Mariel Mbewe & Soren Chikondi

I nearly told Mariel I enjoyed hiking. It was sitting there in the message box, a perfectly ordinary lie that would have required me to buy shoes and complain quietly for the rest of the relationship.

We had been talking on WaBanja for about a week. Her profile mentioned being outside, and I had decided this probably meant mountains. I liked the idea of being somebody who liked mountains. In practice, I liked looking at them from a place where somebody could bring me a sandwich.

I deleted the sentence and asked what she meant by a good day outdoors. She said a walk near the water, somewhere to sit, and not having to pretend the weather was pleasant when it was not. I put my phone down and laughed. I had spent several minutes preparing to become the wrong person for somebody who was asking for almost exactly what I liked.

When we met for a short lunch in town, she was easy to talk to—not in the way people mean when somebody does all the talking. She let a question sit. I could finish a thought without rushing to make it entertaining. When I asked about her work, she told me one thing she liked and one thing that had annoyed her that morning. I trusted that more than a cheerful summary.

The lakeside walk came a few weeks later. I arrived with a route saved on my phone. Mariel arrived with water and a packet of biscuits. Her preparation was clearly better. The route I had chosen was partly closed, and the alternative involved a steep path that neither of us wanted to take.

An earlier version of me would have insisted we could manage it. I would have mistaken persistence for competence. Instead I asked whether we should abandon the plan and find the flatter path. Mariel looked relieved. “I was hoping you would say that,” she said.

We walked slowly. We stopped to read a sign about birds and then failed to identify a single one with confidence. We sat on a bench with the biscuit packet between us. She told me she had once agreed to a running date because she did not want to seem unfit. I told her about the message I had deleted. She laughed so hard that a piece of biscuit went down the wrong way, and for a minute our romantic afternoon involved offering somebody water while trying not to laugh ourselves.

The photograph by the lake was taken months later. We were going to lunch afterwards, which explains why I was wearing a proper shirt instead of the old one Mariel calls my gardening shirt, despite my owning no garden. We had gone back to the same flat path. I knew where the benches were by then.

We have had more difficult conversations since. Being comfortable together does not make every decision easy. But I am grateful that our beginning left room for an honest answer to a small question. I still like mountains. Mariel knows exactly how far away I prefer to admire them.