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L.A. Affairs: Do I really love him? Or do I just hate myself?

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L.A. Affairs: Do I really love him? Or do I just hate myself?

I scrolled past his profile on Hinge, not because I wasn’t interested, but because I didn’t think I stood a chance. I’m a 5-foot-10 English major who, despite thousands of salads and ab crunches, has yet to lose the stubborn lower belly fat that prevents me from having fun at pool parties.

He had tens of thousands of Instagram followers and was friends with other disconcertingly attractive gay men my friends and I dubbed “the Instagays.” A retired college athlete with blond hair, a killer smile and washboard abs, he was the exact image of what I wasn’t. The only thing we seemed to have in common was that we were gay.

So when he invited me to connect on Hinge, I was stunned. I paced my apartment, thinking every thought between “I can’t believe the hot guy thinks I’m hot” and “This must be a mistake.” I accepted his request cautiously, half-convinced it wasn’t really him.

Our chat began with the usual song and dance of gay online dating: Cute dog. Cute cat. What do you do for work? How do your parents feel about you being gay? It dragged on for a week until I suggested we meet in person.

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Much to my surprise, he agreed. We picked a Thai restaurant not far from me. He arrived shortly after I did, dressed in all black with Steve Madden boots and a Patagonia coat. When I stood to greet him, I was surprised by his reserved demeanor, completely different from the confident image I had projected onto him from his now-vanished social media presence. I had anticipated a guy who walked in with a chip on his shoulder, as if just showing up was doing me a favor. But that wasn’t the case. I could feel his nerves.

Was he embarrassed to be here with me? I wondered. Maybe I look different in person from online. Why was it so hard for me to consider that he might actually find me attractive?

Soon our conversation turned to music. We discovered we loved Lana Del Rey and agreed “Norman F— Rockwell” is her best album. Oddly, his favorite song, “Love Song,” was also mine. We talked about Charli XCX, Bon Iver, Frank Ocean and the recently departed Sophie.

By then, my curiosity had become full-blown infatuation. In the gay community, we’re often inundated with soulless club bangers. So meeting someone who appreciated music with fewer than 100 beats per minute felt like a revelation. I would’ve never guessed that someone who looked like him would listen to music with such introspection. Together, we found solace in lyrics that mirrored our unspoken truths. It felt oddly like we were trauma-bonding.

Conversation flowed effortlessly as we moved from music to families, my grad program, his internship abroad and our shared distaste for “The Tonight Show.” Eventually, we realized the restaurant was closing, the neighboring tables were cleared and the chairs were already stacked. We asked for to-go boxes and stepped out into the night.

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As we walked side by side toward our cars, we paused in front of a bookstore on the corner, its windows glowing warmly against the cold. “Do you want to go in?” he asked, his breath visible in the frosty air.

“Sure,” I said, my voice catching a bit. I didn’t know why I felt so nervous. Maybe because it was the first time I realized I could love him. The hot guy was a secret nerd. Inside, he gravitated to the architecture section, pulling out thick design books and talking about his growing library at home. We moved to the queer lit shelves, where he held up “The Song of Achilles.”

“Have you read this yet?” he asked.

“No,” I admitted, adding it to my mental list.

We wandered toward the cookbooks. While he searched for recipes, I scanned for celebrities and found Antoni from “Queer Eye.”

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“I hear he makes a killer guac,” I said sarcastically, holding the book out. He raised an eyebrow and indulged me with a laugh. We left the store, him empty-handed, me with Sally Rooney’s “Beautiful World, Where Are You.” At our cars, I longed to kiss him but held back. I couldn’t tell if he felt the same way.

We hugged goodbye, polite and with some distance. Even without a kiss, it was the best date I’d ever been on. When I got home, I noticed a new follower on Instagram. It was him, but not the profile I remembered. Gone were the shirtless pics, the Instagays, the party weekends in Palm Springs. His new account had just a few hundred followers and no selfies, just his design work. What happened to the guy I thought I knew? I couldn’t help but wonder if something had changed in him.

