...by marysol
It literally started off as a date. We found each other on "social media." Honestly, I am surprised I swiped right but it was in Eric’s profile where he says he’s an INFP (what I obviously assumed was his Myers-Briggs type). I was fascinated that he found that to be something worth putting on his profile. He seemed harmless enough to not have to go through my rigorous initial "stranger danger" screening process. We had planned a date to go sketching for an afternoon.
We hit it off pretty quickly, sitting on the lawn of Iolani palace for what was only supposed to be a 90-minute sketching date. We were connecting pretty fast – at a very terrifying pace for me... on the first date and just in general. Specifically because my last long term relationship just shattered me completely and accepted that lifetime romantic love doesn't happen for everyone, including me. I just wanted guy friends and nothing serious, especially my first year of just moving back home to Hawaii. I had no idea something like this would happen or if I was even capable of being in a relationship. I felt like Eric may have been having the same sentiments and he told me “let’s just take this date-by-date.”
Eric brought up the idea of entering a film competition together. We had barely gone on a handful of dates but I'm ambitious enough to enter any competition just to use as creative exercise. Once we got started, our connection was frightfully strong and we began to use the film project as a medium to say things to each other that we couldn’t really communicate with just talking to each other. We had JUST started dating and we were already getting into a relationship pretty deep. Our film challenge entry "immerse | journey" essentially documented us just meeting and falling in love and being terrified to admit it, all while it was happening.
For immerse | journey, we went surfing, stand-up paddle boarding, hiking and ate dinner. Then, we spent 5 days hanging out at Eric’s studio playing with computers, talking about art, him teaching me how to use Final Cut Pro and eating dinner together: those are 5 solid nights of dates! Creating Immerse | journey was wholly self-referencing as our relationship developed. It’s funny to know that we portrayed our interactions as flashbacks but it all may have just happened in the same day. Now, pretty much our “next project” is what we decide to do on our next date. For shits and giggles, I was brainstorming what the next project could be while Eric was working on the editing. Eric said, “if I could ... do this full time, that would be… ideal.” I then quickly said, “well, why not? Let’s think about this...” and I started frantically writing on the next sheet of what we now call “idea pages” and that is DxDp origins story.