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I was with my girlfriend for three years before we broke up near the end of 2015.

We’d met through a mutual friend while shooting a short film for a local competition. She and I were the two main characters in 17 Days of Summer, a spoof on the film 500 Days of Summer (because Seattle only has 17 days of summer!). While working on it, we became interested in one another and eventually started a relationship.

Aside from shooting the movie, we never really dated. I never asked her to go out with me in that formal way. It was very casual—we’d meet up for dinner at a place she suggested, or we’d go to a bar and meet mutual friends. But now that I’m single again, the idea of asking someone out totally terrifies me.

Of course, there is something great about the formality of dating. The newness and the potential of it can be exciting. The burgeoning relationship isn’t solidified so there is a sense of having to prove yourself to the other person. And because I’m new to it (again), I thought I should ask some other Seattleites—everyone from a chef to a writer to a musician to an entrepreneur who invented her own dating app—about their experiences and what I should expect as I dive back in.

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“We’re seeing a pretty big spike in activity now,” says Susie Lee, ceo and founder of the Seattle-based dating app Siren, which puts women in control of interactions and aims to curate a more intellectual, conversation-based medium for dating. The app, invented in 2013, does not involve swiping user photos right or left, but rather it promotes conversation through open-ended questions of the day, or “conversation starters,” like, “what did you want to be when you were a child?”

Lee invented Siren after returning to single status. She had a background in the arts but didn’t want to date someone in the scene. “I’d just gotten a smartphone and I was asking friends what they do [dating-wise] with their phones,” she says. “I tried OK Cupid and Match.com but I never finished making a profile. I thought it was so stupid; it felt like junior high. I thought all I was going to get was Asian hunters.”

While dating apps are hard enough to navigate, Seattle itself is a difficult place to date, Lee says. “We joked that we’d try to solve the Seattle Freeze with Siren. And that if we could nail Seattle, every other city would be easy.” According to data from the app, people living in Seattle tend to be shy and introverted, while Lee found the opposite in other cities. “People in LA and New York really took to it and started messaging,” she says. “It was much more extroverted and energetic.”

She credits Seattle’s shyness in part to its Scandinavian history, a culture known to be quieter and darker. “The weather contributes to it, too,” she says. “And this is a city that took to the tech world very early so that kind of introverted behavior has been here for a long time.”

Despite Seattle’s traditionally shy reputation, there are plenty of people who have found love. Zephyr Paquette, head chef at Seattle’s Marjorie restaurant, recently met a woman online, fell in love and got married—all in the span of a few weeks.

Paquette owes her online dating success in part to a friend who took her phone, altered the description to sound more genuine and changed her profile pictures to make them more current and more representative of her personality. “My friends all thought my pictures sucked,” she says. “With my career, it’s so hard for me to get out there. I was all over the online [dating] stuff, but couldn’t find anything, couldn’t get anybody to answer, respond or even show up.”

With those simple changes in place, the next morning she woke up to find a message from a woman saying hello. They texted back and forth, met for a drink and that was it.  “She proposed to me on Christmas Eve and we got married on New Year’s Eve,” she says. “We got secret married but are telling folks we are engaged until she introduces me to her mom and then we are planning a July wedding.”

Paquette considers herself lucky. “Seattle is a passive city—if it’s too wet outside, no one leaves their house—but even though she’s a Pacific Northwest girl, she’s not passive.”

For some locals, dating in the age of the Internet has been an odd experience.

“Dating has always been a bit weird here,” says Adrian Ryan, who until recently wrote the Homosexual Agenda column for The Stranger and has bylines in other publications including Seattle’s Jet Space Studio. “But I think that has more to do with the fact that I’m highly Google-able. I’ve had guys do massive amounts of research before a date and, believe it or not, that can be rather off-putting.”

Instead of looking for a relationship online, Ryan opted to be part of a throuple (a three-person couple) for a year and a half that he says was possibly the best relationship he’s ever had in Seattle. “For a long time it was perfect: they were married and where their relationship seemed to fall short – interests they didn’t share, for example – I just seemed to slip right in naturally.” 

While the three did everything together, including meeting Ryan’s family on Thanksgiving, a “lack of communication and clear boundaries” caused the throuple to go south. Despite a double dose of fun and affection, Ryan notes the stress was also twice as much. He’s off the market for now. “I’d probably never do it again… probably.”

Evan Flory-Barnes, a double bass player for several music groups including Industrial Revelation, is also familiar with being in an unconventional relationship.

“People hear ‘open relationship’ and think it’s all about sex or a fear of commitment,” Flory-Barnes says, “but I don’t think I’ve ever been committed to loving someone so totally and so fully than I have in this relationship.”

He says the duality within this sort of partnership is both traditional, in that there’s a focus on two-way communication, and also a paradigm shift for him; a sort of trailblazing.

“You’re an improviser while also having this solid root in your connection,” he says. “You dance with all your emotions. We are committed to each other’s happiness as people, as individuals in the world.” 

At the end of the day for Flory-Barnes and his partner, it’s about recognizing the vastness within all people, the love one can have for many in life, and how relationships shouldn’t be about reward, reprimand or limitation. 

“It’s about openness to being a human,” he says, “and that includes sensuality and sexuality and closeness and bonding.”

Openness seems to be the key: Openness to people, to new ways of meeting people, to new ways of being with people. Dating is hard. It involves putting yourself out there, showing vulnerability predicated on loneliness and not being sure what moment – if any – might lead to something long lasting.