Memphis Flyer - 2/11/2021

e k Ta ! t r a e H

COVER STORY BY CHRIS McCOY PAINTING BY LILY BEASLEY

Stories of love going right when the world is going wrong. Morgan and Webb

Fe b r u a r y 1 1 - 1 7 , 2 0 2 1

Morgan Stewart lives alone. A self-described workaholic, she likes it that way — or she did until the coronavirus upended the world last March. “I was lonely and bored,” she says. “Before, I had the excuse of, ‘I don’t have time to date.’” Webb Hunt works at a Covington Pike car dealership. He was having no luck meeting people. “I thought, maybe I just need to go outside of my bubble and date people. But I don’t know how to do that.” So, in April 2020, Morgan and Webb both decided to download the dating app Tinder. “I matched with her because she was cute, and she liked charcuterie and Sailor Moon.” “I thought he was a little bit too cute for me,” says Morgan. “But in one of his pictures, he had a carrot butt in his eye like a pirate, and was kind of scowling. That made me think he’s silly enough for me. The thing that got my attention about Webb when he started messaging me — and I feel like men 10 on dating apps don’t do this — he asked me personal questions about myself based on

the information I provided in my pictures in my biography. There was a lot of witty banter back and forth between us, then I gave him my phone number.” “From my perspective, that was the most important part of it — letting her decide,” Webb says. Morgan and Webb

For date nights, Webb would have a meal delivered to Morgan, and they would watch You’ve Got Mail and the Sharknado films in their respective homes. Morgan sent Webb chocolates from Phillip Ashley, and they started exchanging love songs on Spotify. They were on FaceTime every night. “We

read a book together,” Morgan says. “We have a lot of overlapping nerdy interests. He’s a sci-fi person and I’m a children’s book person. So we read a sci-fi children’s book.” “It was just really cool,” Webb says. “It seemed like an active relationship, even though we’d never met in person yet.” Finally, in May, they decided to take the next step. “I had a lot of anxiety about deciding to meet each other,” says Morgan. They took COVID tests, and then he came over for grilled cheese sandwiches. “I’m adding one person to my household,” Morgan says. “For as long as this thing is going on, I have one human being in the whole world who I’m allowed to touch.”

Lyncola and Markus “I will tell you the truth,” says Lyncola Odell. “I was just dating little fuckbois, who didn’t want to grow up and be a man.” One night, she told her friend Angela Field she was ready to start dating seriously, and asked her to “please pray to God to send me the right one.” “She said she prayed and saw my face,”