I am not alone in hoping to never use an online dating app ever again. Despite their normalization, many of my friends have come to the same conclusion, even if the reason for their reservations are different. Whether it be a lack of interested parties, making you feel bad about yourself, or an overabundance of superficial interest from people who are merely treating the numbers as a game, but who have no interest in any particular person, hence making you feel bad about humanity as a whole, or the apps themselves becoming increasingly predatory in their monetization schemes, the way the mercenary has infected intimacy leaves a vast swath of eligible people alienated. Similarly, many of the people I am closest to, both in age and in temperament, no longer are interested in going out to bars, spending money on overpriced drinks. Whether they be actively sober or simply no longer fond of the company of the active drunk, the companionship of the barfly, especially as a romantic partner, does not appeal.
So when we chat with each other, my friends and I, there is a certain tenor to the conversation of having given up. These are the two main ways people meet each other, and they seem bad: Is there no alternative? While some might hope to meet someone normally, or have someone in their extended circle of acquaintances reveal themselves as a romantic prospect, the people that you meet through the ways that people meet each other do not appeal, at least in the abstract. Again, these feelings seem pretty widespread, at least among the people that I talk to, be they men, women, or queers of one stripe or another. They might live in different cities, or in isolated suburbs. They are, generally, older; I don't think the people I know in their twenties feel the same way. But age comes for us all, and coupledom does not, presumably some people are just a few years off from joining us in the ranks of the unsure what to do with oneself.
So it came to be that I started saying to people, what about speed dating, that's a thing people do. And one married friend said oh yeah I did that once, did not meet anyone, but had a good time. So informed, I continued to iterate, maybe that could be a thing that might work out. Most friends voiced disinterest, or academic interest in learning how it would be, were I to make such an attempt. And so it came to be that I put my money where my mouth was and did the thing everyone else was skeptical about. For them I write this blog post, to report: Yeah, that doesn't work either, I don't think.
I will do my best to protect the anonymity of the organizers by refraining from any embarrassing details that might in fact be their proprietary blend, even though it might be some of those factors that in fact made it worse than others. So it is that I cannot dismiss the enterprise completely, as much as I would like to. The basic premise, that you can realize you like someone in a really short period of time, and that the people that have this immediate appeal might differ from the purely superficial strengths as seen on a dating profile, is sound. The question of what then goes wrong is interesting: You have a smaller pool of options, but what goes awry is in the self-selection.
The best way I can put it is that that the people who are willing to participate in a speed dating event are primarily interested in the experience. They will congratulate themselves for putting themselves out there, even though the whole experience is designed to minimize risk. You could characterize these people as boring people, and maybe that would be fair, but I'm boring too, albeit in different ways. Arguably even more boring, because I don't have this interest in "experiences" for their own sake. My interests in the arts make me very much a homebody, despite what I would think of as a good amount of intellectual curiosity.
Back in the day, the dating website OKCupid had a blog, where they would make blog posts analyzing the data they discovered over the course of running a dating website. One of the things they found, that I think makes a lot of sense, is that men and women evaluate attractiveness differently, when asked to do so using a scale of 1 to 5. Men's ratings fall under what I would consider a normal or expected distribution of value, a bell curve, wherein most women are considered average, or a 3, with less people being given a 1 or a 5 judgment. Few are considered extremely beautiful, but few are considered hideous. Women's evaluations, however, are inverted, with very few men being considered merely average: It is more likely that someone will either be viewed as extremely attractive or completely unfuckable. That anecdote is not really germane to my larger point, that's just an example of a post they made that I remember. What's more important is that they determined that, of all the questions they had on their quiz, to assign a percentage to determined compatibility, two questions ended up being far more relevant towards if a relationship actually worked or lasted than any of the others. One of which was, do you like watching horror movies, and the other was, have you ever traveled outside of the country by yourself.
The best way I can describe the population sample of the speed dating event is that it self-selected for people who had traveled outside the country by themselves. There was a brief "introduce yourself and say a fun fact about yourself" that revealed this pretty explicitly, as travel destinations were pretty much the only thing that anyone had to say for themselves as a fun fact. Except for me, I explained that I had chosen this event over others because of its proximity within blocks of my house. This marked me as an outlier, and I commenced to not connect with anyone at the thing, which is fine. I suspect that this interest in "travel" as an activity or end to itself corresponds with the interest in "dating" as an end to itself.
The other part of meeting a lot of people one after another is that you realize how boring a lot of people are, and how many of them can barely communicate, or are sort of disinterested in doing so, and that being articulate to any degree might register as "intense" or "intimidating" to the general public, even when you are doing your best to be friendly and welcoming and ask questions or whatever. Many people don't want to answer questions, they just want to vibe vaguely. But look, I'm well aware that making any sort of criticism of people in general reflects poorly on me, so I don't want to dwell on that stuff. But suffice it to say, you might lose track of what most people are like when you exist in your own little self-selected world of people who share your interests or some personal history. The idea of meeting strangers holds appeal if you have begun to feel that you live in a small bubble. Still, certain laws of statistical averages explaining what the general populace is like will make a person come off as misanthropic if they break it down for you.