Bryan Winter, You’ll Never Get a Date in This Town Again

Melissa Lipton was sitting in her office when her computer chimed its friendly tone to announce an e-mail.

She opened it. It was a personal letter, written by a man she didn’t know to a woman she didn’t know but who had passed it on to a female friend who passed it on to another.

The story is oh so familiar.

“You seem like a nice person, and I don’t mean this as badly as it might sound, but . . . I immediately rule out women who put up too many barriers. I do this simply to economize on time. Now, maybe you’ll find someone who’s so taken by a single dance with you that he’s willing to negotiate by e-mail for a chance to trek to your suburban hide-out to plead his case. . . .”

It went on from there, an astonishingly blunt brushoff, signed “Bryan Winter.”

How typically D.C., thought Lipton, 31.

She forwarded it to 12 friends.

*

For countless thousands of young women in Washington, this e-mail has become a crucial bit of intercepted intelligence from the battlefields of dating. It was a confirmation of their worst fears about singlehood--that it really is that bad out there, that eligible women really do outnumber eligible men, and that, yes, the men all know it. And it was a warning: Watch out for this one. And so they passed it on, from co-worker to fellow bridesmaid to soccer teammate, in an ad hoc sisterhood of strangers that could have come together only through the Internet.

Bryan Winter’s letter seems to have gone everywhere. Within days it has breezed through Capitol Hill offices, tripped through PR agencies, blitzed almost every nonprofit and law firm.

Meanwhile, in a house on MacArthur Boulevard, the telephone rings. Then stops. Then rings. And rings. And keeps ringing.

This is the house where Bryan Winter lives. No, not that Bryan Winter. Another one. Not that it matters much by now.

*

Who is Bryan Winter?

Three weeks after his words exploded through the District of Columbia, his identity is still a mystery.

The Washington Post tried to trace the e-mail backward to its original author or original recipient by contacting previous senders, but the trail went cold. The Post also contacted various Bryan Winters listed in the public record.

This Bryan Winter is not the Wisconsin-based Web site manager who is married with a child but nonetheless has received dozens of scolding e-mails from strangers who find his name on the Internet and assume he’s the guy.

“I’m hoping my 15 minutes will end soon,” he frets.

He’s not Brian Winter the soon-to-graduate Georgetown medical student, even though he fits the suspect profile as a single 27-year-old--please note it’s an “i” not a “y” in his name, he says quickly.

“It’s a good thing I have a girlfriend, otherwise I’d be persona non grata around this town,” he said.

And he’s definitely not Bryan Winter the 40-year-old Georgetown stylist. As the only same-spelling Bryan Winter in the District phone book, he seems to have born the brunt of the outrage.

In the first two weeks of May, he and his wife received “hundreds” of harassing phone calls at their home. One caller stayed on the line, not speaking, just playing some kind of music. It was a scene out of “Play Misty for Me.” Creepy.

“It’s gone from funny,” says this Bryan Winter, “to pretty scary.”

The truth is, there’s no proof that the Bryan Winter in question actually lives anywhere in the D.C. area--if he exists at all. The e-mail has swept through New York and Los Angeles, where many of the senders and readers are convinced that Bryan Winter walks among them, not us.

Only one thing is certain about “Bryan Winter”: He’s sure got a way with words.

*

The e-mail begins with a preamble by an unknown author:

“This is an e-mail that a friend of mine received the other day from a guy she knows nothing at all about. She met him while out dancing and gave him her e-mail address. When he e-mailed her, she e-mailed him back with a few get-to-know-you questions . . . like ‘what’s your last name?’ This is how he responded:

“I am at a stage in my life where I’m looking seriously and systematically for someone I can share my life with. You seem like a nice person, and I don’t mean this as badly as it might sound, but I don’t have time for 20 questions by e-mail. I met five girls Saturday night, have already booked a first coffee with three of them, and meet more every time I go dancing.

“I immediately rule out women who put up too many barriers. I don’t do this because I think there’s anything wrong with them, nor do I do it because I’m arrogant. I do this simply to economize on time.

“I know that dating in this city is difficult and scary for women. But keep in mind it’s that way for the guys, too. Most of all, remember that you’re competing with thousands of other women who don’t insist that the man do all of the work of establishing a connection. And they live closer.

