I met the love of my life at Downtown Las Vegas’ Emergency Arts in July 2010.

Not much came of that first meeting—I was living in Seattle at the time—but Laura remembered me, and almost three years later she offered to drive me to Justice Myron E. Leavitt & Jaycee Community Park for weekly bocce matches against members of the Italian American Club. Beyond that, we’d meet up at Downtown events and go to the movies at the Palms, friendly as you please.

Then, one evening in September 2013, we kissed passionately at the bar at Artifice while our bocce teammates chatted on, oblivious. That was it; we went home together. To this day we puzzle over how we fit my bike into the back seat of her car that night.

Our romance was made in places most wouldn’t consider inherently romantic. We didn’t stroll under a canopy of autumn leaves, or lean on the rails of a footbridge at midnight; we met in a former medical center, stole glances in the Palms’ food court and shared our first kiss at a (admittedly charming) bar.

That’s what Las Vegas had to offer, and we used it. And when I asked my friends where they fell in love, the answers were similar: watching planes take off and land from the McCarran observation lot on Sunset; sharing the comically huge drinks at the Peppermill Lounge; watching the volcano at the Mirage; taking in the nighttime view from the base of Sunrise Mountain; walking through the cactus gardens at the Springs Preserve; or simply driving out into Southern Nevada’s abundant open desert, pulling off the road and … well, y’know.

Years ago, a Weekly colleague of mine declared that Las Vegas had no romance to it. “This is an ugly-ass town,” she wrote. And even at the time she said it—in the late 1990s—she was mistaken, not just about the Valley’s visual appeal, but about this city’s effortless facility for matchmaking.

We live on a figurative desert island, with daytime skies of purest azure and nights of stars floating on neon. It’s a big place, but not so big that we can’t have mutual friends or a few things in common. Many of us came here from someplace else and yearn for not only human connection but a sense of place; a desire to make a new, better life in a new town.

Lots of newcomers to this city erroneously call it “a blank slate,” when what they mean, and what every local knows in their heart, is that Las Vegas is a place of bountiful possibilities—for business, for art, for romance.

You don’t need a tree-lined promenade or moonlit canal to fall in love in Vegas. (Though we do have indoor malls that approximate both.) And even though this pandemic has limited our possibilities, it can’t eliminate them; Las Vegas is too artful and persistent a matchmaker for that. Given the slightest opening, this beautiful city can make love happen, as mysteriously as two lovestruck bocce players squeezing a Schwinn Cruiser into the back seat of a Nissan Altima. Seriously, we’re still amazed by that.