browngeek

A few days back I went speed-dating. While the whole concept of deciding if you would date a person within 7 minutes seems pretty shallow, it is however a surprisingly effective way to weed out the obvious mismatches. It also helps that everybody there is for the same reason (unlike the bar scene where some of the women are there “just for the music”).

So how long is 7 minutes? It depends. As Einstein described his theory of releativity- “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute-and it’s longer than any hour”. Don’t get me wrong here. Physical attraction is a must but it is not the only attribute. If the person across you cannot hold a conversation for more than a few seconds, or if there is no eye-contact at all (worse if the person is looking at the next date) then you pretty much know in the first minute that the next six minutes is a long arduous torture. I had four such 6-minute eternities that night. OTOH, with three other women, the seven minutes went by unnoticed. In fact, we kept talking as I walked to the next date. Obvious chemistry. (If you were one of them, you probably are reading this :wink:)

I highly recommend speed-dating over online-dating (match, eharmony etc). The primary reason being you meet the real person and not his/her writing skills, not to mention photos that were from five years ago! Another reason is stereotyping. A lot of online profiles say that ethnicity of the date does not matter. Of course. But since you need to spend lots of time in sending emails from pillar to post, why bother with the ones from a different race. Why bother looking past the stereotype. I bet the number of inter-racial couples that met online is in the low single digit. The third reason, of course, is time. Seven minutes. Thats all you waste on a mismatch. Yes they can be long minutes but, hey, you can always excuse yourself and get a drink!