Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: It’s hot when a man drives to me. But would this new guy make the trek from the Valley?
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.
Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner in One Night Only.
Nicole Rivelli/Universal Pictures
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Nicole Rivelli/Universal Pictures
A wise man once said, Sex is natural, sex is good / Not everybody does it / but everybody should.
Don’t take this declaration literally — have sex if you want to, or don’t have it if you don’t. It’s the sentiment that’s admirable, the notion that sex doesn’t have to be shameful, rigid or distressing. It can be fun! It can be freeing! It can be weird, but in a good way! That spirit seems to have carried over into this summer’s movie season in some big ways: The buzzy comedies I Want Your Sex and The Invite have been enthusiastic champions of unconventional sex and sexuality.
And this week brings two more films where desire and straight-up horniness are top of mind — Jane Schoenbrun’s excellent Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and Will Gluck’s infuriatingly sex-negative One Night Only. The latter stars Monica Barbaro and Mr. Dua Lipa — er, Callum Turner.
As the end credits rolled at my One Night Only screening, I thought to myself, Did they really put out a mainstream sex-negative rom-com, in the year 2026, arguing for the so-called “upsides” of living under an authoritarian government? Also known as “the sex Purge movie” — because it echoes the popular action-horror franchise – director Gluck and writer Travis Braun’s high-concept dystopian love story is about two hot New Yorkers who keep having awkward meet-cutes during the one 12-hour-period a year when Americans are legally allowed to have pre-marital sex. (When the movie begins, the country is three years into the congressional mandate, which is enforced via biosensors branded on the wrist indicating one’s status as single or married.)
It’s an inherently fascinating premise that could, in the right hands, be taken in creatively curious directions, interrogating right-wing policing of women’s and queer people’s bodies or even Gen Z’s supposed collective aversion to sex in most forms. That latter issue is of particular interest to Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, which sees Olivia Wilde’s freewheeling artist character enter an ethically dubious yet consensual sexual relationship with her much younger employee, played by Cooper Hoffman.
But apart from a throw-away line here and there, One Night Only is thoroughly uninterested in engaging with the politics it explicitly conjures beyond a few clever sight gags. Instead, it leaves you with more questions than answers, thanks to unclear and avoidant world-building. (For starters: What, exactly, qualifies as “sex”? How do queer people and visitors from abroad factor into all of this?) The movie merely gestures at resistance against the mandates, and does so only half-heartedly and insidiously; the one character we see defy the law is made out to be an all-around deviant with a long rap sheet.
And then there are multiple characters who outright state that just maybe, government-mandated year-round celibacy forces people to be “intentional” about who they sleep with — as if it’s a lemonade-from-lemons kind of situation. (Completely ignored is what it might mean to force couples into marriage who otherwise wouldn’t tie the knot, doing so just so they can have sex without fear of arrest.) To make all the pro-Gilead vibes even less digestible, the script’s humor is second-rate, and Barbaro and Turner just don’t give off the necessary heat to be the central couple. It fails in its dystopia and as a rom-com.
It’s a wonder One Night Only is being released the same week as Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a great, gory and viscerally sensual meditation on old-school slasher flicks. The two movies couldn’t be more different in their approaches to sex; their simultaneous arrival is like the inverse of the Armageddon and Deep Impact twin-movies phenomenon of 1998. For Schoenbrun, sexual anxiety — presented here in the form of internalized societal judgment, among other things — is a hurdle to be overcome through confrontation with the self, not shrugged-off acceptance. Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a young queer indie filmmaker, has been tapped to reboot Camp Miasma, the fictional horror franchise that was key to her sexual awakening as a kid (think Halloween, Friday the 13th). She seeks out its now-reclusive original star Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who lives on the grounds of the remote abandoned sleepaway camp where the first movie was shot decades ago because, she — kind of — jokes, “Somebody’s gotta be here” when the franchise’s iconic monster, Little Death, returns.
Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
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At first, Billy is presented as a Norma Desmond type with a Dolly Parton-esque accent (Anderson lays the lilting southern drawl on thick), but the central dynamic between faded movie star and hungry filmmaker is way less antagonistic than Sunset Boulevard. It’s also far more erotic — Kris has largely suppressed her own sexual desires for human connection despite being in a polyamorous relationship, conferring all that energy onto filmmaking and a heavy obsession with the bloody, twisted fantasy of Camp Miasma. Rewatching that first Camp Miasma movie together, Billy helps Kris lose her inhibitions and access a different side of herself; Einbinder and Anderson’s on-screen chemistry, sexual and otherwise, is blissfully alluring.