Maybe he had grown tired of performing perfection. Maybe the pressure to be desirable got too heavy. Or maybe he just stopped caring about what others thought. What must it feel like to not care? Growing up gay in a conservative Catholic environment, I had no blueprint for happy queerness.

The stories I saw were tragic: Gay men were lonely, addicted, dying. So I clung to external markers of success, hotness, followers and desirability as a kind of shield against shame. I thought if someone like him wanted me, maybe I could finally feel worthy. But what if he didn’t need any of that anymore? What if I’m still the one holding on?

We only went on two more dates. Every time I tried to plan a fourth, he had something else going on. It wasn’t quite ghosting; if I texted, he’d respond. But the message was clear, I cared more than he did.

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It’s a strange thing falling for someone who seems to embody everything you’ve ever wanted to be. What made this so hard wasn’t losing him, but losing what might have been had he felt the way I did.

Ultimately, I’m not sure if I loved him or if I just wanted to be chosen by him. I wanted the world to look at us and say, “See? He’s enough.” But he taught me, maybe without knowing, that chasing external validation only leads back to the same question: Do I really love him or do I just hate myself?

The author is an award-winning writer and television producer who lives in West Hollywood. He’s on Instagram: @lmillernd.

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.

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Map: See Taylor Swift’s NYC Hotspots Ahead of Her MSG Wedding

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Map: See Taylor Swift’s NYC Hotspots Ahead of Her MSG Wedding

Swift has attended fashion’s biggest night, the Met Gala, a handful of times over the years. Perhaps no appearance was more memorable than 2016’s event where it was not her dress, but her hair that made an impact. Swift’s bleached platinum bob at the star-studded fund-raiser that year was part of a short-lived era known as “Bleachella” to some fans.

Some fans believe the 2016 event, which both Swift and her ex-boyfriend, the actor Joe Alwyn attended, is where the couple might have first encountered one another. A moment Swifties think the songstress referenced in “Dress,” singing “flashback when you met me, your buzz cut and my hair bleached,” a line that describes how both stars looked that night.

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For her first time as host on “Saturday Night Live,” a then 19-year-old Swift arrived having already written the song she would sing as the opening monologue. Seth Meyers, the show’s head writer at the time, later recalled bringing Swift into Lorne Michaels’s office, where she performed a “perfect” musical monologue and noted it was better than what the show’s writers had concocted for her to deliver. Swift has served as host and musical guest on the sketch-comedy show over the years. She’s also made repeated cameo appearances, including appearing alongside Kerry Washington and Betty White in a “Californians” sketch in 2015 for the show’s 40th anniversary.

In 2023, Swift and Travis Kelce both made cameo appearances on the show. The same day, they were also spotted by tabloids holding hands in New York City, one of the earliest public glimpses of them as a couple.

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The iconic arena in Midtown Manhattan will serve as the venue for a private, two-day event around the wedding of Swift and Kelce on July 2 and 3. The first event will reportedly be a smaller gathering of 100 people for a rehearsal dinner at the Infosys Theater, a venue inside the Garden, while as many as 1,000 guests are expected to arrive at the venue the next day for a larger celebration, with possible stage appearances. Swift has some history with the Garden, performing there several times over the years, as well as sitting courtside and cheering the Knicks to a win during a game earlier this summer.

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Whenever the singer is spotted coming and going from the Greenwich Village recording studio — which was founded by Jimi Hendrix and has hosted icons like the Rolling Stones and Chuck Berry over the years — fans are immediately abuzz with whispers about new music. Swift has worked there with Jack Antonoff, her longtime collaborator, on albums including “Lover” and “Folklore,” as well as re-releases of her older albums.

Swift has been spotted plenty of times at this Italian hot spot in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan, most recently in May, celebrating Lena Dunham’s 40th birthday. If you can’t get a table, try your hand at making their famed — and delicious — salad dressing.

