Just after Kimberly Lauren France and Paul Richard Green met on Tinder in early April 2021, Mr. Green floated an idea. Instead of getting to know each other through the app, they should set up a first date and, in the meantime, Google each other.
Ms. France, who goes by Kim, agreed to the plan, but told Mr. Green that his search would uncover her age, which wasn’t listed on the app. “Just so you know, I’m older than you,” she texted him days before their April 10 meeting in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. He had no problem with that and fired back a caveat of his own: “I’m fat,” he texted.
By the time the sun was filtering through the windows of her Prospect Heights apartment on April 11, they were a couple.
The careers of Ms. France and Mr. Green churn up plenty for internet sleuthing. In 1999, Ms. France, 59, was the founding editor of the Condé Nast shopping magazine Lucky. Today she is a writer and a host of the podcast “Everything is Fine.” Mr. Green, 50, is a music teacher and the founder of the School of Rock, a training academy for aspiring rock heroes. When they met in the park for a masked-up walk in spring 2021, each had cleared hurdles imposed by the other on Tinder.
Mr. Green’s list of red flags was purely musical — and included anyone expressing a predilection for jam bands. “If you liked Zac Brown Band or Dave Matthews Band, it was a straight-up deal breaker for me,” he said. He based his “super like” of Ms. France on her list of favorite Spotify artists, which inlcluded the rock bands Yo La Tengo and the Velvet Underground.
Ms. France, on the other hand, had been screening her potential matches for peacocking. “If a guy had a picture of himself on a private jet; if he had a picture of himself at the gym; if he had a picture of himself with a celebrity — those were all automatic swipe lefts,” she said. Mr. Green barely squeaked under the limbo stick. “Paul had a picture of himself with Devo.” Out of respect for that…
Read the full article here
