Why do (April) fools fall in love?

First dates are nerve-wracking. Especially when it’s your first-first-date ever. So as I stood in the living room in the outfit I now regret but took two hours of waffling to finally choose, I looked at my mom incredulously when she said, “Hey, maybe it’s just a big April Fools’ joke.” She was completely kidding of course, but when you’re already high-strung, who’s to say that someone who chooses to take you out on April 1st couldn’t just have a cruel sense of humor?

When I was younger, April Fools Day meant pulling pranks on my parents. There was the time I changed Mom’s language in her phone to Spanish, and her T9word began texting my dad completely in Spanish, leading to confusion when he responded with “Hola, señora.” Or the million times we hid in various cupboards, closets, and pantries, waiting for my parents to walk by so we could scare them. April Fools’ Day was a day of mischief and silliness.

April Fools’ Day is an interesting holiday. The origins of April Fools’ Day are muddled, but one potential origin is a Middle Ages holiday which was celebrated by Brits on January 1st but by the French on April 1st, leading the Brits to call the French “April fools” because they were celebrating on the “wrong” date.

Three years after the first date, which was actually a terrific first date and not a poor joke, we are probably “April fools” according to the Brits. Who celebrates an anniversary on the day whose trademark is a bed of lies and tomfoolery? Who goes out to romantic dinners and buys their significant other a gift when the rest of the world is putting saran wrap on toilet seats and buying up the Dollar Store’s supply of silly string?

We do, and I think it suits us well. We’ve used our convenient anniversary to play pranks, like the time we told my boyfriend’s best friend that he was proposing, and he almost had a heart attack, thinking that he’d gone crazy to propose to me in the middle of college. I’m convinced that we’ve probably established this as a “boy who cried wolf” scenario, and that when such things happen, no one will ever believe us, but that’s beside the point.

I think it’s also a little symbolic. They say “April showers bring May flowers,” and relationships are certainly full of both. I think we’ve both learned that for each shower you can weather, you receive flowers tenfold.

So this April 1st, when people around the world are pulling pranks and pinning paper fish on each other’s backs (why, Italy, France, and Belgium?), I’ll be celebrating a date which is pretty important to me, and waiting to see if this is something real, or just the longest-running April Fools’ joke ever. If so, props to him, because that’s three years of dedication. And paying for Olive Garden.