These are ominous questions to ask in a column about blind dates. But they’re the questions raised by the date between Tom Keefe and Hillary LeBeau, both 30.

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Tom, who works at a political consulting firm, applied for Date Lab at the behest of co-workers, even though he told me he usually doesn’t like people when he first meets them: “That’s just who I am. Once I get to know them, I’m like, ‘Oh, they’re fine.’ So I’m always aware of that.” He was gently self-deprecating but completely earnest, which would have been charming if he weren’t delivering this information the morning after a blind date I had arranged for him. “I would say 80 percent of people prove me wrong within the first 15 minutes and I end up liking them,” he said.

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On his Date Lab profile, he listed his type as “tall, driven, sense of humor, good conversationalist.” So, I set him up with Hillary, a tall, driven, union-side labor lawyer. Hillary told me she signed up for Date Lab because “it just sounded so funny and cool to me.” Laughing, she added, “And I like attention? That sounds terrible. But when I told my co-workers that I was doing it, they were all obsessed,” egging her on just as Tom’s workplace cheer squad had. Ever the lawyer, Hillary prepared for the date by studying Date Lab precedent. Reading old columns “actually made me kind of nervous because they’re all like, ‘Oh, we’re well matched, we had a lot to talk about, but there was no spark.’ That’s what everyone says: ‘There’s no spark.’ ”

We sent them to Pearl Dive Oyster Palace near Logan Circle. Asked for his first impression of Hillary, Tom said, “She’s not my type.” Why? “I don’t know. I just felt, ‘This isn’t my type.’ ” Hillary’s first impression: “He’s a normal-looking guy.” More prone than Tom to find silver linings, Hillary speculated that normal-looking might be better than good-looking: “If he’d been super hot or something, I’d be very intimidated.”

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True to the Date Lab pattern Hillary had identified, they did have a lot to talk about. Over salmon and fish tacos, they discussed the Democratic presidential debates that had taken place earlier that week. Both liked Sen. Elizabeth Warren and were curious about Sen. Kamala Harris. Both were anti-Bernie Sanders and skeptical of former vice president Joe Biden. That kind of agreement, on a first date, seemed like a good sign to Hillary: “It’s important for me to see where you land on [politics], and it seems like his opinions were compatible with mine.” When Hillary said she was from North Carolina, Tom told her that he once lived there for six months to work on a Democratic campaign — another moment of political synchronicity.

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But their feelings were not in sync. “There were no awkward silences or lulls,” said Hillary, concluding that the conversational element of the date had been a success. Tom, however, found the pace of conversation off-putting: “I react to nervous situations by being very subdued,” he said. He prefers dates who let awkward moments pass quietly: “We don’t have to fill every hole in the conversation.”

From Hillary’s point of view, Tom “got kind of cagey” near the end of the date. She interpreted this as uncertainty about how to end the night: “I go on a lot of dates, so I’m really good at defusing awkwardness and just jumping into it, and jumping out of it, and expressing, ‘I want to go home,’ or ‘Do you want to go somewhere next?’ ” Unfortunately, she did not pick up on Tom’s preference for comfortable silence.

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“I don’t want to say there was no spark, but there was no spark,” a reluctant Hillary admitted. Still, she chose not to completely close the door on the possibility of — something. “A lot of times I’m really surprised,” she said. “There will be somebody that I’ve hung out with a few times,” and felt nothing for. “And then they’ll do or say something where I’m like, ‘Oh! You’re cool. I want to be with you.’ ”

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As for Tom, he tried to be mindful of his tendency to recoil from the new. On first dates he often reminds himself, “I have to be slow, and then see what happens. Be nice. You may actually end up really liking them.” But, he said, Hillary “never made it into the 80 percent of people I end up liking.”

Rate the date

Tom: 3 [out of 5]. “It was fine.”

Hillary: 3. “Average.”

Update

No further contact.