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For a period between 2016 and 2017, Swift rented a four-story townhouse in Manhattan’s West Village. The pad appears to have inspired her 2019 track “Cornelia Street” from the album “Lover.” It’s a road she’ll never walk again, at least according to her lyrics.

Fans still regularly visit the house, even though it has been nearly a decade since Swift inhabited the home, which has an indoor swimming pool. In 2023, some Swifties made pilgrimages to the location after news broke on her split with the actor Joe Alwyn, whose relationship fans believe to be the inspiration for many of the tracks on “Lover.”

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Swift’s residence in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan has grown over the years. She initially bought two penthouses from the “The Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson in 2014. A fan who once visited the apartment recalled Swift’s father saying that when his daughter first viewed the place, the actor Ian McKellen, who had been living there, was sitting in the kitchen. She has since purchased several adjacent properties.

Fans have seen glimpses of the home on social media over the years and, more recently, watched Swift use a fire extinguisher to put out a small candle blaze in the kitchen in a video posted by Swift’s recent musical collaborator Gracie Abrams.

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Good luck getting a table here if you are not Swift or Kelce. The upscale American restaurant in SoHo is known for comforting dishes like a French dip sandwich and an ice cream sundae, as well as its savory sour-cream-and-onion martini from the cocktail menu. Swift has visited several times — including outings with Gigi Hadid and Sabrina Carpenter.

In “Delicate,” Swift sings of an unnamed “dive bar on the East Side.” Swifties believe this dark speakeasy on East Seventh Street is that bar. Fans also believe the song was written about Swift’s ex-boyfriend, the actor Joe Alwyn. The pair broke up in 2023; later that year she met Kelce.

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This exclusive, members-only club in Lower Manhattan is frequented by plenty of celebrities, including Swift. The club bans photography and videos, as well as members of the media, and patrons are barred from identifying others in the room on social media or to the press.

Still, even with the privacy rules, there have been plenty of posts and photos documenting Swift coming and going from Zero Bond. There was a visit in 2023 with the actor Miles Teller and his wife, Keleigh, as well as a recent celebratory evening with the Haim sisters in June after the group watched the Knicks win at Madison Square Garden in matching shirts. There have also been multiple visits with Kelce over the years.

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Swift spent part of her 34th birthday celebration at this rustic American restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Wearing a black minidress bedazzled with a moon and stars — a nice nod to the visual themes of her “Midnights” era — she partied the night away at Freemans’ upstairs cocktail bar with guests including Jack Antonoff, Blake Lively, Zoë Kravitz, the Haim sisters, Sabrina Carpenter and her childhood best friend, Abigail Anderson Berard, who was immortalized in Swift’s song “Fifteen.” The pop star was also seen dining here with Gracie Abrams earlier that same year.

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People line up for hours — yes, hours — to secure a spot at this restaurant in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. The brick-oven pizza spot, which is B.Y.O.B. and cash only, is a favorite of pizza connoisseurs — though not those at The New York Times — and celebrities alike. (Its owner has said he does not accept reservations.) Beyoncé, Jay-Z, the Beckhams and, of course, Swift have all been seen dining here, though unclear if they had to sweat it out in the line like us mere mortals. Swift, who once sent her dad to hand out pizzas, though likely not from Lucali, to fans camping out in New York to watch her perform on “Good Morning America,” has shared meals here with famous friends including Blake Lively and Selena Gomez, as well as a date night with Kelce.

The Brooklyn neighborhood where, if Swiftie lyrical interpretations are to be trusted, Swift left a now-infamous scarf at the home of one Maggie Gyllenhaal around 2010. Swift was dating Gyllenhaal’s brother, Jake, at the time and their relationship is believed to have inspired Swift’s “All Too Well,” a 2012 heart-wrencher of a song beloved by many fans, which Rolling Stone once ranked as her best song. “You keep my old scarf from that very first week,” Swift sings. In 2017, Maggie Gyllenhaal told Andy Cohen on “Watch What Happens Live” that she was “in the dark about the scarf.”

