How (Not) to Date a Berliner

Before I moved to Berlin permanently, I spent a winter here in 2008. The weather was the same as in Seattle (rainy, hazy, full of bleak) but everything else around me was different. I was dating one of those mythical born-in-Berliners. His name was David, and he thought I was crazy.

David wore Capris and smelled like magic. He lived in a white modernist cube of an apartment in a crumbling building above a major intersection in Mitte, near his Yogi friend "Greg." On weekends, he'd leave the apartment around midnight and come back at four or five am, at which point he would make bok choy with soy sauce and sleep until 2 in the afternoon. He was 35. I was 21 and terrified of life. We were an odd match.

David and I would Skype and I would tell him a joke and he would laugh and then look at me like I was an alien. We didn't understand each other on most levels. For one, he didn't even WANT to talk about his job, even though it sounded totally cool (he was an editor and I was at a very impressionable age). He also wasn't paranoid about sex, unlike all of my hyper-educated gay friends in the States. He used condoms, end of story, why was I freaking out? 

David taught me how to be a hedonist. Together, we'd go to abandoned warehouses filled with paper mache and dancing. We'd go to strobe-lit caves of wonder. I tried dancing like a German (there's less irony involved) and I definitely tried drinking like a German (ie, in public). I felt awe at this adult amusement park of art and leisure. On the drive back to his apartment, I'd stare out the rain-streaked window at all the grafitied and crumbling buildings, wondering what crazy, naked art projects were going on inside.

One night, David and I got into a fight. We were at a bar, talking to an old flame of his, and I began to feel like a used, snot-encrusted hankie. I suddenly believed he had slept with the entire city. "I've lived here a long time!" he responded. "So, of course I've known a lot of people." The necessary expiration date on this age-imbalanced relationship came into sharp focus. I didn't care that he used condoms, I felt like I was going to get a disease anyway. The next day, I wrote him an email apologizing for essentially calling him a slut, but it was clear we weren't cut out for each other at that stage in my life. I left Berlin soon after.

Back in Seattle, the gay bars were the same. But I began to let go, just a little bit. I was more open to meeting new people. I was actually just more open, period. You don't realize it until you go back to the States, but it's much more fun to look at the world through the eyes of a Berliner, even if you barely understand where they're coming from. You don't have to open your legs, though -- the eyes will do.