On a bitterly cold and rainy night last month, I walked into an upscale bistro on L Street NW, gave my name to the maitre d’, and was ceremoniously handed a plain manila envelope with my name on it. The contents: two disposable cameras and typed marching orders from The Washington Post. That moment was almost certainly the closest I will ever come to feeling like a spy, but the cameras were essentially there for me to spy on myself. My mission was a lot more prosaic and a little more surreal than espionage: I was on a date for The Washington Post Magazine’s Date Lab.

Date Lab has been sending single (we hope) Washingtonians on blind first dates for almost a decade now. The feature runs weekly, and has attracted a cult following that divides into two diametrically opposed fans: Those who read each week hoping to see sparks fly, and those who are just there for the many, many train wrecks. My date was doomed to disappoint both of them. Here’s what I learned in the process.

Awkward. Photo: libsciterp/Flickr.

My intentions for applying to Date Lab were pure, if misguided. I didn’t apply just to get a scoop for an article. I wasn’t even writing for DCist at the time. More accurately, I wasn’t even employed…by anyone. It was 2009, I had just returned to D.C. from a rocky finish to my college experience, and I was living alone in my dad’s attic like a mopier version of Charlie Brown. I spent most of my time filling out job applications that I would never hear back about, so filling out a survey for Date Lab seemed like a natural-enough extension of a skill I was becoming depressingly good at (which I guess means either “applying to things”, or “being silently rejected by them”, depending on how you look at it).

Until the moment I received an email from a Post employee with the title “Date Lab? (!),” I had forgotten I’d even applied. I’d also forgotten how much I had changed over the past five years, but the horrifying process of re-reading my application brought the 2009 version of me back to life like a really, really awkward zombie.

My first reaction was to immediately tell all my friends and a lot of my colleagues in the hope that someone would talk me out of going on the date, which backfired, since my friends apparently enjoy awkward things happening to me almost as much as I do. My second thought was to email back and ask to make sure I hadn’t been matched based on, for example, being excited about the upcoming film Avatar. 2009 was a long time ago.

The Date Lab writers very graciously allowed me to go back through my old answers with updates, which is easily one of the worst things I have experienced in my entire life. Most of my revisions simply stated “oh God, oh God, please don’t publish that.” I had fashioned myself after a manic pixie dream guy, who was learning the harmonica (a pursuit which lasted maybe a week), and making friends with strangers on the bus (if that was EVER something I did, I have since entirely forgotten these people, and suppose I should apologize to them if they exist). I had claimed that I would love to be trapped on a deserted island with James Mercer and Zooey Deschanel, which to me now sounds like it belongs in one of the more obscure rings of hell in Dante’s Inferno.

Still, after I was done revising my application into oblivion, the writers were happy to inform me that all the important things I had been matched on— whatever they were— still applied, and that we were clear to move ahead and start planning for the date. Which is when I learned…

And now we wait. Photo: Riley Croghan

As I’ve mentioned, my application was pulled from the database five years after I submitted it, an experience which apparently isn’t all that rare. After I got the initial email asking if I was still available (which is a pretty valid question after five years) I had to wait to see if my mystery date was also still in. There’s a lot of steps to take before the date, and any of them might cause a potential dater to have second thoughts. First, there’s the recently-introduced video interviews via Post TV that run on the web version of the article, which could, understandably, put people off.

There’s also the part where you sign a long disclaimer that boils down to several dozen variations on the statement “I am aware that appearing in this article may subject me to public ridicule.” Since I long ago gave up my right to care about things said about me in the comments section of an article (thanks, DCist!), this was a no-brainer.

After that, of course, you still have to pick a time to meet that you both agree on (no easy feat in the middle of the December holidays), and then you have to, you know, actually show up to the restaurant.

There’s a ridiculous amount of suspense at that point: Prior to the date, you have instructions on where and when to meet, and you know the other person’s first name— and that’s it. Until the moment your date shows up, they could be anyone or anything— and they might not show up at all (and, in at least one case, they might show up and then bail— but you’ll still get an article out of it). But my match arrived, right on time. The date was on. Which is when I then learned that…

When I applied for Date Lab in 2009, my dating experience— much like my job prospects and my ability to not act like a gay Zooey Deschanel-wannabe— was pretty close to nil.

I’ve since come a long way in those fields (thanks); in the case of dating, I’ve acquired a real taste for awkward date stories, and generally go about collecting them like a kid collects Pokémon cards. I’ve been on first dates where I accidentally brought along a third-wheel I’d never met before, dates where I’ve spilled well over a pint of beer all over myself, and one date where I accidentally kind of fell into the Potomac River in the middle of winter.