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Swift later released an updated, 10-minute version of the track in 2021. A red scarf featured prominently as a thematic motif in “All Too Well: The Short Film,” which Swift also released that same year.

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DLTA’s former Ace Hotel is reborn as a ‘creative hub’ — and yes, you can still sleep there

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DLTA’s former Ace Hotel is reborn as a ‘creative hub’ — and yes, you can still sleep there

The historic 1920s tower that once housed the beloved Ace Hotel is entering a new era just in time for the summer.

Two years after opening in the iconic Spanish Gothic building on South Broadway, Stile Downtown Los Angeles has unveiled its multimillion-dollar renovation and its expansion from a limited-service hotel to a full “creative hub.” The makeover adds a 24/7 membership-based creative lab with state-of-the-art music studios, co-working lounges, an updated rooftop bar called Somewhere Special, a restored theater and a curated retail shop for the community.

“We don’t really want to call it just a hotel — it’s more of a hub,” says Jaisun Ihm, CEO of AJU Continuum, the investment company that purchased the historic space.

Throughout the space are throwback touches — for instance, hotel guests can borrow a Walkman and browse the curated cassette library with titles like Sade’s “Promise,” Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl” and the Isley Brothers’ “Between the Sheets.”

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Behind the massive overhaul is South Korea-based AJU Continuum, which purchased the property in 2019 but didn’t change the name until 2024. The project marks the investment company’s first U.S. expansion.

“We don’t really want to call it just a hotel — it’s more of a hub,” says Jaisun Ihm, CEO of AJU Continuum, which is best known for its culture-forward Ryse Hotel in Seoul. With Stile, Ihm says their mission was to “connect L.A. to Seoul.”

Ryse, Ihm says, encapsulates today’s eclectic lifestyle hotel: “It’s grounded in street culture. We say it’s iconoclastic. It’s youthful in nature.”

AJU Continuum teamed up with L.A. architecture and interior design studio Design, Bitches — the group behind the chic Checker Hall in Highland Park and Verve Coffee Roasters in the Arts District. Ihm didn’t care that it was Design, Bitches’ first hotel venture. After working with several firms over the years, he was tired of seeing the same aesthetic everywhere and wanted to work with a team that would bring a “bold” perspective, he says.

When the creatives at Design, Bitches got the invitation, they were all in. “I’ve always wanted to do a hotel,” says RA Rudolph, the studio’s co-founder. “I love hotels and I have opinions,” she adds laughing.

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For Angelenos who frequented the Ace Hotel, a maverick venue that helped revitalize downtown L.A. for a decade beginning in 2014, walking through Stile will feel both familiar and new. While the building’s bones remain intact — a requirement of its historic-cultural monument designation — the space has an industrial-modern twist inspired by L.A.’s creative spirit.

For example, the United Theater on Broadway, which was once the 1927 flagship movie palace for the influential United Artists collective (Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith), now features fresh carpet, modernized sound and stage equipment and roughly 125 new light fixtures inspired by the lobby’s original Spanish Revival-style chandelier. As a nod to the building’s legacy, where Hollywood’s earliest icons broke away from major studios to control their own work, AJU Continuum has launched its own in-house booking team for the live entertainment venue. Also, the giant neon “Jesus Saves” sign that has sat atop the building since its days as a church is still there — and the owners have no plans to remove it.

1 A clawfoot tub inside the Loft King Suite.

2 Lounge chairs inside the Loft King Suite.

3 Rooftop pool at Stile DTLA

4 A woman with hat joins friends at bar.

5 Photo booth photos at the rooftop bar.

1. A clawfoot tub inside the Loft King Suite. 2. Lounge chairs inside the Loft King Suite. 3. Hotel guests lounge in the rooftop pool. 4. Adriana Castellanos and friends hanging out in the lobby bar. 5. Photos taken in the photo booth at the Somewhere Special rooftop bar.

