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So I tried speed dating last week.
It was... interesting, and kind of fun. But it didn't result in any "second" dates for me, so from that perspective, it might have been kind of a bust. It reminds me that, at heart, I might be a bit of "serial monogamist". I don't think there's been a time in my life when I was doing a lot of casual dating; during high school and college the pattern was flirt a bit, kind of start thinking of yourself "as a couple", then go on dates. I don't know if the women there have that same issue, and so won't go on a date unless they're pretty certain of a positive result. And I'm reminded of how long it took, say, my-drinking-buddy-turned-wife-turned-ex-wife Mo to view me as a potential romance rather than as a friendly goofball. Of course, the Mo situation is hardly parallel to a bout of 8-minute-dating, but still. Which of course brings me to the lack of results. It's of course depressing to get zero hits. (A slight mitigating factor is that I didn't get the "full" complement of 8 dates, there were 3 no shows (out of 16 women in all, i.e. you only actually "date" half the available people there anyway) and I had 2 empty times. I guess it's too tricky to rebalance the dates and distribute the no-shows on the fly.) I suspect, and some loyal friends claim anecdotal evidence to support this, that the whole 8-minutes paradigm ain't for friendly geeky guys like me. (Actually, said friend goes on to say that it's all a hormonal/testosterone thing, and that some odd little double blind experiments he tried with some lab grade testosterone a friend sneaked him bear this out.) I think I come across OK in this kind of forum, as far as that goes, not blatantly repulsive or annoying, but the positives I do bring to a relationship just don't show up in that kind of venue; I try to be smart and funny when I need to be manly and sexy. One thing I didn't read beforehand is: the 8 minutes go by really quickly. You barely have enough time to mutually establish stories before the bell rings and it's time to move on. I suppose it could be argued you should be more focused and goal-oriented in your spiel and the questions you ask, hopefully not to maximize the chance of getting another date, but of quickly sussing out the potential there, and any glaring incompatibilities. Or maybe that's now how these things should work, that the spontaneous rambling is part of the charm. Another detail is the M/F breakdown. I'm sure this would be potential fodder for a budding sociologist, but according the organizer, for the younger generations, you get about a 2:1 ratio of men to women signing up. By my age, it has evened out, and that trend continues so that the ratio is flipped for the older demographics. I guess I should be kind of grateful for that, but who knows. So that's that. Now, on to web-based matchmaking and dating sites! (I still suspect that, especially for guys like me, it's better to go someplace where people consider themselves available and try to find someone interesting then to go in the wild, find someone interesting, and hope that they consider themselves available...) |