Why Do I Write This Blog?

I will date it all.

I’ve been fielding a superflous number of questions lately about what my “end game” is in writing this blog.

Do I want… a boyfriend?

Do I want… a husband?

Do I want… to be a professional voyeur?

Do I want… to pretend to be Samantha from Sex and the City?

When I started this blog, I did the first thing a blogger does – I thought long and carefully about the name. The name of my blog would be the hallmark of its brand. I knew a few things for certain:

• I would go by the pseudonym “C”, the first letter of my first name.
• I would blog about D.C. I had just moved here and wanted a creative way to learn about the city.
• The tagline for the blog would be “save the Date,” with only “Date” capitalized to emphasize that instead of saving a particular date, it’d be about bringing back honest to God dating, complete with phone calls, planned outings, uncomfortable who pays moments, etc.
• I would date the city, not just men. Like I said before, I wanted this blog to be a way for me to learn about D.C. and experience all it has to offer. Dating would be my means to doing this.
• I’m a writer, unfortunately not being paid to write. As M has said to me before, “We don’t write because we want to, we write because we need to.” I need to write, and this blog would be my outlet to do it every day.

So I settled, first, upon “D(ating).C.”, an awkward word play on Dating D.C. and Dating C, the two things I’d be doing in this blog: dating the city and writing about my dates in the city. I thought it was clever until I learned a smidgen about SEO, and then I realized it was just complicated. So I transitioned it to “Dating D.C.,” a purposeful name because I didn’t start this blog to document my own dating life (I have to admit my expectations weren’t high for it after a year devoid of dating in Japan); I started this blog to date the city.

I wanted to be romanced by the city. To fall in love with the city. To figure out if D.C. and I have a future. Can I make this city my home? Can I build a career here that will keep me challenged and still in love with this city every single day? It was my goal to find out, and I’d do it through going on dates – with men, my friends, my roommates and myself. I’d make each date an opportunity to learn something new about this exciting, vibrant city in which I found myself and tell it all here – dating rules and lessons I learned in my adventures and give lipservice to the places I would go.

When I first started, I wrote in third person, narcissistically imagining it some sort of avant-garde way of personal blogging – doing it from the outside looking in at my own life (I should also mention that I never expected this to be well read). It failed, miserably. I wasn’t comfortable in that style; it denied me the things I enjoy most about personal writing – the freedom to explore my own emotions, the ability to write as I think, with as much passion and feeling as I think it.

After deciding all this, my personal dating life boomed. It happened so fast that I could barely keep up with it, let alone get it all on the blog. I didn’t know whether I wanted to yet, but I wrote about it. And then it got read. And more read. And suddenly I found myself a dating blogger – half-voyeur and half-tell all single woman.

Now it has transitioned into a blog about my active dating life in this crazy city.

So now to the question of my end game.

My end game isn’t to find a boyfriend or to find a husband. This I know for certain. This also tells the answer to the “Do I consider myself a Sex and the City’esque writer?” No, I don’t. I’m not. I’m neither trying to emulate it nor be Samantha (or any character). Not to mention, the show doesn’t espouse nearly the feminist values I wish it did and that I aim to espouse in my own writing about dating, sex and relationships.

My end game is to know the city, know myself better and to save the Date. I believe in the magic that is dating – in the spark of a first connection; the electricity of a first great kiss; the self-negotiation that is understanding our feelings; the momentary sting of self-consciousness the first time we get naked in front of someone; the ecstacy of a first orgasm with someone; the hurt of a failed romance; the awkardness of running into a date who we never called back on the street, etc. I love it all, and I believe in it all and all that it teaches us about ourselves and what we want and need in a partner. It is joyous, the entire process, and it is horrendously painful.

The goal of this blog is to celebrate the ups and downs, the joys and pains, the ridiculous stories and awkward encounters that make up our collective dating conscious, all in a city that someday soon, I might just call home.

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