When first impressions are all you have, you have to make a good one. And I had 12 first impressions to make that night. I mean, I needed to look at least 25 years old — and hot. I wore a swooped-neck silky brown shirt, a Gap jean jacket, khaki Capris and, hopefully, an air of sophistication that belied my years.
A few hours later, I — fondly remembered as “Woman 1” — sat at table G, anticipating the arrival of “Man 51” through “Man 62.” The men, on the other hand, fidgeted in the center of the dimly-lit, hazy back room of Matilda, a restaurant-bar located at 3101 N. Sheffield Ave.
“Make sure all of you have your name and your number on your badge. Your number is most important because that’s how they’ll identify you,” Jodi Swanson, our hired matchmaker for the evening, bellowed into a microphone, her husky voice springing away from her stretch red-leather pants and toward 23 soon-to-be daters.
“So gentlemen, if you can take a seat in front of a woman at a lettered station, when we blow the whistle, that will get us started.”
FWWEEEEEEEEEE!
At Hurry/Date, romance always begins with a whistle. This SpeedDating company, founded about two and a half years ago by Floridians Adele Testani and Ken Deckinger, sets up singles across the country and around the globe on blind dates. More specifically, on approximately 25 blind dates in one night. On the bright side, each date lasts only about three minutes. And on the downside, each date lasts only about three minutes.
“Some people say ‘Oh, how can you tell if you like somebody in three minutes?'” said 28-year-old Testani in a phone interview from Hurry/Date’s New York City headquarters. “Certainly, we aren’t saying you know you want to marry them in three minutes, but you can see if there is an attraction or chemistry or if you have the same type of humor. And then you can decide if you want to see them again.”
“It’s a way to avoid the looooooong, agonizing date,” she continued.
Hurrydaters pay $35 for the evening. At the end of three minutes, the host of the party blows a whistle, hollers “Rotate!”, and all the men, scrawling notes about their previous date in an attempt to ultimately decide to circle “yes” or “no” (which comes in handy during the online component later on), stand up and move to the next women to begin conversations anew.
“The main benefit is that you meet so many people in one night that you never could on one regular night out,” Testani said. “If you’re a single going to a bar and you see someone across the room and think they’re cute, maybe you get enough effort to go over and talk to them, and maybe they’re single. But odds are much better at Hurry/Date because everyone is single.”
According to Swanson, single doesn’t necessarily imply desperate.
“I always say that if they’re desperate, they don’t come because they’re afraid they’ll look desperate,” Swanson said at a back booth of Matilda before her party started. “If they’re arrogant, they won’t come because they think that they’re too cool for school. You just get the kind of people who are like ‘what the heck,’ person next door, just-give-it-a-try, easy-going people.”
Like Randy — number 61 and my first date of the evening. Randy, a former voice major in college and a current computer technical designer, seemed pretty chill, and we chatted about how people in the South drive slowly and foolishly call soda “Coke.” Despite his receding hair line (three-minute blocks encourage shallow judgments), his smiling eyes and soft-spoken manner made him a definite “yes” in my book. However, my opinions were all relative.
With so many would-be suitors in an evening, comparisons were bound to happen. For example, Brian, number 59, was adorable on his own terms — I mean, the guy loved to ballroom dance! But he seemed even more amazing following Brian, number 60, who had a feeble handshake and weak auditory skills.
Northwestern psychology Prof. J. Michael Bailey, who specializes in human sex and sexuality, said during a phone interview that the nice, charming guys don’t necessarily finish first in the musical-chair world of SpeedDating.
“The kind of people that do well in SpeedDating would include some people who are really good at putting on a fairly superficial front for three minutes,” Bailey said. “People who know how to do some kind of shtick, where they have a line or they have a way of getting a good short-term impression, will do well. But in the long run they might be less interesting, they might be less nice, they might be less smart.”
To convey a good first impression, Bailey recommended emphasizing what the opposite sex finds appealing in a mate: Men are more concerned with a woman’s physical attractiveness — hence my dilemma of what to wear — whereas women worry about status, stability and income. He advised males to mention their job, but not to obsess about it.
“I think it’s important to listen and not just talk about yourself,” Bailey said. “I’ve heard over and over that women find it really obnoxious when a man is just going to talk about himself.”
Sadly, Pete, number 62, never heard Bailey’s advice. Clad in a periwinkle button-down shirt, my tenth date of the night began to lose points from the get-go, when he gave bunny ears to the man in front of him for rotating too slowly and then wasted another 45 seconds complaining to our host. And then he interrupted me. Twice.
But he had fun. And as a whole, he said, the experience was better than he imagined it would be.
“I thought it would be a room full of losers,” said Pete, 26, who said he plans on giving SpeedDating another chance.
Whereas future female SpeedDaters will probably have the pleasure of seeing Pete, most participants don’t return that often, according to Swanson. She said only about one to two percent of her customers are regulars. And they return because they “have such a good time.”
Swanson attributes the low rate of returnees to a (hopefully) high percentage of people finding happiness. Based on her friends’ results (she said she has no official statistics), most participants have dated people they met for longer than six months.
SpeedDating is geared toward the 25- to 35-year-old crowd, according to CEO and co-founder Ken Deckinger. As people leave the post-college ages of 21 to 25, their social networks narrow and their opportunities to meet new people decreases, although their desire to find someone and settle down increases.
“Dating is becoming more complicated because people are staying single longer,” Deckinger, 30, said. “And (with age) what you want in people narrows, and it’s harder to find someone that fits exactly what you’re looking for. As you become older, and become busier and busier with your career, it’s harder to put time aside to meet people.”
SpeedDating is a more “efficient” than online dating, Deckinger said. “With online dating, you spend a long time communicating with people,” he said. “You spend weeks emailing back and forth, and when you meet them, they’re nothing like you imagined.”
Hurry/Date does, however, have an online component. After the event (and after all the after-hours schmoozing), participants go home to enter their preferences on Hurry/Date’s website. Those “yeses” and “nos” circled become important when notes like “Michael, #53, black shirt, Europe, yes” don’t ring any bells.
If both people “yes” each other, they’re considered a “match” and are able to communicate with one another through Hurry/Date’s email system, which protects participants’ true email addresses until they choose to reveal them.
“Hurry/Date is like Match.com in reverse,” Testani said. “You meet someone in person, then match up, then start emailing and flirting.”
Swanson, who participated in her first Hurry/Date party last spring after hosting for a year and a half, said she received identical emails from a few of her matches.
“A couple of the guys who emailed me must have been friends, but didn’t tell
the other that they matched with me because they sent me the exact same wording,” Swanson said. “But, like, verbatim, the last paragraphs were identical.”
Needless to say, she wasn’t turned on by their lack of creativity and warned future Hurry/Daters to be original in their post-date communication.
Swanson also recommended participants be selective when checking “yes.”
“It’s not good to have more than, like, four or five matches, because then it gets kind of crazy,” she said. “Because you want to date these people, you don’t want to blow them off. My friend had 11 matches. He was dating girls Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, Sunday morning. It was, like, insane.”
Pete hasn’t decided whether or not he wants to contact his would-be matches.
“They got my email address,” Pete said. “If they want to email me, that’s fine.”
He said that the quantity of participants was worrisome.
“If you do find someone attractive or interesting, that girl saw 20 other guys,” Pete said, claiming that this thought “psyched” him out. “I don’t like sharing my women.”
