I met Dan on Hinge.

He lives in Woodland Hills, and I live in Venice. In Los Angeles, this is considered a long-distance relationship. In another city it might be nothing. Here, it’s a factor.

But I believe that with the right person, you can make anything work, so I stay open. I’m a native New Yorker, and if I were living in Brooklyn and a guy lived on the Upper West Side, that would be a 45-minute subway ride, which is truly nothing in New York. So with that same logic, I try to have flexibility with men in L.A.

When we started planning our first date, Dan suggested three options: a hike on mushrooms, a wine tasting or a walk on the beach.

A hike on mushrooms is something I’d only do with someone I already trust, not someone I just met online. I don’t do first-date hikes because I don’t like feeling trapped if the guy’s a dud. So I chose the wine tasting.

Then I learned the wine tasting was in West Hills.

On a Friday night, driving there from Venice would be insane. So I said I didn’t want to meet there because of the traffic. He suggested Malibu. That was also not ideal on a Friday.

I was getting annoyed — this was a pink flag because in my dating world, the guy is supposed to come to the woman’s neighborhood in the early days. I’ve gone out with plenty of men from the Valley who effortlessly suggested they come to me. It’s not rare or impossible.

I suggested he come to the Westside. I didn’t specifically say Venice, and in hindsight, I probably should have. He landed on Brentwood, which was manageable for both of us. On our first date, we met at an Irish pub on Wilshire Boulevard. He was cuter and more interesting than I had expected, and with the Guinness flowing, we had fun.

When I got home, he texted me: “Well, I like you 🙂 Less the tik tok and the lack of rock music in your life, but it’s not a deal breaker — there are other qualities 🙂 What are your thoughts?”

I noticed the slight negativity but was mostly dazzled that a man texted immediately after the date to say he liked me. In the modern dating economy, this felt rare.

The next day, both of our evening plans fell through, so we made a last-minute date. The wine tasting he originally suggested still sounded like fun, and although it meant me driving to the Valley, I was up for it now that we’d met.

We sipped flights at Malibu Wines & Beer Garden in its airy, romantic courtyard and played a flirty version of Truth or Dare. Halfway through, he dared me to kiss him.

We ended with sushi on Ventura Boulevard and a short make-out session in his car. He invited me to Thanksgiving at his uncle’s, which felt too soon, but also sweet.

After the second date, he texted and said he had his kids that week and was also hosting an event on Thursday, so his only day to meet was Wednesday. I said great.

On Tuesday night, he checked if we were still on, and I said yes.

Then he texted: “I’m flexible on time but not on location. I have a big event on Thursday, hopefully you can come to me again.”

My stomach tightened. This again?

So I texted back: “I drove to you last time, which was a bit of an exception for me especially in the early days, but the wine tasting location sounded special. Usually guys come to my area. How about we switch it up this time?”

He replied: “I appreciate the effort! Because of my event, I’d rather be close to a computer just if needed … Here is what i offer:
— I’ll come to your area anytime next week/end
— Lunch/dinner on me
I want to continue where we stopped last time 😉 No pressure of course, but let’s snuggle”

I responded: “Ok let’s meet next week. Snuggles sound nice … let’s see what happens …”

Then he wrote: “So I won’t see you tomorrow?”

I replied: “Unless you wanna come to me and bring your laptop along, let’s rain check until you have more flexibility.”

He said: “Dang, you are hard. I’ll let you know tomorrow around midday if it’s ok.”

And then — surprise — he decided to come.

He drove to Venice for a 5 p.m. date. He said his ETA was 5 p.m., and it ended up being 5:25 p.m., typical 405 Freeway.

When he showed up, he was in a cranky mood. On our way to KazuNori in Marina del Rey, I thanked him for picking me up and told him I think it’s hot when the guy comes to the girl.

“You’re just saying that because you want me to come to you more,” he said, not playfully, but aggressively.

That was basically the end for me. But there I was, in his car, heading to dinner. So I stayed pleasant and tried to make the best of it.

I shared that in the early stages of dating, I find it’s good etiquette for the guy to come to the woman’s neighborhood. He immediately disagreed and started ranting about how dating rules are ridiculous and how they swing in women’s favor. He resented paying for dates and declared he wasn’t looking to “sponsor a woman’s life.”

“If women want equality and equal rights,” he said, “then it should apply all across the board, including dating, and the man shouldn’t have to pay.”

I said women don’t actually have equal rights because we get paid less than men and often receive lower salaries than men in the same position.

I tried to change the subject and reset the mood, but he insisted we keep hashing it out.

I tried to explain masculine/feminine dynamics: providing and protecting, giving and receiving.

“What does the man get out of this arrangement?” he asked.

It was like watching someone’s personality warp into Mr. Hyde. Then he brought up another point: He’s a single dad of two kids, so he gets tired; and because I don’t have kids, that should factor into who drives where.

At this point, I was barely engaging and focused on eating my hand rolls, and I couldn’t wait to get home.

The check came, and I happily split it, wanting nothing further from him.

