Dating in Santa Barbara as a Woman: The Beautiful Math

The women running the beach path at Leadbetter before the fog lifts have the town to themselves for an hour, grey sea, grey sky, the harbor masts appearing and disappearing, and by noon the marine layer will burn off and Santa Barbara will put its postcard back on. Living here as a single woman means living inside that daily reveal in more ways than one. The town is small, gorgeous and layered, and the layers do not date each other much: student Isla Vista at one end, moneyed Montecito at the other, the working Eastside and Westside running their own family-networked social world, and in the middle, where a normal city keeps its dating pool, a gap. Every single woman in this town can describe the gap precisely, because she is standing in it.

The missing men

The housing math that hollows the middle is not gender-neutral in its effects. The cohort that gets squeezed down the coast to Ventura or out of the region, people in their late twenties and thirties on ordinary salaries, takes with it the men a woman of the same age would otherwise be meeting, and the ones who remain divide roughly into the anchored, teachers, nurses, tradesmen, the ones with rent-controlled luck or family property, and the subsidized, whose presence in this expensive town is underwritten by money that is not salary. A woman dating here learns to ask the unromantic question early: how does this person get to live in Santa Barbara. The answer is not disqualifying in any direction, but it predicts nearly everything about the shape a relationship can take, and local women treat it as due diligence rather than gold-digging, in a town where the rent is the biography. The workaround the town has settled on is the corridor. Dating down the 101, toward Goleta, Carpinteria and Ventura, is standard practice, the coastal towns functioning as one strung-out social market with the freeway for a main street, and a Santa Barbara woman’s stated radius is understood to include them the way a city woman’s includes the outer boroughs.

Generosity and terms

At the Montecito end of the gradient the money is old, real and sometimes single, and the town has a long tradition of relationships that climb it. Santa Barbara women are unsentimental about this. The distinction they draw, over the second glass in the Funk Zone, is between generosity and terms: money that expands a woman’s life and money that arrives with a schedule of expectations attached, and the local wisdom holds that you learn which kind you are dealing with not from the first month but from the first disagreement. The age gaps that would raise eyebrows in a company town raise fewer here, where the visible economy includes patrons, benefactors and third marriages, and the judgment women apply is practical rather than moral. What the gradient does to everyone, though, is instill a low-grade suspicion of motive, hers and his alike, that flatter towns never have to price in. In Santa Barbara the question behind the question is always what is actually being exchanged.

Gown, briefly

Isla Vista is its own weather system and most town women age out of it by twenty-three, but no honest account of being a woman here skips it. The square mile beside the university runs the densest party economy on the coast, balconies over the ocean on Del Playa, and the women inside it operate the standard campus protocols, arriving in groups, leaving in groups, drinks watched, locations shared, with a fluency that is national now rather than local. It is also, and this is stated plainly because it happened here, the place whose 2014 killings put the phrase #YesAllWomen into the language, and the town below the campus carries that memory quietly. What a woman in Santa Barbara proper mostly experiences of Isla Vista is its annual June exhalation, when a wave of graduates tries to stay in the area, and the female half of that wave discovers that the town’s rents will decide who remains, which returns the story to the missing middle from the other side.

Read at a glance

A resort town practices a specific skill on women: sorting them into visitor and resident at sight, and treating the two differently. A woman with a rolling suitcase and a wine-tour reservation is met with the professional warmth of an economy that runs on her, and with the private assumption that she is temporary, an assumption some local men treat as an opportunity and no local woman is fooled by. Residency is signaled in small currencies: calling Arroyo Burro by its real name, Hendry’s, knowing which morning the fish market opens on the harbor pier, being greeted at La Super-Rica by someone in the line. Women who move here describe a probation period, a year or so in which the town keeps confusing them for tourists, and its end, the first time a stranger asks them for directions, as a genuine promotion. The distinction matters romantically because the town’s serious suitors screen for permanence the way its landlords do. Everyone here has been left before, usually for a city with jobs.

No clock on the wall

What Santa Barbara does not supply is marriage pressure. Coastal California ideology and the town’s demographic mix, students at one end and long-retired at the other, combine into a place where being unmarried at forty is unremarkable and where divorce reads as an ordinary chapter, this being a town people conspicuously move to after one. Single motherhood carries no stigma and one enormous practical problem, the same one everything here has: cost, and the childcare math pushes single mothers toward the family networks of the Eastside or out of town entirely, which is said plainly by the women living it. The pressure a woman does feel here is aesthetic rather than marital. This is a town of visibly maintained people, the yoga classes are full at six in the morning, and the grooming floor that Tucson lowered, Santa Barbara raises. Opting out of the polish is possible and women do it, but it is a choice made against the grain of the place, and everyone can see the grain. The restaurant economy adds its own clock besides: a large share of the town’s single people work nights in its dining rooms and tasting rooms, their weekend falls on a Monday, and the industry’s internal social circuit, late, familiar, staffed entirely by people who already know each other, is where a good portion of the town’s actual pairing-off quietly happens.

After the burn-off

The town’s redeeming feature, romantically, is that its smallness eventually defeats its surfaces. Nobody stays a stranger here long enough to sustain a persona: the man from the tasting room resurfaces at Hendry’s at sunset, the paseo up State Street runs everyone past everyone weekly, and reputation accumulates the way it does in all small handsome towns, permanently. Women here use that. The local instinct is to slow-play the early stage and let the town do its work, because in Santa Barbara time, not questioning, is what dissolves a false front. That is the one point where L’Amore Vince agrees with the fog: its daily face check-in and the visible verified streak mean the person she is talking to is at minimum real, present and the same person every day, which in a town full of beautiful arrivals with vague explanations is a floor worth having. The rest burns off by noon, the way it always has here. What was actually there all morning is the thing worth knowing.