“Now, maybe you’ll find someone who’s so taken by a single dance with you that he’s willing to negotiate by e-mail for a chance to trek to your suburban hideout to plead his case. But you might not. And if such a person does exist, and you do happen to cross paths with him--what do you imagine a guy that desperate would have to offer?

-- Bryan Winter”

The last word belongs to one of the early forwarders:

In the hopes that this e-mail might get back to him after being seen by countless thousands of young women along the way . . . please send this on to a friend!

*

Which is exactly what happened. And along the way, a Greek chorus swelled.

freak! anybody know him???

And watch out for dc men like brian winter!

And oh, you gotta love dc men. . . .

Within hours, Bryan Winter was the sneering talk of break rooms and happy hours across the region. For a brief moment, he was almost the male Monica, breaking out of the city’s faceless mob of young career-starters and bar-hoppers to become a symbol of his generation and class.

Bryan Winter’s name was sullied not through mass media but through a characteristically small-town strain of old-fashioned gossip, of the kind that once could shame someone into exile from the community.

But unlike in the typical small-town gossip circuit, Bryan Winter’s name was not being bandied about by people who knew him, or even knew of him, but by educated young professionals--lawyers and policy wonks and consultants and meeting planners who didn’t hesitate to fire the “send” button.

It could be the anonymity of e-mail. Or the credibility that seems to accrue to a piece of e-mail when you get it from a friend, who got it from a friend, who got it from a friend, so it must be for real.

Either way, we may be seeing a lot more Bryan Winter situations, says Tara Lemmey, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“The Internet changes the nature of community or social circles,” she says. “We frequently pass judgment or gossip around among social circles; but social circles have never been so apparently interlinked. The normal degrees of people you talk to becomes amplified.”

With the Internet, she adds, the normal flow of gossip undergoes a powerful time compression. “You can do the kind of information transfer in a couple of hours that would have taken a couple of weeks in backyard and hallway conversations.”

*

Some of them feel bad about it now. A little.

Even if they didn’t personally call the MacArthur Boulevard Bryan Winter or e-mail the Wisconsin Bryan Winter, they know they played a small role by forwarding the e-mail and spreading the name.

With a week or two of hindsight, some sheepishly speculate the letter may have been a hoax, another urban legend making the rounds.

And yet: It rang so true.

“I could picture it taking place in some bar on the Hill, with a bunch of snotty little [Capitol] Hill interns,” Melissa Lipton says.

Lipton, who is single, admits she hasn’t run into anyone that obnoxious lately, but “the arrogant tone in it wasn’t too off-base from some young men I used to encounter.”

But why did so many women feel the impulse to forward the e-mail to so many friends? Freelance writer Jennifer Mendelsohn, 30, who happily forwarded the letter, understands.

“Dating is usually a solitary experience--there’s nobody there to see how mismatched the guy at your doorstep is,” she says. But the Bryan Winter e-mail was proof. “You didn’t have to just say, ‘This guy did this awful thing to me,’ ” she says. “It was documentable and replicable and forwardable.”

Many people have noted one particular unfairness of the chain: It doesn’t include the e-mail from the young woman who kicked it off. Perhaps she was overly coy, trying to string along a vapid e-mail flirtation. Perhaps she was overly prying, trying to gauge his social and career status before making a date.

In some circles, the letter is a sexual Rorschach test--women see one thing, men see another. Some men were perplexed by the female outrage: Gee, at least he’s being straightforward with her. Isn’t that what women want?

But even men unsympathetic to Winter are reluctant to step into

this minefield. One young lawyer who said he was deeply troubled by the male-bashing aspect of the e-mail chain declined to speak for attribution, calling it “dating hara-kiri.”

*

For the battle of the sexes being waged in his name, Bryan Winter has little patience. “If that’s what you believe about men,” he says, “you shouldn’t be dating in the first place.”

After a few days of harassment, he started screening his calls and put a new message on his answering machine.

“This is Bryan Winter,” it begins. “I buy my coffee at Safeway, I only dance in my kitchen, and I don’t even have an e-mail address.

“But if you would still like to leave a message for me--or my wife, Deborah--please do so after the tone.”