Schoenbrun, who is trans and nonbinary, is doing something remarkable with Teenage Sex and Death: They manage to draw upon decades’ worth of film theory and gender studies texts and render much of it cinematically, while largely avoiding too much didacticism or prescriptiveness. The film’s expression is sometimes messy, contradictory, and heady, but that’s a feature, not a bug, because sociological academia is often all those things too. So is the journey of sexual exploration.
In Schoenbrun’s previous film, I Saw the TV Glow, which they described as their way of talking about “not being in one’s body … living as voyeur,” Owen (Justice Smith) rejects the calling to live outside himself in exchange for “comfort” in the “norm,” only to find himself truly miserable and unmoored. Teenage Sex and Death, conceived after Schoenbrun transitioned, shows a filmmaker on the other side of that unmooring, both conceptually and visually. (The production design by Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland is top-tier, and includes gorgeous matte backdrops and Hitchcock movie references.) Desire — even the supposedly weird kind that finds pleasure in “powerlessness,” as Billy puts it — is natural and good.
Teenage Sex and Death ends up being a perfect tale for this moment — metatextual, chaotic, firmly progressive in the face of rapid societal regression and devaluation of intellectual rigor. (And also it must be said: a damn good time at the movies, if you don’t mind your eroticism with a side of gore.)
But then again, One Night Only feels timely, too. It’s only astounding that a movie so retrograde and stealthily propagandistic about sex could exist if you ignore, well, everything going on right now. There will always be art made to meet and challenge repression, and art made to merely reinforce it. The only rare thing this week is that the yin and yang happened to arrive at the same time.
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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Sally Field attends Netflix’s Los Angeles Premiere of “Remarkably Bright Creatures” in Hollywood at Netflix Tudum Theater on April 30, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Netflix)
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This week’s show was recorded in Chicago with host Peter Sagal, judge and scorekeeper Alzo Slade, Not My Job guest Sally Field and panelists Tom Bodett, Shantira Jackson, and Paula Poundstone. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.
Who’s Alzo This Time
One Giant Crash for Mankind; Mexico meets Mexican-ish; Who’s Watching the Baby?
Panel Questions
A Murder of Best Friends
Bluff The Listener
Our panelists tell three stories about a show that just couldn’t go on, only one of which is true
Not My Job: Legendary actor Sally Field joins us to answer our questions about the world’s dumbest animals
This week, we’re joined by legendary actor Sally Field, who’s up for an Emmy for her role in Remarkably Bright Creatures. She plays our game called “Remarkably Dumb Creatures,” three questions about the dumbest animals on Earth.
Panel Questions
Righty Tighty, Lefty Also Tighty; No Encores, Please!
Limericks
Alzo Slade reads three news-related limericks: Get Your Back Out at the Outback; The Worst Part of Waking Up; The Waaaaah-dyssey
Lightning Fill In The Blank
All the news we couldn’t fit anywhere else
Predictions
Our panelists predict, after the big crash, what’s the next story that’ll get the Moon into the news?
Hannah Simone’s seven-season run as Cece Parekh in the Fox sitcom “New Girl” (2011-2018) continues to pay dividends in ways expected and unexpected. In the first category is the show’s rewatch podcast “The Mess Around” (co-hosted with former co-star Larmorne Morris), which streams new episodes every Sunday on Hulu.
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
In the second category is her next big-screen project, Searchlight Pictures’ “Super Troopers 3,” hitting theaters Friday. It’s the latest installment of the Vermont-set, cop-and-caper comedy franchise in which she plays the sister of state trooper Thorny (co-star, director and member of comedy troupe Broken Lizard’s writing team Jay Chandrasekhar) and love interest of Farva (fellow Broken Lizard co-star Kevin Heffernan), headed to the altar complete with Indian wedding shenanigans.
“We first met when Jay directed a couple of episodes of ‘New Girl,’” Simone explained. “And then last summer I got a text from him asking me to play his sister. I was like ‘Enough with the texting’ and I called him immediately.”
As for her perfect L.A. Sunday, it starts with a lemon, ends with puzzles and has a whole lot of family, phone calls and fusion food in between.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
8 a.m.: Grab one of life’s lemons
The first thing I do when I wake up is go get a lemon from the little lemon tree we have and squeeze it into some room-temperature water and drink it. It’s an Ayurvedic thing and it’s supposed to be very good for your system. Then I follow that with two very strong cups of coffee.
