Looking for DC Love in All the Wrong People
If Virginia is for lovers, DC is for breakups
If there’s one thing that unites DC, it’s the terrible dating scene. Over the years, I’ve bonded with Native Washingtonians and transplants alike over our failed forays into romance.
But as I looked for love in all the wrong people, an unexpected relationship bloomed.
One of my first dates in the District set the tone for the kind of bizarre disregard I’ve repeatedly experienced since. A man from Bumble invited me to Rakuya, but when he finally showed up to Dupont (late), I realized he had lied about his age, height, job, and food preferences. (He hated fish). The already-awkward sushi experience didn’t stop there: He tried to recruit me to join his band and read messages from women who ghosted him. I paid my tab and tried to leave, but he insisted on following me. So I ran around the corner to hide in the nearest place: Kramers.
I was afraid that barreling into a nice-looking shop and asking staff to hide me would get me thrown out. But Kramers’ front staff let me crouch behind the fiction stacks. When my date came looking, he didn’t spot me. The booksellers took my safety seriously, and welcomed me into the bar. In my first steps into a community I’d explore over the next decade, I spent the rest of the night on a date with myself — a magical night that led to many more solo date nights at other independent bookstores across town. DC’s bookstores and libraries became places I could browse for fun, meet up with sources, or even take shelter from storms. They are where I met friends, and neighbors, and stopped feeling like a tourist here for the first time.
This wasn’t the only time a truly terrible date ended up shaping the way I lived in DC. A year or so later, I matched with an Arlington man who I thought might be worth crossing the bridge for. He introduced me to the Downtown Holiday Market and, nearby, Fado Irish pub (RIP). My date was twitchy, but I chalked it up to the crowds he said were affecting his hearing aids. However, after a quieter outing to Earth Treks in Crystal City, I could sense something was still “off”— and it wasn’t related to his hearing. I asked him to drive me home early. He responded by pretending that he would run over the homeless people we passed. When I admitted that that terrified me, he joked that it was “just a game”. So I lied about my address and blocked his number after running out of the car.
While worrying about the safety of myself and my homeless neighbors is never ideal, I am glad that this experience led me to learn more about hearing loss and American Sign Language, and to seek out more people in the community. I hadn’t previously known that DC is home to the country’s only Deaf university and its highest-per-capita population of Deaf or hard-of-hearing people. Several of these Deaf DCers later spent time teaching me about the issues facing their friends and family, allowing me to report on problems like DC not providing enough quality ASL interpreters. I think it’s made me a better neighbor to the 20,000 Deaf and hard-of-hearing residents of DC (who have aired their own dating drama on Netflix) and it’s been a good reminder that even though we walk the same streets we don’t always experience the same city.
It’s a city I used to hand-sketch street maps to navigate when I first moved here sans smartphone. Since then, I’ve learned my main streets, my rush hour shortcuts, and I like to think I can even remember which Red Line direction I’m supposed to be on most days.
But I also still sometimes find my way around based on memories from dates. After all, I first biked Georgia Ave NW when visiting a bisexual who enjoyed sleeping with me — as long as we could do it secretly. And I still mark when to turn right on a NoMa street when I see the apartment of another woman who ghosted me after I cooked her a four-course Italian dinner.
There’s a map in my head of DC now, and it’s as much made of memory as it is places. Even the bad memories are useful, little signposts directing me forward. And one of those places etched in sharpest relief is the Key Bridge.
On one June night several years ago, I remember dragging my exhausted ass over the bridge after a long work day in Georgetown and a fight with my girlfriend at the time. She had paid my apartment’s security deposit after learning how dire my finances and relationship with my family were at the time. But we had only gone on a handful of dates, and she was already pressuring me to marry her and move in. She said this was love — this wanting to mesh into me so tightly she subsumed me. And who was I to disagree?
I remember stopping halfway across the bridge that night. It felt like my feet weighed 1,000 pounds and I couldn’t lift them to take another step. I was so hungry, so exhausted, so broke, and so ashamed of feeling like I was failing the uphill trudge for my career and love life. I remember tugging at the chain link pedestrian safety fence, wondering if I had the energy for one last climb so the black waters below could wash it all away.
I didn’t realize I had sat down until I looked up and realized I’d missed the Kennedy Center across the water, brilliantly lit up with new rainbow lights. The colors were so bright, and reflected so perfectly across the Potomac to me, that it seemed like someone lit the whole building up just for me.
And I thought about whoever proposed the idea to light up the Kennedy Center for Pride Month. That person must have taken the time to research the logistics, persuade some board to agree, buy equipment — all to show a community of people that they too belonged in DC.
It was the perfect example of how I’d begun learning how hard residents of the District of Columbia fight — through red tape, language barriers, class, transportation inequalities, and anything else that divides us — to make strangers’ lives better. All that work, from little things like welcoming a scared person into a bookstore, to patiently explaining community problems, to putting on a gigantic gay display, just to tell your neighbor “you belong here just as much as me.”
And I thought, now this is love.
A mental health crisis can make you feel alone. But help is available.
Call 988 to reach the National Mental Health Crisis and Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which can connect you to local resources. The Crisis Text Line provides support via text at 741741. NAMI’s DC Helpline is available during the standard workday at 202–466–0972 and the DC government runs an Access Helpline at 1–888–793–4357.
