It’s grocery day for Ola Malone — a day she looks forward to every week.

“I can’t think of anything else that I need,” Malone said. “But, you know, going to the grocery store, how that is.”

For Ola, Walmart is the place to be. Alone, this would be a tough task for the 83-year-old Dallas resident, but not with Maria Gonzalez by her side — Ola’s 79-year-old senior companion.

“With isolation, loneliness really becoming an epidemic in our older adults,” said Senior Companion Program Director Melissa Gomez. “This really helps both parties combat that isolation and loneliness.”

Senior companions are part of the Senior Source, a Dallas nonprofit helping residents age.

“I always like to work with people,” Gonzalez said.

Ten hours a week, spread over three days, Gonzalez comes to Ola’s home for whatever Ola wants to do.

“Doctor’s appointments, store,” Malone listed out. “We go to Hobby Lobby.”

On grocery day, after the Walmart trip, it’s back home for some TV and gossip time.

Before Malone and Gonzalez were connected, Malone’s daughters had to help her.

“I was homebound,” Malone said. “They would have to take off their job to take me to work and do stuff for me.”

Now, Malone has Gonzalez do stuff for her.

“She and I have really grown together fast,” Gonzalez said. “We’re good friends.”

Aging can be a lonely process, especially if you’re doing it by yourself.

“I suffer from depression because of the job where I used to work,” Malone said. “Anxiety, a lot of anxiety.”

But Gonzalez is not only a built-in helper — she’s also a friend. For Gonzalez, this keeps her going.

“This is for my own good, keeps me healthy,” Gonzalez said. “Move around, have a schedule, get up in the morning.”

As much as Gonzalez may be Malone’s companion, Malone is Gonzalez’ too.

“It is completely a friend component,” Gomez said. “We have volunteers that stay with a client to the end of life. They become part of the family.”

The senior companion does need volunteers — it has a waitlist of seniors who want companions. If you’re 55 and older and can dedicate at least ten hours a week to a client or two, you can sign up at the Senior Source Website. There is a $4 per hour stipend, and you must pass a background check.

There are lots of D words that have been used to describe dating in Dallas: dismal, dumpster fire, damned, disheartening. We don’t need anecdotes to prove it’s a nightmare, though, unlike many men in this city, the numbers don’t lie. So it’s not hard to understand why Theresa Rowley, a local comedian, traveled to Ireland to kiss her Prince Charming, though he, too, turned out to be a frog. 

Once upon a time (spring 2024), in a land not far away (East Dallas), Rowley got the modern equivalent of a handwritten love letter, a flirty Instagram direct message sans fire emoji. The message from an Irishman across the country sparked her interest, and soon, the two were an international item. After a couple of months of constant communication, as much as you can possibly have with someone in a time zone five hours ahead, Rowley hopped across the pond to meet her situationship. 

“I was not about to be official with a man that I had never met before,” she tells the Observer.

She also took a friend for enhanced security, because a first date with a guy from the internet is scary, no matter where he lives. But all went well, and with her new boyfriend’s permission, she posted a TikTok video about her soiree, and it immediately struck a chord. 

“[I did not think] that it would get any type of traction at all because it’s very different than my normal content,” she says. “It popped off, just went real viral.”

Rowley is a comedy influencer with more than a million followers across several platforms. Her video amassed more than a million views, was the subject of a feature from the Washington Post and caught the attention of Tourism Ireland, which sponsored a second bae-cation back to the Emerald Isle. 

“It was a fairy tale,” she says. 

All Good Things Must Come to an End

Soon, it was time for the Irishman to come to Texas. He spent Thanksgiving with her family and lived his cowboy dreams. Rowley was hopeful this was the beginning of forever. But then the poisoned apple came. A dreaded “Hey, girly” message paired with screenshots landed in her direct messages just 12 hours before Rowley was supposed to board another flight so they could spend Christmas together in Ireland. She canceled her flight and spent the holiday with her family in Amarillo instead.

“It was a gut punch to read,” she says of learning her knight, and the people’s prince, was infidelious. “But also necessary because with the nature of our relationship, you never know who’s messaging you and why they’re saying what they’re saying. But the proof was in the pudding.”

Rowley, having shared their love story up to this point, couldn’t leave the shocking plot twist out of the fairytale turned horror story. That video sits at four million views. It sounds like a PR stunt, but the story is true, and Rowley said she doesn’t have any non-believers. 

“I always expect trolling, but it really was not that,” she says. “It was just a light-hearted story in a time where those are few and far between. People seemed to latch onto it as a beacon of hope, and I hated to let them down, but I didn’t want to keep up a ruse.”

Rowley hasn’t sworn off the Irish forever, but she’s not exactly looking for her next Emerald Isle resident to come sweep her off her feet. 

“It’s so funny how the comments have changed, too, because in the first videos, when it was lovey-dovey, it was all like, ‘Irish guys are the best. You’ve got to go outside of America,’” she tells us.

Now, the Irish (according to her comments sections, anyway) don’t have the best reputation. But Rowley doesn’t want her tale to dissuade the city’s other hopeless romantics.

“I don’t want this to be a story that there’s no hope for women. Not all men are dogs, not all men cheat,” she says. “I have to hold on to that hope for myself… People make bad choices based on tough experiences that they’ve had in the past, and we can learn from that. We can shake hands, we can kiss on the cheek and we can move on.”

So there you have it. Dating in Dallas is bad. But it may not be better anywhere else, either. C’est la vie.