Why Every Bad Date Has a Literary Soul

After a string of perplexing encounters, I was surprised at the lofty themes that kept emerging.

Photo by Bilal Bozdemir on Unsplash

My memoir, No One You Know, details a time that I was far from friends and reeling from a breakup, so I noticed myself becoming much more open to strangers like dental hygienists and drifters and taxi drivers. Starved of intimacy and connection, I was also going on a lot of dates, another frontier of my life suddenly crowded with people I didn’t know at all, as I tried to get over the end of a relationship that spanned many years and places. Dating then was often exhausting—so many people would flake or cancel or we just wouldn’t be a good match. Sometimes, it worked out for a while, but usually it didn’t.

Later on, when I started putting some of the wildest stranger stories down on paper (like when a man on a train platform and I got into a tense confrontation over some four-leaf clovers I was carrying), I noticed that they shared some themes of identity and persona with some of my more befuddling dates. It was surprising to see a literary gleam in something as familiar as dating.

But when you abstract away the banal elements of small talk and drinks, you’re left with some classic ingredients: there’s natural tension. Details are extra salient. You may not have long…