10 a.m.: A walk-and-talk with the sister-in-law
I’ve become really close with my sister-in-law, and almost every Sunday, we meet for what we call “tea time.” No tea is consumed. We just go for a long walk and spill the tea. I love walking in L.A., and there are a lot of really quiet neighborhoods in Studio City. So we kind of just walk and wander the neighborhoods or go to a park.
Noon: Post up at Pijja Palace
I’m not a classic eggs-and-bacon brunch person. I lean more toward early lunch, and one of my favorite spots to do that is Pijja Palace. It’s an incredible sports bar [with] fusion Indian food so there are things like masala wings, chicken tikka pizza and dosa-style onion rings on the menu. And it’s a sports bar. So if it’s a Sunday and there’s an afternoon Dodgers game or a Kings game [in town], that’s where I’m going. But if not, I’m going to Pijja to eat and watch the game.
And I always call my mom when I’m driving because she lives in Scotland and I have to take into account the big time difference. It’s the most L.A. thing in the entire world that we only talk to our family members when we’re driving because the drives are so long. I’ll talk to her for about an hour on the way to Pijja.
2:30 p.m.: Put the bro in Broad
Then, since I’m over on the Eastside, I’d probably go downtown. Especially if I’m with my brother [Zach Simone] — he’s my plus-one forever — we’d go to the Broad. I love it there and could go every day. I like going to see [Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room — the Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” (2013)]. It’s always the most profound experience because you only get one minute and it’s really weird how it centers in you when you know you have a minute.
3:30 p.m.: Celebrate the Central Library’s Centennial
Then I’d walk down to [Los Angeles Public Library’s] Central Library, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Right now they have an incredible installation [on] the history of the library told in these 20-foot-high books, which is so beautiful and cool. And I will say they have probably one of the best gift shops in all of L.A. I can’t even call it a gift shop because I just buy things for myself.
4:30 p.m.: Drive and dial dad
If this was my dream Sunday, I would probably drive to the Westside and call my dad in Canada and talk to him for an hour while I drive. I can usually catch him at home watching cricket.
5:30 p.m. Kick it on Abbot Kinney
I’d wander around Abbot Kinney [Boulevard] for a while. One of the stores I like to wander into is Burro; because I’m a gift giver, and it’s a really good store for that. It’s very curated and stocked with all of the kinds of things I love.
6 p.m.: Fusion food at Badmaash
I’d probably grab an early dinner. And my favorite restaurant for that is Badmaash, and they just opened one in Venice. They just put the most amazing thing on their menu; a steak frites with masala au poivre. The peppercorn sauce is done with all Indian spices. My dad used to do fusion cooking before it was a thing. He used to make spaghetti Bolognese with cumin and coriander in it, so Western and Italian cuisine with Indian influences is comforting to me.
7 p.m.: Catch a sunset in the rearview mirror
I’d start to head back home around 7 [p.m.]-ish because that’s when the sun’s about to set. It’s the most L.A. thing in the entire world, because you have this beautiful sunset happening at the beach and you’re right there. But you don’t want to be in traffic, so you’re heading the opposite direction. I’ve probably seen thousands of the world’s most beautiful sunsets in my rearview driving down the 101 [Freeway].
8:30 p.m.: Prep, puzzles and popcorn TV
On Tuesdays, we have the Tuesday Night Supper Club, which is really just our Tuesday night version of a Friday family dinner. So, once I’m home, I’ll prep a chicken curry so it can sit in the marinade for a day.
I have a very loud addiction to puzzles — I don’t do them casually — so then I’ll open a puzzle. If it’s a 500-piece puzzle, it’ll be done before I go to bed. If it’s got 1,000 pieces, it’ll be finished the next day. I’ll work on a puzzle and watch some trash popcorn TV that I love — reality TV: “Love Island,” “Temptation Island,” “Survivor,” anything like that.
11 p.m.: Sweat some old “New Girl” episodes
I have a HigherDOSE Infrared Sauna Blanket, and at the end of the evening, I’ll use that for about an hour while I watch two episodes of “New Girl,” to prepare because we usually record “The Mess Around” [rewatch podcast] on Mondays.
12:01 a.m.: Wind down with Wordle
After I shower, I’ll go to bed, and the last thing I’ll do is play Wordle and Connections. I lost my perfect streak once because I didn’t get to it in time. So now I’m the person who has to do it at 12:01 a.m. so I won’t forget to do it.
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