You know, like people used to do. Kate isn’t conservative, exactly. She considers herself moderate: conservative on economic policy, liberal on social issues. But she has grown tired of liberal men asking whom she voted for in the last election. With that in mind, we set her up with Brett Dieringer, a Republican Hill staffer from Richmond who listed “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle’s treatise on virtue, as his favorite book.

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Brett is 6-foot-3, a “social smoker” and a “hardcore walker” who over the phone sounds like a dead ringer for the actor Thomas Haden Church. Brett, too, had despaired of tiptoeing around other people’s politics on the Washington dating scene. He feels like 90 percent of the “young females” he encounters in D.C. are “very liberal,” and many seem to view conservative men as walking dealbreakers. (He is not imagining that. And many Date Lab applicants say they want someone with similar political leanings.) He described his dream date as “a Southern belle wedding planner that knows her way around the kitchen.”

It was raining when Brett arrived first at Ambar in Clarendon. He was seated with his back to the entrance and quickly stood up when Kate walked in. He said her eyes reminded him of a clear sky. “They’re not a dark blue, they’re a much lighter blue,” he said. “I’m going to sound so cheesy, but they had a hint on the outside, an aura, where they almost went from blue to white.”

He introduced himself: “It’s so nice to meet you, Kate, I’m Brett.” He told me later that the recitation of her name was deliberate; he tried to do the “whole, like, ‘paid attention ... in school’ kind of [thing] where, like, I knew her name because I looked at the email.” Like a gentleman.

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They sat, and servers brought a variety of small plates. The food was Balkan, and neither of them fell in love with it; dubiously, Kate described one dish as “lamb with I-don’t-know sauce.”

Brett, who is proud of his German and Irish roots, asked Kate about her heritage. She explained that her dad’s family is from Mexico, which always surprises people since she has blond hair and blue eyes. She didn’t see anything wrong with that question, but it also struck her as unusual. “I feel like most guys around my age are not sticking to questions like, ‘What is your heritage?’ ” she said.

Kate also took note about how much he seemed to talk about college. He asked her whether she’d been in a sorority. “At first, I thought that he might be the type of guy who all of the good things in his life happened in college,” she said. Then Brett told her he graduated in 2017.

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“That really threw me for a loop,” she told me later. She’d been hoping for someone closer to her own age. But we had hoped their old-school sensibilities might still make it a match. Instead, Kate ended up talking about her collection of Disney VHS tapes and wondering if her date knew what VHS tapes were. (He did.) “I tried to make it funny and just make some jokes out of it,” Brett said, “and just, like, alleviate the situation as best as I could.”

Kate didn’t feel a spark with Brett, but he did charm her enough that she didn’t immediately rule out a second date. “I really thought he was a genuine person, very sweet, very down-to-earth,” she said. “He has a Southern gentleman mentality about him.”

Of course, a gentleman mentality wasn’t the entirety of what Kate was after. She and Brett did text a bit after their date, but she wasn’t impressed by his follow-through. “If there’s anything fun going on next weekend,” Brett texted her, “let me know.”

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As post-date texts go, it was lamb with I-don’t-know sauce. “If he was a 23-year-old who was making plans and following up, and like, ‘I really want to see you,’ I might have been like, ‘Okay!’ ” Kate said. “But I do look for the assertive man.”

Rate the date

Kate: 4 [out of 5].

Brett: 4.5.

Update

No further contact.