UNHINGED

I matched with Kendal Overbay on Hinge when I was twenty-six. He seemed almost impossibly aligned with the life I had always wanted. He was Christian. He wanted marriage and children. He talked about family, commitment, and a future together with the confidence of a man describing plans already in motion.

And I believed him.

What began as an unlikely dating-app romance quickly became something far more serious. There were promises of marriage. Conversations about children. Family introductions. A month spent together at his home in Washington. A major surgery I helped him through. And, little by little, a life I began rearranging around the man I believed I would marry.

Then the stories stopped adding up.

Claims about money, property, business, sobriety, and even the basic circumstances of his life began colliding with reality. Explanations became contradictions. Promises disappeared. The man who had once seemed so certain about our future became increasingly difficult to recognize.

By the time everything began to unravel, I was no longer simply trying to understand what had happened to our relationship.

I was trying to determine whether the man I loved had ever existed at all.

Unhinged is an intensely personal account of falling in love with a version of someone, overlooking the small inconsistencies that eventually become impossible to ignore, and slowly surrendering pieces of yourself in the belief that love requires patience, loyalty, and sacrifice.

Part memoir, part cautionary tale, it examines how easily certainty can replace questions, how repetition can make even extraordinary claims feel ordinary, and how difficult it can be to distinguish devotion from self-erasure while you are still inside the relationship.