Date Lab: On this date, something’s ... fishy

About the daters ...

Brag a little …

Roy: I am fit, active, affectionate, spontaneous, creative and practical. I have my own teeth and hair, and shower every day.

Molly: I am extremely open-minded, exceedingly curious, and I listen. I make an effort to take care of myself for health and aesthetic reasons. I take pride in my appearance but am not conservative, a slave to fashion or anyone else’s expectations of what I should be. I am not classically pretty but am usually told I have a different, exotic or sexy look. I have a goofy smile and a bit of a crooked nose, but I embrace the oddities. I find laughter to be as essential as air. I am a very good cook.

Interests to share …

Roy: Biking, travel, food, positive outlook, art.

Molly: Books, independent/foreign films, travel, family, biking, hiking, kayak, canoeing, spontaneous road trip to a vineyard, volunteer work at the Washington Animal Rescue League.

Your idea of funny …

Roy: Quick-witted, somewhat sarcastic, can take and dish it, not easily offended, spicy but not guttural.

Molly: Dry wit and sarcasm. Appreciation for irony, tangential humor and anthropomorphism. I don’t care for silly, goofy, slapstick, raunchy, banal.

About the date...

7:30 p.m., Grapeseed, Bethesda

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Molly: I had a really trying day and just wasn’t up for it. It was raining, and I was just thinking, If this could be any other night. But I decided to put that aside and go for fun and the experience of it. I’ve spent a lot of time in labs and research; I just went into it like: This is another experiment.

Roy: I got there about 10 minutes early, waited for Molly at the bar and then chose to have a seat. Molly showed up at 7:35.

Molly: The first thing I said to him was that I assume that you have a sense of humor or you would not be here. He concurred. My first impression was: This is a nice-looking guy. He had on a suit and those stylish glasses. He had a funky, professional look, which I find attractive.

Roy: I thought she was well put-together, smart, attractive, very easy to talk to. Roy: The thing that springs to mind [about our conversation] is what we do for work. She’s in behavioral psychology, so I said I knew it was being analyzed. That was a bit of fun. I do capture management for a federal contractor, dealing with anti-fraud, anti-terror. She seemed a bit disinterested in that. I do realize it’s a bit complex; that’s fine.

Molly: That’s funny, because most people say I ask too many questions. I actually understood pretty clearly what he did for work and am interested — and would have asked more. But it is so “D.C.” to talk about work; I was conscious of that so kept it to a minimum. I did not mean to come off as disinterested at all, but maybe that was how it was perceived.

Roy: The conversation was going strong, and that was before the staff even noticed us. We talked about dogs; she volunteers with a rescue group, and I have one rescue dog. She’s very interested in food, as am I.

Molly: I just kept being pleasantly surprised about how many different things that would never show up on the Date Lab questionnaire that we had in common. I lived in London; he grew up there. My parents lived in Ireland; he has a home there. We both like traveling and really diving into culture. We had a meeting of the minds on certain things, and there was also this undercurrent of humor that kept the whole night fun.

Roy: I would agree our senses of humor were similar. There was this funny thing with ordering the food. We had talked about restaurants calling fish one thing and serving something else . When I tasted her fish, I knew it was a rock salmon, which is what I grew up eating in London in fish ’n’ chip shops. Nonetheless, it was very good. We had a good laugh over that.

Molly: You know how they say the first taste is with your eyes? This [fish] is not an appetizing sight. He said something to that effect under his breath, and I laughed. To say the sauce was the color of puke would not be overstating it. But it wasn’t bad, and I did share.

Roy: She had two interesting ideas. One was quite unusual but very funny. She thought putting the food in the envelope with the camera would be like a time capsule — our date told through leftovers. [Editor’s note: We did find the fishy remains the next day but declined to give them a try.] Earlier on, she told me she had been talking to her friends about showing up with a huge bunch of flowers and poking her head through them. I told her, “Okay, that would have been frightening.” Funny but very frightening.