Date Lab: One dater logged off early, blaming Zoom fatigue
By Jessica M. Goldstein,
Photos courtesy of the daters
Nate Rathjen understands that not every woman will love that he wakes up at 5:30 a.m., six days a week, to go running. “The Venn diagram of people who are compatible with me and are okay with [that] fact … that intersection is pretty small,” he acknowledged, but he remains hopeful: “I’ve always wanted to date a runner.”
Aside from an early rising (or early-rising-accommodating) athlete, what’s the 26-year-old Nate, who works in IT for a government contractor, looking for? Someone “on the same intellectual level as me,” he says. He’s active in local politics and hopes his partner would be passionate about that as well. (We spoke a few days after Election Day, as the nation fell in love with NBC’s Steve Kornacki and obsessed over Pennsylvania. “Obviously I’ve been on Twitter, basically three days straight, retweeting everything I see about the election,” Nate told me.) And he’s looking for something serious: “I don’t need more friends. I don’t need friends with benefits or anything like that. It’s really about looking for a partner.”
I matched Nate with Mariel Frank, a strategy consultant, who also mentioned on her application that physical fitness was an important part of her life. “I’m 24, so I don’t feel like I need to get married, like, now,” she said. “But it’s been a while since I’ve had a serious relationship.”
“I’m definitely on the pickier side,” she allowed, though she claimed to not have a “super-specific” type. “I care that someone is really driven and motivated. … I’m also very social and like to spend as much time with friends as possible.” That, plus he has to be “active,” she said. It was proving difficult to find all that in one man. Not to mention, “I’ve mostly only dated guys that are my age, and generally the maturity is just not there.”
Mariel applied to Date Lab back in January. By the time we matched her, she was staying with her parents in Washington state. She had mostly put dating on hold while working remotely, and she wasn’t sure when she would return to D.C. She didn’t mention her plan until the very end of the date, though — which made Nate feel quite misled and more than a little annoyed. “If I’d known that up front, I would’ve said that’s a dealbreaker,” he said.
Ironically, Mariel clocked that Nate was “a bit self-conscious about being an hour outside of D.C.” and felt like it wasn’t fair to her, with her Logan Circle address, that her match lived way out in Leesburg, Va., “which is not that close in my opinion.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To prepare, Nate put on a “normal first-date outfit”: khakis (see above re: Kornacki effect?) and a button-down. He ordered pad see ew from Thai Pan and grabbed some craft beers out of the fridge that he thought could be good conversation starters. As he was Zooming in from his living room, Mariel’s computer decided to install a bunch of updates, kicking her out of the video date. She recovered, an aperol spritz in hand and pizza nearby, on her dad’s tablet.
Nate’s first impression was positive. Mariel struck him as a “very good match” for him. They agreed on the basics: Neither would date a Trump supporter; both loved running and getting outside. But Mariel said it did not take long before “I could tell that I probably wasn’t going to be super attracted to him.” (“Even though I said I don’t have a type, I typically don’t really like facial hair, and he definitely had some, so that was a first reaction.”)
Mariel was having a perfectly adequate time but wasn’t interested enough to keep talking for hours. So about an hour and 15 minutes (or an hour and a half; reports varied) into the date, she begged off, saying her eyes were tired from so much screen time but that they could exchange numbers.
Then, Nate says, “I get a text from her at about 11 at night saying, ‘It was great meeting you. I don’t feel a connection.’ ”
“Why didn’t you just say that?” he asks now. “Why did we have to go through the whole rigmarole of giving me her number?”
For her part, Mariel says: “I may have said, ‘Oh, I’m going to log off, but I can give you my number.’ I was just trying to figure out how to be nice.”
Nate’s take? “I’ve already deleted her number,” he says. “I’m moving on.”
Rate the date
Traditionally we let the daters rate the date. However, after both of these daters described to me a date that was, objectively, bad, they both refused to give the experience anything lower than a 3.5, for fear of hurting the other person’s feelings. Yet it is my job, as former publisher of The Washington Post Eugene Meyer once decreed, to “tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained,” and therefore I must report that this date was a 2. No hard feelings! But it was a dud. No good date ends after 75 minutes because one of you hit your daily screen time maximum.
Update
No further contact.
Jessica M. Goldstein is a contributing writer to The Washington Post Arts & Style section and the magazine.
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