He thought the guy he met on vacation was just a fling. He turned out to be the love of his life
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Guillermo Barrantes relationship with Larry Mock was supposed to begin and end in Palm Springs.

It was a “casual, brief encounter.” A vacation dalliance that only lasted half a day.

“It was just so casual, so easily nothing could have happened from it,” Guillermo tells CNN Travel. “We could have walked away and just had our lives separate. But of course that didn’t happen, because it wasn’t meant to be that way. It was meant to be the way that it was. That it is.”

It all started in summer 2013. Guillermo - then in his early 40s - was on vacation in the California resort city of Palm Springs. He was in a phase of life where, he says, he was prioritizing himself, and wasn’t interested in long term romance.

“I thrived in being by myself, in traveling by myself, in having dinner by myself – I loved all of that so much,” says Guillermo, who lived in Boston, Massachusetts at the time.

“I wanted no commitment, I wanted no emotional entanglement of any kind. I wanted to have fun, get to know myself. And it was in that mode that I met Larry, when I wasn’t really looking.”

During the vacation in Palm Springs, Guillermo was staying at a friend’s apartment, and while the friend worked during the day, Guillermo passed his time at a “run-down, no-frills” resort a couple of blocks away.

“You could just pay for a day pass, they’d give you a towel, and you could be in the pool and use their bar,” he recalls.

One day, as he was walking the palm tree-lined streets to the resort, Guillermo swiped right on a guy on a dating app – Larry Mock, mid-40s, friendly smile. The two men exchanged a few messages back and forth. Larry said he was also on vacation in Palm Springs, staying in the resort Guillermo kept frequenting.

They arranged to meet there for a drink by the pool. Guillermo was looking forward to meeting Larry, expecting “some casual fun.”

Then, when Guillermo and Larry met, there was “chemistry” right away. Guillermo calls their connection “magnetic.”

“My impression of Larry: sexy, handsome and warm,” he recalls.