A blind date is kind of like a TV pilot. A show can have potential, a richness waiting to reveal itself once the exposition is out of the way, but if the first episode isn’t pitched right, then — boom — canceled. We paired Tim with Molly Igoe, a 23-year-old graduate student whose recent first dates included a guy who booked a reservation at a fancy restaurant and then showed up wearing sweatpants. (Boom, canceled.)

On a Tuesday night in May, she put on a navy-and-white striped jumpsuit, straightened her hair and set out to meet Tim. Molly had said on her Date Lab application that she was looking for someone “on the taller side,” with an athletic build, who cares about his appearance. Tim walked into Johnny Pistolas in Adams Morgan wearing a blue button-down shirt and trousers, which, while not memorable, were at least not sweatpants. The first thing Molly noticed was that he was definitely on the taller side (he’s 6-foot-3) and slim (she would soon find out that he runs marathons). She likes tall guys, but “past people I’ve dated are usually a little shorter,” she explained to me later. However, she also said: “That wasn’t the reason... I dunno, he just didn’t strike me as someone I would have necessarily gone up to” in a bar. So, she wasn’t attracted to him? “That’s very harsh-sounding,” Molly said.

Here, I should mention that Molly is studying for a master’s degree in political communication. As it turned out, that’s what Tim studied as an undergrad. And so, unlike many self-conscious D.C. daters, they did not resist when the conversation veered toward politics. Molly was in Joe Biden’s camp — or, at least, she was at the time (she has cooled on him since the first debate). Tim, who is from New Jersey, identifies as “a Cory guy” — as in Booker, the New Jersey U.S. senator and former mayor of Newark. Molly wasn’t as keen on Booker. “Somehow, very early in the date, she said she didn’t like Cory,” Tim told me.

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All of this, by itself, hardly added up to a dealbreaker. (“I’m not anti-Joe by any means,” he said.) But it was the start of a pattern that Tim began to notice: It wasn’t just that Molly disliked a bunch of his favorite things; it was also that the political-communication student’s communication style was not very ... political. At least, not to Tim — a guy who doesn’t consider himself strongly anti-anything and thinks the world would be a better place with no swearing. (I asked Tim if he was really from New Jersey, and he assured me he was.) He found it a bit jarring that Molly voiced, without restraint, her dislike of a lot of the things that he liked — even though he’d just told her that he liked them. For instance, when she said she hated “Peaky Blinders”: She hadn’t liked the pilot, and the second episode hadn’t done much to convince her that the series was worth her time.

Yes, people who don’t like the same things can date successfully. But, Tim said, it was hard to cultivate a promising dynamic when Molly seemed so bluntly opposed to the things that got him excited. “Like we talked about Cory Booker; she was no bueno about Cory Booker. We talked about ‘Peaky Blinders’; no bueno on ‘Peaky Blinders.’ She asked me what music I like. I said Kanye is probably my favorite musical artist; she was no bueno on Kanye. And we’re talking about some of my strong likes here!”

Molly wasn’t too hot on some of Tim’s likes, but she liked Tim well enough. She liked that he was educated, a go-getter and seemed like a good guy, to boot. By the end of the date, she was willing to entertain the idea of going out again. “He was a good person, we had things in common,” she said. “On paper, he checked a lot of my boxes.”

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And yet, when they left Johnny Pistolas, she picked up signals that this probably wasn’t going to happen. He asked for her number but didn’t offer to walk her to the Metro. The next day, they texted. Tim told her he didn’t see them as anything more than friends. Molly agreed. The date hadn’t been bad, as pilots go. But it hadn’t brought the heat from a chemistry standpoint, a romance standpoint, a let’s-see-where-this-goes standpoint. There would be no second episode.

Rate the date

Tim: 4.5 [out of 5].

Molly: 4.5.

Update

No further contact.