you'd said you liked Switzerland. You answered with Concrete being dropped at Dina and Gifi’s house, looking betrayed. By June you’d worked out that your offices face each other across One Central: you in Office 2, him in Office 4.
The Swiss taxpayer defers to the Google Guide
He suggested brunch. You pulled rank. The first date was brunch at Julith in Alserkal. By Monday there had been a pool day, a late night, a near miss with a Jetour and a new title for him.
Dating, run like a workstream
He booked your first matcha run like a client call. You negotiated the scope. Two days later he asked you to send an Outlook invite to his personal email, and you started adding a Southern Italian buffer to every meeting time. Eight days after the first brunch, he said it first. You said it back nine seconds later.
A governance checkpoint on a beach
You turned the holiday into a checklist. He added a decision gate. You pointed out that a man who never asks questions he's afraid of hearing answered must have already done the risk assessment. He had, with ChatGPT.
The agenda was your relationship status, and what to tell people when they asked who you were going to Mauritius with. On the beach that Friday, the official answer was that you weren’t in a relationship yet. Nobody sent a calendar invite for what came next, but little by little it became exclusive anyway, well before Mauritius.
Farewell cake, and a correction
His Dubai project wrapped up. He got a farewell cake, and you got the job of telling him to stop saying you deserved better.
The dress code
Somewhere in July, getting dressed became a joint decision. Before every date, every trip and every dinner, one of you checks the colour so the two of you match. You packed for Mauritius by colour, he got himself a pink linen shirt, and the Indian wedding is already being planned around it.
Mauritius, the quietest week
You met his midnight landing with two kinds of shredded chicken, and he rewarded you with his first voice note, three months in. Then the chat nearly went silent: 116 messages in eight days, because you were finally in the same place.
Long distance, with live tracking
He's back in Zurich and you're the only person who knows which flight he's on. There's Istanbul at the start of October, a visa slot, flights booked on SWISS and a countdown widget pointing at November.