🏷️ العلامة: PersonalEssay

This morning I got a message on Duolingo.

It was from a woman I’ve been mutuals with for about a year—one of those quiet, low-stakes connections where you’ve been reacting to each other’s achievements for months and keeping your streaks alive in parallel.

It was short. It was in Vietnamese. I didn’t understand it at first.

So I translated it.

It said: “Would you be my boyfriend?”

On paper, that’s nothing. A sentence. A throwaway flirt. The kind of thing that should bounce off you and disappear into the scroll of the internet.

But it didn’t.

I felt my heart kick up in a way that honestly surprised me. Not because I suddenly believed I’d met The One through a language-learning app, but because something small and human had reached out and touched me in a place I didn’t realize was that hungry.

I responded with a boundary that kept it light: something like, “On Duolingo? Sure — study boyfriend.”

I didn’t promise anything real-world. I didn’t move the conversation off-platform. I didn’t try to turn it into a story bigger than what it was. I just let it be what it was: a tiny thread of warmth between two near-strangers who share the same weird daily habit of showing up to learn.

And that was the part that felt important.

Because the effect wasn’t created by a lot of words. It wasn’t created by intimacy. It wasn’t created by plans, or photos, or a long getting-to-know-you arc.

It was created by the knowledge that there was a real human nervous system on the other side.