by Kat Valdez

Note: After publishing How to Stop Dating in FoCo, I thought about how I didn’t tell the whole story. You can’t be a person of color in Fort Collins, Colorado – a city that’s 84% white – and not address the topic of identity. So here goes...

Globe at Universal CityWalk. Photo by Guneet Jassal on Unsplash

Act One: Hope

1. Download the Bumble app. Time to find the love of your life.
2. Your friend, who is a woman of color like you, says she’s been on 100 horrible first dates – mostly with white men – and “there’s nothing for you here.”
3. Feel disappointment, sadness, anger. Imagine life back in your hometown of Los Angeles.
4. Decide to plunge ahead. You hope there’s someone out there in Northern Colorado who could like you for you (and not have an Asian woman fetish).

Act Two: Debate

1. Go on a coffee date with a creepy, white dentist who lives in a small community on the east side of I-25.
2. Have a lackluster text conversation with a very tall, very white man who graduated from Colorado State University with a business degree.
3. Engage in a fun and intelligent text conversation with a young, attractive, dread-locked biracial guy in Westminster. Get stood up for a video phone call with said guy, who apologizes nine hours later: “Sorry, sweetheart.”
4. Download the OurTime app.
5. Scroll through hundreds of mostly white, conservative, religious men in Colorado and surrounding states who “like” you.
6. Look wide-eyed through the photos of an older white man who answers Bumble’s icebreaker question, “What would you do if the zombie apocalypse happened?” with “I’d go into my ammo room…”
7. Message an attractive Chinese man in Denver, who asks you what you’re looking for in a relationship. He’s looking for marriage. Your friend tells you that’s a classic cat-fishing method. They look for lonely women –widows are even better – marry them, and then steal all their money, never to be heard from again. It happened to her parents’ friend.
8. She says he’s probably some dude living in a basement, who stole someone’s photo to use for his bio.
9. Have an interesting text conversation with a handsome Black man in Denver who asks about your writing and who calls himself a musician even though he doesn’t play any musical instruments, and who says he performs wherever “they” will allow him to perform.
10. You immediately picture an unhoused person on the 16th Street Mall, holding drumsticks and beating on an overturned plastic bucket from one of the big box hardware stores.
11. Remember what your white therapist advised (before you silently fired her for trying to erase your identity with the words, You look white to me.): “You want to date your equal. Someone who has a job, housing, and a car.” (It’s good advice. Maybe you’ll forgive her one day for her color-blind racism.)

Act Three: Liberation

1. Manifest two new friends who share your love of theme parks.
2. Plan a vacation to Orlando to visit Universal’s The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Disney World Hollywood Studios’ Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.
3. Step onto Platform 9 ¾ ™ to ride the Hogwarts Express from Hogsmeade to Diagon Alley.
4. Drink frozen Butterbeer.
5. Rescue an animatronic “HP Interactive Snowy Owl” whom you name “Beatrice.”
6. Laugh with the abuelita who has no idea how to captain a spaceship on “Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run.” Her granddaughter leans over to push the flashing buttons for her.
7. Meet Phil, who grew up on Batuu and who serves you Jabba Juice with blueberry popping pearls at Oga’s Cantina. (He’s nice, funny, and cute. Too bad he lives in a galaxy far, far away.)
8. Groove to the tunes of the droid DJ.
9. Speed down a waterfall on Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, tell E.T. to phone home, ride the first roller coaster on the moon with Jimmy Fallon, survive the spooky hotel elevator in The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, eat a fancy dinner at The Hollywood Brown Derby, and escape from Kylo Ren in “Rise of the Resistance.”
10. Have the time of your fucking life.

Kat Valdez enjoyed visiting Hogsmeade and Batuu in April (sunny, with a low of 65 and a high of 83), and plans to return again some day. In the meantime, she continues to write at the thrilling intersection of pop culture and racial equity.

TheDefiantCurtsy.com: Pop culture through an equity and inclusion lens

Read how it all began: “How to Stop Dating in FoCo, Part I“
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