Columnist Sarah Hepola reflects on dating in Dallas.
Photos/Jason Janik, DMN files; Illustration by Nadya Shakoor, and Susan Barber
I moved back to Dallas at 36, hoping to fall in love. I’d spent the past six years in New York City, living the dream, if “the dream” includes $50,000 in debt, a peptic ulcer and a drinking problem. To be fair, I had the drinking problem before I moved to the Big Apple, but New York is where it came into full bloom. Think of it this way: You’re a woman who guzzles lager and tequila till 2 a.m. at Barley House or the Lakewood Landing, then you move to a city where last call is 4 a.m. Just what your reckless drinking needs: a bonus round.
New York was great — for my writing career, my network of power players, my knowledge of museums and, like, pierogies — but it was terrible for my dating life, my health, my bank account. The dating scene, in particular, was bleak. I was 30 when I moved there, shipping out from Texas after my boyfriend of two and a half years dumped me, and I thought for sure I’d meet my future husband in New York, which is hilarious to think about now. New York is fabled for its panoply of options, but if you know about the paradox of choice — the more selections on tap, the harder a decision becomes — then you might understand why I failed spectacularly in my mission.
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Online dating existed during my years in New York; I just never used it. My dating strategy was a tried-and-true Gen X formula: Get drunk, see what happens. A lot did. The adventures that followed were thrilling and comic and borderline dangerous, but as far as finding a man to cuddle with on the couch, split the bills and the Malbec and theories on top-tier reality TV, I rolled snake eyes. I lived with an overloved orange tabby named Bubba. I called him, without a stitch of irony, “my guy.”
It’s hard to see patterns while you’re inside them. I moved to New York in 2005, and I didn’t understand I’d entered one of the worst dating markets for ladies like me. New York was teeming with gorgeous, talented single women chasing the same brass rings. Sex and the City, for all its sweeping romance, was not about how easy it was to find a good man in New York; it was about how near-impossible. The Bachelor better captures the dynamic of New York dating: Corral a bunch of pretty, accomplished women in one place, pump them full of Chardonnay, then watch them compete for the same dude.
The author with her much-loved orange tabby, Bubba.
Tara Copp
The years of 30 to 36 were prime settling-down years among my cohort, and I attended a lot of weddings. I must have flown back to Texas half a dozen times for ceremonies in a leafy backyard, a bucolic park, an old-fashioned chapel. What I noticed about Texas, now that I had distance, was how domestic it seemed. Couples had kids, plural. Most of my New York friends were married, but not many had children. They were classic DINKs (dual income, no kids). Not one owned a standalone house, although my most successful friend owned two floors of a Chelsea high-rise with her then-husband, and their interior designer had a Wikipedia entry.
I was 35 when I quit drinking, and I moved back to Dallas a year later. I went to the Arboretum one night with my mom, and we stumbled upon a summer concert on a sloping hill. Kids scurried around, funny-dancing to a cover band, while adults watched from picnic blankets, old-fashioned Americana. My mom and I stood in line at a food truck, and we got to chitchatting with a couple who’d moved from San Francisco. Their friends thought they were crazy. You’re moving to Dallas? But they owned their home, they both had good jobs. As we spoke, their children were scampering around among friendly strangers.
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I wondered if I’d made a classic youthful miscalculation, bolting from my hometown in search of the good life only to discover a better life existed in the place I’d left behind.
Spotting The Bachelor on the Katy Trail
Dallas was an adjustment at first. I’d grown up here, eager to make my mark in the world, and finding myself back — at an age I’d once foolishly considered “midlife” and currently on a payment plan with the IRS — was less than ideal.
I moved to East Dallas, where I felt comfortable, and I rented a carriage house owned by a married couple so sweet they brought me flowers on my first night.
It wasn’t weird to be single in your late 30s in Manhattan, but in Dallas, I was an outlier. I went to Home Depot one afternoon to buy paint for my new pad, and the guy behind the counter asked if my kids were gonna help me. I looked around, thinking I’d spot children, but no. He just assumed I was a mom.
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Most of my Dallas friends were mothers. I sat on my friend Jennifer’s couch and watched her fold the kids’ laundry, which seemed endless. Moms don’t go out much, and I’d quit drinking, so we had that in common. But I also grew close with women who were unattached, the statistical anomalies like me. My friend Allison was single — one of those fashionable Uptown types who knows the best brunch spots. We took walks on the Katy Trail, apparently one of the best pickup spots in town, but we traversed that stretch a hundred times and nobody asked us out, though I did spot Troy Aikman and a guy who’d been The Bachelor.
Dallas women intimidated me. The high heels, the makeup at yoga, the hair extensions tumbling down each shoulder so that every woman in her 20s looked a bit like a mermaid. But at least there was a dating scene — as in, people went on actual dates, which included dinner or coffee or something other than a drunken cab ride to a hovel in Queens.
