Katie almost budges but doesn’t offer her last name. When you blog openly about walking around naked in your apartment, you don’t want creeps finding out where you live. She has conceded that she lives in Northern Virginia and works as a copy editor for a publishing company, which tolerates but is not wild about her blog. She also makes it easy to find her out on the town, tweeting about her travels and openly advertising public happy hours she sets up, like tonight's.

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She grew up in a house where they weren't allowed to lock doors. If you wanted someone's attention, you barged in. A private life to her, then, is probably different than yours. "Doors are meant to be open," she says. But she does show restraint when it comes to sex; anything even slightly more than a kiss gets an ellipsis in the blog.

The blog focuses more on the theater of dating, the missteps and the unwritten rules that make it the complicated science it is. Of chief importance to her: Men should always pay on the first date. She is very insistent on this.

“All women want to feel safe, and the way to do that is to pay on a date,” she said. “It shows control. It shows courtesy.”

She’s the defender of a lot of gender-based, rules-because-they’re-rules conventions that cut both ways. She often hears from couples that have had lasting marriages after first dates in which they discussed politics and exes, then split the bill at the end. Great for them, she says, for overcoming long odds that wouldn’t apply to the majority of daters.

With that in mind, we’re in search of a first-date guidebook to dating in D.C., and we’ll need your help establishing best practices for both men and women. Leave comments with your dos and don’t's, or feel free to e-mail and I can post yours anonymously. Continue the discussion on Twitter with the hashtag #dcfirstdates, or weigh in on Quora if you please.

This is the beginning of a month-long project about dating in D.C. The next story will be about online dating, and we’re in search of success stories and horror stories from D.C.-area daters. Please get in touch with us if you know of some good or bad examples.

Also, if you like the dating blog genre, you might also enjoy 50 First (J)Dates, A Single Girl Doing Single Things, City Girl, Dating D.C., Date the District, Dating in Ballston, and The Marathon’s Mistress.