Texas Boss, 58, Quits Job After Matching With Employee, 22, On Tinder

A 58-year-old CFO from Texas has quit his position after matching with an employee 36 years his junior on Tinder.

Rick matched with Alyssa Cleland, 22, via the dating app in 2018, when she was working for the land surveying company where he was chief financial officer.

Alyssa was initially unsure of mixing work with her personal life. However, after meeting up for lunch, the pair quickly realised they had far more to talk about than just the office, chatting away for a full four hours.

Find out more about this couple in the following clip:

Rick has since admitted he had noticed Alyssa prior to their match. However, when he swiped right, he hadn’t recognised it was her profile he was looking at.

Rick told Barcroft TV:

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.

But the thing is, for whatever reason I didn’t connect that picture and her profile with the girl from work.

Alyssa on the other hand had recognised him straight away:

I messaged him because I recognised him immediately and I was like, ‘What are you doing? We can’t date’.

After twigging who exactly she was, Rick was concerned Alyssa would assume he had deliberately abused his position of authority, and suggested meeting for lunch to clear the air.

According to Rick:

I had a lot to lose if I’m the guy in the corner office, and here’s somebody that just started.

You can’t do that in a company. You just can’t because she could then feel like if she wasn’t interested then it feels like a hostile workplace like here’s this guy using his power or authority and I wanted to diffuse any of that.

And we didn’t just work together, it was a company with 200 employees and I was running the company.

However, the spark between them could not be denied, and things sped up fairly quickly from there. Just six weeks later, Rick had quit the company and they began dating.

Rick, who has previously been married and raised stepchildren, said:

Once we started seeing each other, it was like we saw each other almost every day. It was really like, boom, boom, boom; we accelerated pretty quickly.

And then, it was only a couple months and she had some stuff going on with her roommates when I was like, ‘Just move in’. So, that was that.

Now a full-blown couple, the lovebirds have been dating for more than a year and are reportedly in it for the long haul, the decades between them making no difference to their feelings.

Alyssa said:

I’m in love with Rick for sure. And I’m just waiting for a ring at this point. If it means changing his diapers, I’m in it for the long haul. I could be hit by a car tomorrow.

No one knows you know how long we have on this earth. And so I think just spending it with the people you love, despite him getting older, quicker – it’s all we can really do.

The couple believe they make such a great couple partly because they both share a similar drive towards future goals.

Rick explained:

Even though I have been married and have raised kids and all that, it’s just me and my life is all mine, and I can do what I want with it. And somebody like Alyssa fits that really well, because that’s where she is.

Alyssa added:

We talked about our future and we both don’t want kids. I personally don’t want to have kids.

We are both kind of like on the same page in terms of careers and goals, and I’ve been told I’m really mature for my age and stuff like that.

Alyssa attributes her maturity to her difficult upbringing. Born with a rare congenital condition called paraxial tibia hemimelia, Alyssa was born in the Ukraine before moving to the US while still a young child.

According to Alyssa:

[Paraxial tibia hemimelia] happens to one in a million people, and basically my tibia – which is your large lower leg bone – didn’t develop. And so because of that I wasn’t able to walk, and so that’s why they amputated my leg.

I’m a right above-knee amputee. From what we know my mother was super young and she probably couldn’t take care of me, and so I wound up in a hospital in Ukraine. I was supposed to die. And I was in the hospital for a year before I was taken to the orphanage.

After being adopted by her American family, Alyssa has been wearing prosthetics since she was just four years old, which she says made her grow up ‘really fast’.

She explained:

That’s why I think we work; just because I’m not like other 20-year-olds – and I’ve dated other 20-year-olds and it’s been fine. But I mean there is something you said about dating someone older and just the life experience that you gain from them, and so I like it.

Speaking about Alyssa’s maturity, Rick said:

There’s no way it would work if she was like typical 22 – ‘Hey it’s eight o clock, where are we going?’ Like, ten o clock – I’m going to bed.

I don’t feel an age difference. The way we relate to each other, just general conversation and interaction and relating to each other, it’s just very compatible – it just works.

All the very best of luck to Rick and Alyssa for the future.

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