In the car back to my place, he remarked: “It’s obvious we’re never gonna see each other again.”

Obvious, but did it need to be stated?

Then he showed me a Spotify playlist he’d made for me of his favorite electronic music, because he knows I like EDM.

“Oh, that’s sweet,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s how I show interest. Through things like this, not who drives to who,” he replied.

When I got out of the car, we wished each other luck, and I headed inside and shut the door.

Two hours later, he sent me the playlist. I’ve yet to listen to it.

It wasn’t the distance that ruined it. It was the resentment. I’m not looking for a man who feels burdened by the effort. I’m looking for a man who sees the value of courting a woman in the first place.

The author is a writer, comedian and former psychologist who lives in Venice. She is the creator of the new vertical series “Manfari.” She’s on Instagram: @solange_neue and @manfari.show.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

In a memo addressed to staffers sent Tuesday, the secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie G. Bunch III, defended the institution after the White House issued a 162-page report that characterizes the National Museum of American History as a place which has become “subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”

In his email, which NPR has obtained, Bunch wrote in part: “While there will always be room for improvement, this report is not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History. At the Smithsonian, our work is driven by scholarship, accuracy and an uncompromising commitment to tell the fullness of America’s story. As public servants and the keepers of this institution, we are charged with helping a nation find understanding, hope and clarity and as part of that duty, we are dedicated to excellence, reflection and growth.”

He continued: “We remain focused on what grounds us: a steadfast commitment to scholarship, nonpartisanship, independence, accuracy and integrity. For nearly 180 years, the Smithsonian has worked alongside partners across government — from the White House to Congress to our governing Board of Regents — guided by our enduring mission to increase and diffuse knowledge. That purpose remains: to pursue knowledge with rigor and to serve the American public with clarity and care.”

The White House report was issued on July 4 by the Domestic Policy Council under the title “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage.”

The council faults the National Museum of American History on a multitude of fronts, saying it underemphasized the Founding Fathers and early colonial and Revolutionary history; was not sufficiently celebratory of the country’s 250th anniversary; and that it engaged in “anti-white,” “illegal alien” and transgender activism.

It also accuses the museum of trying to “indoctrinate” teachers and students through its exhibitions, programming and teaching resources.

In the report, the council also specifically criticizes museum director Anthea Hartig, who has led the National Museum of American History since 2019 and is concurrently the president of the Organization of American Historians, calling her “an activist advancing an ideological agenda contradictory to the museum’s founding purpose of fostering patriotism.”

It was after the death of her son, Laith, that Esme Saleh decided to become a folk artist.

She had always been creative, experimenting with watercolors and learning to sew and embroider at a young age.

“I had a creative inkling,” she said, “but I never pursued it.”

Everything changed on Aug. 17, 2013.

When Saleh was nine months pregnant, she woke up with stomach pains and presumed she was in labor. She and her husband, Nasim, immediately went to the hospital, where doctors checked her and put the baby on a heart monitor. Saleh’s blood pressure was high, however, and the baby’s heart rate kept dropping. After about an hour, his heartbeat stopped. Doctors rushed her in for an emergency C-section, but it was too late. Laith did not survive.

Saleh lost a tremendous amount of blood and developed postpartum HELLP syndrome, a dangerous form of preeclampsia, but doctors were able to stabilize her.

When she woke up, the first thing she asked was, “How’s my baby?”

After losing her son in 2013, Esme Saleh left her job as a television producer. Since then, she has sold her hand-painted candles to local designers in Los Angeles and to LVMH in Paris.

“Aug. 17, 2013, was the most difficult day of my life, and Aug. 22 was the second most difficult, the day we drove home with an empty car seat,” she said of her and her husband’s new reality.

They named their son Laith Finn Saleh.

“His first name means ‘lion’ in Arabic. His middle name is an ode to Huckleberry Finn — sharp wit, kind heart, strong moral compass — all the attributes he’s imparted on us in spirit,” said Saleh, 45.

After such a devastating loss, she found it difficult to trust the world again. “It was hard to trust anything,” she said. “The medical system. Myself. It made me realize the fragility of bringing anything to life. We take so much for granted.”

So after years of working as a television producer, Saleh left broadcast journalism and leaned into her creative spirit.

She grew up in San Diego. Her mother was raised on a farm in Mexico, and her father moved from Tijuana to Los Angeles to be near her mother, who started working for a family in Sherman Oaks at 16. They eventually settled in San Diego, where Saleh’s father, now a church deacon, worked as a car salesman.

“The word Mystic has also become a driving force of what this journey means to me,” Saleh says. “A magical, otherworldly journey that has led me to some beautiful friendships, projects and unlimited well of curiosity. When I paint each pair of candles, it feels like I’m imparting a piece of that magic.”

“He always wanted to be a weatherman on TV,” she said, explaining how he hoped to get his big break on television by doing a weather report from the car lot.

Saleh wanted to be a broadcast journalist as her father had. After graduating from San Diego State, she interned in the sports department at CBS affiliate KFMB-TV although she didn’t know much about sports. She enjoyed sharing information with people, learned how to write plays of the week and felt she had found the right career.

