A summer to remember: Our favorite summertime reads from L.A. Affairs
As summer comes to its unofficial end with Labor Day, we’re hanging on for as long as we can. Here are summer stories about love, loss and everything in between.
We scoured the L.A. Affairs archives and came up with 13 stories that are sure to make you laugh, cry, roll your eyes and even sigh at the roller-coaster ride that is known as the search for love in L.A. These stories have something else in common: They are set against the backdrop of the sunniest season.
One L.A. woman meets her L.A. dream guy on vacation: “We didn’t meet on the apps; we met in a plaza in Colombia.” Another meets someone special in a very special place: summer cancer camp — for children. One story is about loving oneself and exploring bisexuality — through pole dancing.
And there’s also a touching tale about senior love: “I was 87. He was 93. Obviously, it wouldn’t last.”
If you have a true story to tell about the search for love in L.A., we’d love to hear about it. You can find submission details here, and you can find past columns here.
Some of these columns made an appearance in our first book, “L.A. Affairs: 65 True Stories of Nightmare Dates, Love at First Sight, Heartbreak & Happily Ever Afters in Southern California,” which would also make a fine holiday gift (because it’s never too early to start thinking about the holidays).
- 1
I went to South America and brought back a North American souvenir — a guy who just happened to be good-looking, employed, travel savvy, available and local. Wait, was he a unicorn?
- 2
I was fresh off a bad breakup. Summer, I promised myself, was going to be filled with doing things that intimidated me, and pushing myself to try new things. And my journey to fulfill that promise began at a pole-dancing studio in Hollywood.
- 3
Together we had woven a 10-year on-again-off-again story so obnoxious, the jokes we made about being like a couple straight out of a sitcom started feeling like a twisted reality.
- 4
It’s a stereotype to say all L.A. men are like this. But there are enough tools out there to make me wonder: Which guy deserved a gold medal in the Tool Olympics?
- 5
Moving to L.A. was a chance to begin dating anew. No one seemed quite right. Well, there was this one woman I liked spending time with, but she’d firmly said she didn’t like to hike, and that’s something I love...
- 6
A summer romance to me is two people living every moment with joy, even as they realize summer will end. Dave Wylie and I had a three-year ‘summer romance.’
- 7
It’s been one year with him. One year without my mom, who died shortly after we started dating. How do I love, when I carry this certainty that love is always lost?
- 8
After 46 blind dates that were mostly disastrous, my expectations were not too high. I had survived so many evenings of challenging conversation, no attraction and boredom that I figured what was one more to add to the list. It would at least give me another funny story to share with my friends and family.
- 9
I don’t usually date surfers, but J. made me laugh so hard. He was different because he was making fun of everyone else when he used surf lingo such as “brah” and “get pitted.” He was seriously unserious about surfing, and that’s what I found attractive.
- 10
It was the start of summer, and I was finally, officially done with a bad relationship that had run its course. So I downloaded Tinder, joining the hordes of Angelenos looking for true love in all the wrong places.
- 11
We met amid an August heatwave. When he stopped responding to texts and emails, I couldn’t accept that this was his way of saying, ‘It’s over.’ Instead, I kept waiting.
- 12
I can’t help but think that cancer — this horrible disease — is what brought us together.
- 13
I was only 5 years old when a caretaker’s nephew began to sexually abuse me. He made me pinkie-promise not to tell. ‘I do this because I love you,’ he’d say. For years, I would carry this lie — that abuse was a form of love — into my other relationships.