The ten minutes I spent waiting in a booth at Ris for my date to arrive were unbearably tense. Here I was, sitting at a table alone, with a couple of disposable cameras, waiting to meet someone I knew literally nothing about. My hands were shaking a little. Or maybe a lot. In the course of playing it super cool, I brought my hand down to the table right on the side of a plate, sending a loud clattering noise through the restaurant. My only consolation was that this happened before the date, so it never had to become public knowledge (Ed. note: until now!). As I said: I really do love awkward date stories.

But my date arrived, and the tension pretty much immediately dissipated. In addition to both being gay— and I can’t tell you how many times a friend has said to me “I know the perfect guy for you! You both like men. You’ll get along great”— we had one thing in common right off the bat: we had both shared the weirdness of the Date Lab experience, which made for fairly easy conversation.

So at the severe risk of having buried this article’s lede, I suppose I’ve gotten to the point where I need to mention that my date was one of the rare same-sex couplings featured in the column. That’s not for lack of trying on the part of the long-suffering Date Lab staffers, but due more to a lack of dudes interested in dudes who put in applications, as the City Paper has pointed out.

We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what had made us one of those magic pairings and never reached a perfect answer, though I’m pretty well convinced in hindsight that it was height. Peter is a little over six-feet tall, and wrote in his application that he liked taller guys. If there really is a miniscule pool of gay men in the Date Lab archives, the list of 6’4” guys has got to be even, well, shorter.

In any case, after we commiserated over the shared pain of too-short showerheads, always being big spoon, and having it rain a little earlier for us than it does for anyone else, whatever else we had to say is all covered in the actual article and video. The date ended with an exchange of numbers, a hug, and the crushing realization that we were now in the middle of a Mexican standoff, because, of course, the end of the date is not nearly the end of the experience.

The Post TV Studio. Photo: Riley Croghan

I set my alarm an hour early the morning after the date. The plan was to get to my office extra-early so I could grab a quiet room and give a phone interview to the Post before clocking in (and yes, sometimes the post-interviews are scheduled for less than 12 hours after the date actually ends).

Instead, I overslept. By an hour. Let me save you the trouble of writing a comment joking about how it “must have been a really good date,” first because, hah hah, I went home and slept alone like I usually do, so shows how much you know. Also, my interviewer, my boss, and literally everyone else has already made that joke.

So I gave the actual interview in a sleep-induced stupor, from the back of a cab, worrying all the while that I would be late to work. I’m pretty sure that half of what I said was pure gibberish, but luckily for me the Date Lab team is generally pretty kind in their editing— despite all the waivers about humiliation, I take the team at their word when they say their earnest goal is to make good matches. At the very least, my interviewer managed to extract a few full sentences from my rambling.

This is also the point where you have to rate the date on a scale of 1-5, which is where you enter a weird take on the prisoner’s dilemma. If you rank it a lot higher than the other guy, you could come across as naive or desperate or unable to take a hint. If your rating is a lot lower than the other guy, you come across as a jerk— and boy, do people love their Date Lab villains. Of course, if your score matches perfectly, it doesn’t matter if the mutual score was 0 or 5— either way, at least you’re both on the same page.

Having survived the phone interview, mostly, I made a stop in to the Washington Post offices to record the video interview. I got a quick glimpse of the news room, indulged in a momentary “being Zoe Barnes” fantasy (pre-Metro flattening), and then checked in at Post TV.

The biggest challenge in the interview, by far, was ignoring the person off to the side actually prompting questions about the date, and instead staring dead on into the camera. It’s not easy attempting to turn on the charm for a cold, unfeeling machine, but at least I now have practice doing that ahead of Terminator singularity. After that, there was nothing left to do but wait.

And now we wait. Photo: Bethany King/Flickr

Of course, every Date Lab article ends with a postscript: Did the two daters ever get in touch? Go out again? Fall in love and get married and/or pregnant?

Theoretically, the few weeks of down time after the date is the part where you just need to let go and let things play out as they will. You’re no longer under potential scrutiny, you don’t have to photo-document your every moment together. You’re free to do basically whatever.

This isn’t even kind of true. Or at least, it wasn’t true in my experience. I had let my date know that I was considering writing an article about the whole thing. He blogs and is, of course, just as free to write about the date. In that sense, we’re facing a sort of journalistic mutually assured destruction, which makes it hard to get in the mood for a second date.

More generally, though, you don’t really know what the other person said about the date until the article finally runs, which is not a situation that easily fosters trust. And in the meantime, you’re left waiting. You won’t know exactly when the article will run, or if it will run at all.

Ultimately, a second date didn’t materialize, which I know will be disappointing news to the fairytale-romance Date Lab fans, though not, I suppose, to the ones that also hate the gays.

It’s cool, though: I’ve already signed the waiver saying I don’t care.