But during a summer class at Mesa College, she started to think journalism might not be for her.

Saleh’s home is filled with her artwork. “My home expresses a lot of the things that I do,” she says. “If it works here, then I feel like I can put it out in the world.”

“I’m an empath — a sensitive soul — so when I was reading news about death and destruction, my eyes could not lie,” she said. Her professor told her, “This may not be your thing.” But when she arranged flowers on camera, she really came alive. She decided to work behind the scenes as a producer.

Her professor helped her get her first network news job in 2003, and she moved to Los Angeles, working on hard news and entertainment coverage.

After losing Laith a decade later, she couldn’t keep doing red-carpet interviews and acting like everything was fine. “It all felt so different, superficial and hard,” she said. “I felt like there was a bigger purpose out there for me. It’s in the small things that we find the big things.”

She started by painting folk art-inspired invitations for a friend’s baby shower. She painted delicate flowers, oranges and leaves on glass, leather and even lampshades. She created a logo. “I was just trying to say yes to things that were really scary,” she said. “Laith gave me the courage to do that.”

“I was just trying to get out of hole,” Saleh says of taking up painting after her son died.

Her first son, she said, became “a catalyst for painting.”

Then, at the first Thanksgiving during the COVID-19 pandemic when people could gather again, she had a light-bulb moment. “I was setting the table and didn’t have flowers or anything to add to decorate, so I thought, ‘I have these candles. I’m going to paint them and make them fancy,’ ” she said.

Her guests were impressed.

As time went on, painting taper candles helped her find joy again, and others noticed too.

“The one thing I hear when people pick up a pair of my candles is, ‘This makes me so happy. It makes me feel like there’s life here,’ ” she said.

One of the hardest parts of losing a child “is that you’re not just grieving the person, you’re grieving the future you imagined with them,” said Chicago-based grief specialist Carla Harvey. “A lifetime of love suddenly has nowhere to go. Creating art doesn’t erase grief, but it can become a way to carry it.”

Saleh created her brand Mystic by Esme in 2021, but it took her some time before she could gather the courage to try to sell them.

When she brought a shoebox full of samples to Nickey Kehoe, the L.A. store agreed to carry her candles. “I was beside myself,” Saleh said.

“Her candles were absolutely beautiful, and she had a fantastic spirit that made selling them a no-brainer,” said interior designer Todd Nickey, co-founder of Nickey Kehoe.

Saleh gets a surprise kiss from her dog Olive while painting candles at her dining room table.

Saleh viewed her new side project as a way to earn extra money for piano lessons for her 11-year-old son Linus, who is an entrepreneur like his mother. “I felt proud painting the candles while he was in lessons in the next room,” she said. “It became this circular economy, and it led to bigger opportunities for me.”

Last year, luxury conglomerate LVMH commissioned Saleh to paint 465 pairs of candles, or 930 candles in total, for its Chaumet jewelry brand. The collection was unveiled at an elaborate event at the Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay, just outside Paris.

“It was fun,” Saleh said about the process, which took six months from conception to delivery. “I felt like I was dressing my candles up for a party.”

Always a hard worker, which she attributes to being a first-generation child of immigrant parents, Saleh has now created a candle collection for Pierce and Ward in Los Feliz, leather napkin holders for interior designer Nathan Turner and pomegranate wrapping paper for Olive Ateliers. The candles retail between $42 to $50 for a pair, and recently, she developed a handsome pewter candle shaver that will be released in the winter.

Her dining room can sometimes feel like “an assembly line,” Saleh says.

Saleh holds a pair of candles she has embellished with florals.

Occasionally, she leads painting workshops, and she loves helping others tap into their creativity. The most meaningful one for her was an ornament workshop attended by several victims of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. “Without saying anything, we understood each other,” she said. “I understood that they were trying to create memories.”

Saleh knows what it means for things not to last — “impermanence,” she calls it — whether it is homes, candles or life itself.

She paints every day in the art-filled dining room of her home (unless it’s Little League season), surrounded by her family, candles and her two dogs, Lennon and Olive. ”Painting is like meditation,” she said. “You can sit in your dining room and tune everything out and just be in the moment.”

Even the family’s summer bucket list receives an artistic flourish.

An arch inside Saleh’s home receives a personalized touch.

She knows painting candles isn’t new, but she believes her motivation and the care she puts into each candle makes them special beyond their looks.

She has learned to look at the world that way, that painting in her dining room has offered her healing and joy, that she can trust herself and her body, that continuing to be inspired by her two boys — “one in spirit and the other here on Earth” — means that Laith will always be with her.

Many people think healing means moving on, said grief specialist Harvey, but “it’s really about finding ways to move forward while keeping the people we love woven into our lives. That’s what I see in her candles, not an ending, but an ongoing relationship with her son.”

“I feel like my son is channeling through this medium,” Saleh said, her voice breaking as she painted a taper. “He’s whispering to me, ‘Mom, this is your path.’ That has been my driving force. We’re going to grow this together.”