Hirayama, then a 24-year-old Web designer, had signed up mostly for a laugh, she told us recently via Skype from her home in Japan, where she has lived since 2007. She had hoped to meet “somebody cute-ish and talk about geeky things,” she recalls. She wasn’t expecting love at first sight, but “honestly, I cleaned up my room just in case he was unbelievably cute.”
The cleanup turned out to be “such a waste,” she says. Crafts-Finch, then 23 and a video game design intern, seemed geeky enough, but the date almost immediately derailed. Hirayama noted his “not-really-happening red shirt” and his failure to compliment her. He ordered his dessert before she finished eating her dinner — “so rude” she says; by then, Hirayama was openly checking her cellphone for messages.
In her post-date interview, she admitted, “I was really bored.” Crafts-Finch wasn’t exactly enamored, either. “In terms of meeting someone I would want to date, it was a complete failure,” he said in his post-date interview.
Reached by e-mail recently, Crafts-Finch, who has since left the Washington area and runs a small business making video games, says he wasn’t surprised by Hirayama’s criticisms or the hailstorm of Internet comments that followed.
Hirayama got an e-mail from a woman scoping out potential dates for her son, but much of the other feedback was negative. Hirayama shrugs off the haters. “These people who commented negative things didn’t know me anyways,” she says. Today, she’s in a casual relationship but, forthright as ever, she’s quick to add, “I really love America — always open to somebody who can bring me back.”
For a while, it seemed that Hirayama and Crafts-Finch had a lock on the worst date in Date Lab history. But then, K. Bryan Johnson met Theresa Mack.
Their post-date interviews told two very different tales. Mack, a 52-year-old mother of three and then-administrative assistant, gushed that “we meshed from the very beginning.” Johnson, then 49, said he usually dates women who are “more stylish and, to sum it up, medium-size, thin,” and detailed the designer-label clothes he’d worn that evening (and what they cost). She said they walked to the Metro arm in arm; he didn’t remember it that way. She asked for his card; he told her he’d forgotten them — then admitted to our reporter, “I don’t give them out to everyone.”
When the article was published on Valentine’s weekend in 2009, readers swamped the comment board, calling Johnson knuckleheaded, shallow, vain and worse.
Mack admits now, “I guess I was naive.” She didn’t read the online comments (she didn’t know they were there), but when she headed to work that Sunday she got a quick taste of the public reaction. “The security guards were like, ‘Who does this guy think he is?’ ” Mack says.
In the days that followed, co-workers showered her with support. “I learned that they were closer to me than I really thought,” Mack says.
She says that, in hindsight, she knew it wasn’t a good match. Johnson, she says, “was like ‘me, me, me’ the whole dinner.” When he talked about attending parties with models, “I was like, ‘No, I could not fit in with your crowd.’ ” But Mack didn’t convey any doubt in her post-date interviews, even after it became apparent that she was one half of a wildly lopsided he-said/she-said. “I was a perfect lady,” she says. “I figured somebody has to be the better person.”
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