Dating: Help Denver Go From Worst to First!

This past November, The Great Love Debate, which describes itself as “a nationally touring series of live Town Hall-style forums on love, dating and relationships,” declared Denver, which it had visited close to a dozen times in 2017, “America’s Worst City to Find Love.” The very worst.

Shortly after reaching that startling conclusion, host Brian Howie was back in Denver in December for another sold-out Great Love Debate, where he discussed this city’s sad results with the crowd. “Men were, not surprisingly, very passive about it: ‘Yeah, so?’ Women were reluctant to admit their role in all of it, but that slowly changed by the end of the show,” he told us.

And Howie’s not alone in his assessment. According to Instacart, which just released its Most (and Least!) Romantic Cities Index, Denver ranks as the fifth least-romantic city for the second year in a row. Instacart’s methodology for determining this? How often such romantic terms as chocolate, flowers, candy and Valentine come up on a city’s grocery-shopping terms search.

Howie conducts his own research on the road. “We travel all the time,” he explains. “We’ve done, I don’t know, something like 300 lives shows in eighty different cities, and we decide to spend a lot of time in ones that have certain elements. The year before, we spent a lot of time in Atlanta, Minneapolis and Chicago. But in 2017, we were like, ‘We really need to go do Denver, because something’s off there.’ We really talked to the men and the women there. We were trying to figure out why there’s such a disconnect. Because Denver seems to have all the elements where good things can happen.”

But they don’t. Why? “Denver women are pretty much as good as you’re going to get,” says Howie. “But the men in Denver — and I’m generalizing — are as passive as any we’ve come across considering what they have there and their ability to do better.”

And now we’re going to give everyone, no matter how you identify, a chance push the Mile High City back to the top of the dating heap, where it deserves to be. To do your bit for Denver, send your true account of “My Worst Date in Denver” to [email protected] no later than 8 a.m. Tuesday, February 20....or simply post it as a comment. Your entry should be a minimum of 300 words (the sky’s the limit for really bad dates); although we’d like to share some of the entries, we’ll withhold your name on request.

The authors of the three best pieces on the three worst dates will each get a ticket to The Great Love Debate, which returns to the Denver Improv at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, February 22. (If you don't want to take your chances on winning tickets, you can buy Great Love Debate tickets here.)

Help Denver go from worst to first!