Courtesy of “Find My First Love.”

D.C. is perennially on the “best cities for singles” list—but that is because there are just so many other single people here. In an attempt to overcome those odds, some locals have gone to lengths far greater than simply swiping right.

Having found dating in the District so grueling and fruitless, Craig Schattner is documenting his plight on a “docuseries” dedicated to the issue (“Is it him, or is it D.C.?” the show promises to answer). Despite a truly awful track record, people still clamor to get set up in Date Lab only to walk away with an awkward picture and documentation of their failures in print. And in true D.C. fashion, there was once a panel discussion called the Great Love Debate on why dating here is so difficult.

Alicia Kenworthy, an Arlington native, decided to take the “do a crazy thing to find love” approach and ratchet it up several notches. She searched for a long-lost boyfriend while being trailed by a reality TV crew.

Find My First Love, which airs on FYI (a channel best known for the series Married at First Sight, which is exactly what it sounds like), may not get all of the pesky details correct—for one thing, the series bills Kenworthy as a New Yorker, though she actually grew up in Arlington, went to Georgetown University, and was splitting her time between D.C. and New York when the show was filmed. But it did hold up to the title’s premise.

The story begins in late 2013. After coming home late one night from serving cocktails at Barcelona, Kenworthy sat down at her computer, feet throbbing, and searched Craigslist for jobs. Along the way, she stumbled across an ad with an intriguing casting call: seeking people who want to find someone they’ve lost touch with, but haven’t been able to track down.

Kenworthy knew immediately that she wanted to find was Benjamin, a Frenchman she’d met during a gap year between high school and college. But, burned out and worn down from working two jobs, her first thought was more “free trip to France” than “Must Find This Man Now.”

So she applied to take a break from reality, on reality TV.

After telling the producers her story—they’d lost touch after briefly dating in their teens and he had deleted all of this social media accounts—she began filming last month with the chipper host, Cherry Healey (a British journalist and TV presenter, Healey is perhaps best known stateside from those “talk about your bum” Cottonelle commercials.)

“I was nervous about him feeling like I was intruding on his life after so many years,” Kenworthy says. There was always the possibility that he wouldn’t want to see her—or that he had a very beautiful, very annoyed fiancée. “But mostly, I was excited to see him.”

Game for the chase, Kenworthy and a production crew flew to France.

Like I have to imagine everyone who has ever signed up to do a reality TV show, Kenworthy had at least one what-the-hell-did-I-get-myself-into moment. For her, it came when they touched down and the crew put her in charge of the search.

“I was expecting that they would know where he was. But a producer sat me down and said this isn’t like your American shows with a bunch of stunts. We’re interested in your journey to find him,” she said. “And I remember freaking out at that moment that I’d come with this really disorganized production team.”

So they started in Montpellier, the last city she knew he lived in. He had deleted his social media accounts, so she did things the old-fashioned way. “The last AIM (!) conversation I’d had, he was working at a sex shop,” she said (specifying that it was more Good Vibrations than seedy.) Though the show only airs one scene, she actually visited nearly all of the sex shops in the city looking for the right one.

Kenworthy spent the next two weeks crisscrossing the country with the crew, aided by a private investigator’s clues.

As they get to the end of the search, Cherry organizes a grand reunion for the pair on the Pont des Arts (better known as that love locks bridge)—because where else?

“They told him that someone was looking for him—but not who,” Kenworthy recalls. “So that is when I start totally flipping out … what if he is expecting someone else?”

He wasn’t. “I hoped it would be you,” he says, channeling Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail.

After their real-life romantic comedy reunion, the show ends with a brief follow-up to find out that they were still together two months later.

But then the wait began. The pair couldn’t publicly say anything about the show until it aired last week—a full year after Kenworthy’s trip.

Today, they are happily living together in the French countryside, debating if their next move will be to Paris or back to D.C.

So, there you have it, kids. The answer to your dating problems: spend two weeks tracking down someone you met in another country and haven’t spoken to in five years, cross your fingers they aren’t married, and voila … happily ever after.

Find My First Love DDT 60 from NERD TV on Vimeo.