A 58-year-old CFO quit his job as the head of a major company to date his 22-year-old employee with whom he’d matched on Tinder. Rick was heading up a land surveying company where Texan Alyssa Cleland was employed. Both were intrigued when they matched on the dating app, and while they weren’t bothered by the 36-year-old age difference, they didn’t want to get involved since they worked together. They did, however, decide to have a totally platonic lunch together and realized they actually really liked each other romantically. Rick did the only thing he could do in this situation: he quit his job, NY Post reports.
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- Their relationship actually lasted. While it might seem like a relationship with such a huge age gap could never possibly work, Rick and Alyssa are here to prove the haters wrong. By the time their partnership made headlines, they’d already been together for a year and a half, which is way further along than many couples seem to get.
- Alyssa and Rick are pretty smitten. As Alyssa told The Daily Mail: “I’m in love with Rick for sure. I’m just waiting for a ring at this point. Even if it means changing his diapers, I’m in it for the long haul. I could be hit by a car tomorrow.” Meanwhile, Rick says he noticed Alyssa before they even started dating, saying, “Right out of the gate when the company I worked for hired her, I kind of noticed her. And she sort of stood apart from everybody else, because she had this energy.”
- They get a lot of critics on social media. Despite the fact that they couldn’t possibly have handled this in a better way, Alyssa says she and Rick are the subject of nasty trolls online who just don’t approve of their relationship despite knowing nothing about it. However, Alyssa loves the age gap, saying that Rick is a “real man” whose life experience allows him to better handle her condition, paraxial tibial hemimelia, which means she now has a prosthetic leg and hand deformities. “I’m a firecracker and a lot to handle, so I’m happy that Rick is strong and mature enough to help me when I need it,” she said.
- Many people think Alyssa is a gold digger. They think she’s only with Rick because she wanted his money or a promotion, which wouldn’t really work considering he immediately quit his job when they started dating. However, she cleared up the misconceptions on Instagram, writing, “I can without a doubt say that I love Rick wholeheartedly. Were the circumstances that we met under the best? No. Did we make the best out of it & work through it? Yes. So what, we met online — welcome to 2020! So what, he’s older than me — I get to decide who I’m with.”
- Sadly, after 2.5 years together, Rick and Alyssa recently went their separate ways. Alyssa shared the news on the social media platform in November, insisting there’s no bad blood between them and they’re actually really good friends now who love each other dearly. The problem is that Alyssa wants to get married and Rick, who’s been married before, doesn’t want to marry anyone again, not even Alyssa.
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