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Some of the most significant changes can be found in the hotel lobby, which features a curated convenience store called the Goodie Shop, which is adorned with throwback boomboxes. Located next to the front desk, which was significantly condensed, the store is filled with a selection of California-sourced snacks and beverages, lifestyle goods, Stile-branded merch and travel essentials (phone chargers, toothpaste, hair care, etc.).

On the opposite side of the lobby is SparkHouse, a private members club and creative hub for up-and-coming musicians and creatives. The two-story space features professional recording studios, podcast and video suites, co-working lounges and meeting spaces, which are slated to open by early next year once permits are approved, Ihm says. SparkHouse’s cafe and bar is open to the public and sells tea, coffee (try the honey matcha latte), wine, beer cocktails and small bites. Ihm says programming at SparkHouse will include listening sessions, live showcases and even a mentorship program for rising artists.

RA Rudolph in the Sri King Suite at Stile DTLA.

“I’ve always wanted to do a hotel,” says RA Rudolph, the co-founder of Design, Bitches.

The rooftop bar, which offers stunning skyline views of the city and a pool, is now called Somewhere Special. The design team removed about 90% of the plants that used to pack the area to maximize space for dancing and mingling. Also, the pool area, now painted in a playful shade called Carrot Orange, has more seating and a photo booth nearby.

All 182 guest rooms were given a fresh coat of dusty rose paint, new custom carpet, furniture and upgraded bathrooms. In each room, you’ll find Korean amenities like face masks, a custom robe by a local brand called Room Service Los Angeles and books from the former Los Angeles University Cathedral that occupied the space from 1991 to 2011. With the hotel motto being “stay by your own rules,” Rudolph says it was important for them to make the rooms adaptable to each guest’s needs and to prioritize comfort. The result is uncommon room layouts like the tri-suite king room equipped with two twin-sized beds and a king bed split by a privacy divider that doubles as a playful art installation. Rudolph, who used to travel often with her now-adult children, says that’s the type of room she always wished had existed.

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Stile’s arrival comes at a precarious moment for downtown L.A. In recent years, the neighborhood’s once buzzy hospitality and nightlife scene has experienced dwindling foot traffic, slow pandemic recovery and increased vacancies. Some business owners say crime and neglect are driving away customers. Nearly 1,000 businesses left downtown in 2024. Launching a high-concept lifestyle hotel is a bold gamble.

The Goodie Shop at Stile DTLA.

The Goodie Shop, a new curated convenience store, is filled with a selection of California-sourced snacks and beverages, lifestyle goods and travel essentials.

But Ihm says he hopes that Stile will help rejuvenate the area and create an ecosystem that will support neighboring businesses as well. Rudolph says she’s already starting to see that change.

“It’s been nice to see that in the last year that I’ve been coming here to work on the project, it’s livened back up again,” she says. “Especially this block, it feels better.”

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How World Cup fans reflect America back at us : It’s Been a Minute

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How World Cup fans reflect America back at us : It’s Been a Minute

Inside the World Cup Cultural Exchange

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What does America look like to visitors?

We’re finding out in real time as fans and athletes from all over the world visit the United States for World Cup matches across the country. From Ranch dressing, to the wonders of all-you-can-eat buffets, tourists are getting a taste of all the USA has to offer, but how do we square the warm welcome for the World Cup with the United States’ recent stances on immigration? Brittany is joined by immigration reporter Jasmine Garsd, and NPR reporter Juliana Kim to find out.

Want more global perspectives on culture? Check out these episodes:
How often do you think about the American Empire?
Make life harder (and better): Learn another language.

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Follow Brittany on Instagram: @bmluse

For handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR’s Pod Club newsletter at npr.org/podclub.

This episode was produced by Liam McBain and Corey Antonio Rose. It was edited by Neena Pathak. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.

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