Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: We learned L.A. together. Could our love survive us being 700 miles apart?
Long Beach is not Los Angeles. The suburb, if that’s something you can call the seventh-largest city in California, is geographically close to the City of Angels but emotionally distant. The hometown of both Snoop Dogg and Billie Jean King — a set of Long Beach Polytechnic High graduates with pretty disparate skill sets — is culturally its own.
As such, growing up in the LBC meant trips into Los Angeles were an occasion, the kind of pack-the-car event that is normally associated with a road trip: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays that might have been spent in the city exploring the still-striking Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad or the cliffs of Malibu.
When I was growing up, L.A. felt far from me: I had great memories there, but my heart was in Long Beach.
I went north for college — to UC Santa Barbara. UCLA had waitlisted me, and the prospect of going to USC hurt my wallet just thinking about it. At the midpoint of my fourth year in Santa Barbara, I met Becca.
Introduced by our mutual friends, she was pitched to me as “tall and blond, with curly hair,” a historically winning phenotype for me, even if that “blond” mention was an elaborate brunette farce. We hit it off pretty quickly.
She was brilliant, the kind of smart that has the answer to every question. Gorgeous, the kind of beautiful that looks as good in a ripped Carhartt jacket and Dr. Martens as in a ballgown. And she was caring, the kind of person who would answer your phone call in a hurricane.
Becca was from Salt Lake City and had not spent much time in Los Angeles. Perhaps ironically, we had this in common. Nonetheless, I was her go-to for local information on the city.
Once I graduated, she spent time with me back in Long Beach. My charade, as her wealth of Los Angeles information, was doomed from the start, exposed during a particularly brutal bout of freeway traffic. Sitting at the bottleneck where the 10 Freeway meets the 405, Becca asked me whether I had been to the Last Bookstore in downtown L.A. With the glow of taillights illuminating my obvious answer in the negative, she insisted that we go.
So off we went, with Becca expertly navigating the streets that I was supposed to have known by now. The Last Bookstore proved more interesting for her in its vinyl collection than in its volume of volumes. She perused grotesque album covers while I investigated the indie art studios upstairs. We reconnected for a kitschy Instagram flick under the store’s arch of books.
The experience made me realize that I had much to learn about Los Angeles from this Utah girl.
She moved back to Salt Lake City after she finished school at UC Santa Barbara and we began dating long-distance. Every month, Becca would visit me in Long Beach, and like clockwork, she would take me into L.A. It got to the point where she was my tour guide to the city that I grew up next to.
On one outing, we packed a couple of poke bowls and headed to the Hollywood Bowl to see Weezer and Alanis Morissette. When the former’s song “Beverly Hills” was played, my mind drifted to what life would look like if I did in fact live in Beverly Hills, and I was “rollin’ like a celebrity.” In my visions of the future, Becca was with me.
Another outing had us deep in the bowels of the popular Melrose Trading Post. Flanked by overpriced band tees and 20-somethings who somehow managed to all look like the same type of hipster, we hunted for bargains. I picked up a briefcase of all things, for 20 bucks, for my shiny new job in Santa Monica. Money well spent. Becca ended up inevitably with some vintage sweater bearing a college logo. “I’m gonna crop it,” she would later announce. (What’s a flea market purchase without a tasteful amount of midriff?)
Becca showed me a side of L.A. that I had never explored.
But distance took its toll on our relationship. I felt the pressure of my new job, working long hours and sitting every day in traffic for the length of a James Cameron movie. She, for her part, was adjusting to life at home in Utah, on the hunt for a job and with no near future plans to move to Los Angeles. Conversations about our relationship reared their ugly heads.
Maybe the two of us had run our course. There is only so much time realistically that a relationship can last when its participants are 700 miles apart. We began to bicker more frequently, sometimes it felt like just for the sake of it. She planned a trip out to L.A. for us to assess how our relationship would move forward.
I picked her up from Los Angeles International Airport, and we headed to Santa Monica. Dinner was hand-rolled sushi, nice cocktails and a lot of “I” statements. Then I made my first L.A. decision in our relationship. We walked to the Santa Monica Pier.
As with many clichés, there is something comfortable about an oceanfront boardwalk. The sounds of laser guns from the nearby arcade join the predictable arc of the Ferris wheel in something that feels between nostalgic and therapeutic. I woefully underestimated the difficulty of the rigged three-point basketball shootout, and she, likewise, misjudged her stomach’s resilience after we went on an irresponsibly fast rotating roller coaster. We strolled the length of the pier, people-watching, then I took her hand in mine.
Amid the chaos of children screaming, buzzers ringing and neon lights blinking, we felt a level of certainty — a kind of quiet calm that I haven’t felt before.
In that moment, we were never so sure.
The author is a freelance writer and media professional living in Long Beach. His byline has appeared in Business Insider, Yahoo! and other publications.
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.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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