I joined OkCupid, the cool dating site in 2012. I met a lot of men that way, and I drove so much I felt like a cabbie: The Colony, Plano, Garland, Grapevine. I quickly set a 20-mile radius on my preferences. Dating someone in Frisco felt like a long-distance relationship. Most of the men had been married before, and one guy expressed skepticism that I’d never even been engaged. Like, what’s wrong with you? I was taken aback. You’re wary of me because I haven’t been divorced?
The author at Barley House in Dallas.
Jason Janik
Dallas, a cosmopolitan city at last
Dallas was a good place to date: an endless supply of restaurants and bars (not that I went to them) and dog parks (not that I went to them). Most of my first dates took place in coffee shops, and my late 30s coincided with the rise of barista culture. I frequented a spot on Henderson called The Pearl Cup (now Houndstooth) and a cozy, eclectically designed coffeehouse on Lower Greenville called Mudsmith that I still miss.
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I’d grown up in a Dallas that felt insular and provincial. My family moved from the Philadelphia area in 1978, shortly before I turned 4, and I grew up knowing we were outsiders. But the Dallas of the 2010s was more cosmopolitan. I went on dates with men who’d come of age in Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, but also Sierra Leone, India, Colombia. They told me about their childhoods, and we bonded over the utility of the word “y’all,” and the conversations felt a bit like traveling in my hometown.
Mudsmith, a coffee shop the author misses.
Rose Baca/File Photo
OkCupid became Tinder became Bumble became Hinge. The problem with dating apps is the endless availability, that tricky paradox of choice, and most of us fell victim to a restless wandering. I met a guy at a bistro on McKinney Avenue, and returning from the bathroom, I caught him messaging on Tinder, which was so awkward he tried to explain it. A habit, he said. Just closing the loop on a conversation. Whatever, I never saw him again.
By the time I turned 40, I was contemplating a move to Los Angeles. Dallas was cooler than I’d appreciated, but surely another spot on the map would better match my creative lifestyle? I’d written a memoir about quitting drinking, which came out in 2015, and I was ready for the next challenge. It was hard finding a man in Dallas with the artist’s heart and intellectual rigor I longed for in a companion. California was the land of dreamers.
My therapist was skeptical. “You’re having trouble dating, so you want to move … to LA?”
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Meet the gorgeous women of Los Angeles
If there’s a worse city to find a husband in than New York, it’s LA, because think about all the beautiful women who longed to be actresses and models but are just killing time on dating apps. I spent a month in LA one summer, renting a cute casita in Silver Lake, and I met this guy who was exactly my type: shaggy-haired Amherst grad who wrote music for TV and film. And he was sober! Problem is, he turned out to be a lot of women’s type. After going back to Dallas, I spent the next several months looking for excuses to return to LA, while he juggled a rotation of five girls, all of whom were successful, kind and attractive.
It’s not that people don’t get married in Los Angeles. But the unspoken challenge of a high-octane metropolis is that the more people you have to date, the harder it becomes to shut down possibilities. Dallas wasn’t easy on that front, but it was easier than the coastal cities. I did fall in love, twice, but one guy was married, a story so complicated I needed a third of a book to explain it. The other guy was 14 years younger than me, an old soul with a millennial’s flakiness, and he kept me in a maddening game of catch-and-release so long I needed the second third of the book to explain that. (The final third of the book, which is my second memoir, involves a homicide detective in New Orleans, the only man I came close to marrying.)
Throughout these years, as I swung for the fences in search of a big love, I spent lovely evenings with men who would never be my soul match, would never send my heart into orbit, but we laughed and made out in parking lots and confided in each other about the challenges of our lives.
‘Do you wanna go on an adventure?’
I still think about this guy I matched with on Hinge. We met at Catbird, the schmancy bar atop the Thompson Hotel in downtown Dallas. Handsome, well-traveled, good conversationalist. I was smitten from the jump. After he’d finished his cocktail, and I’d finished my seltzer with lime, he said, “Let’s get dinner at Monarch,” the lavish restaurant in the same hotel. We sat at the bar and shared whipped ricotta with focaccia bread and seared hiramasa, and I stared out a window with a stunning view of the skyline as he told me about his mother dying, how it taught him to live every day like it was his last.
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“Do you wanna go on an adventure?” he asked, and since I thought we were already on an adventure, I said yes. After dinner, I slid into the passenger seat of his sports car, which had a full-size television nestled in the console (that car was like something a secret agent would drive), and he took me to a drag show in Oak Lawn. It was a blast. I said goodbye to him back in downtown, where I’d parked my Honda, and I remember staring at him and thinking, this is either my future husband or I’m never going to see this guy again.
It was the latter. But what a night! I had a few like that, with men whose names I can’t remember but adventures I won’t soon forget. In Bishop Arts, I bought cigars with a guy from North Dallas, and we sat on a bench as we puffed on them and made out with such teenage abandon I still feel sheepish about all the passersby. I went to museum exhibits I would have otherwise skipped and saw parts of the city I never knew existed and witnessed more splendor than I did on my futon in New York City or in the dive bars of East Dallas (which are great).
I never got married. I never had kids. But if I wanted love, I found it.