Speed dating in Seattle — Uncle Vinny tells all

Ducklings! Are you single? Are you semi-brave? Do you like remembering how awful dating was? If any of those are true, listen up as I scoop the poop on my experiences with HurryDating and FastLife, two of the speed-dating Services for hire here in Seattle.

My backstory: I’m chronically single, spending far more of my life not in a relationship than in one. I’m far too comfortable being single, I’m shy at all the wrong moments, and I probably have 33 fundamental misunderstandings about human nature (down from the 2,300 I had in my early twenties, but OH WELL), so I’m just single single single. Bah. Anyhoo, in my youth I did a ton of internet dating. Like, a fuckton. A metric fuckton. So much internet dating that it really became soul-crushingingly awful, and I vowed after my last breakup (January 2006?! holy fucking shit) to never look for love online again.

But you know what? I just don’t meet people in my regular life. Chatting up random women fills me with horror, I don’t go to bars, and I don’t do the randomly social things that are necessary to put me in the dating millieu. I’m more of a books/internet/movie person, plus I’m shy, plus see above, etc. So I decided to try speed dating. You get thrown together with 6-12 guaranteed single women, you chat for 5-8 minutes, and move on. It’s low stress if you want it to be, and try not to take it personally if the Unrequited Love Train flattens you.

(And can I just take a moment to mention that after 36 years of saying “gee thanks but no thanks” to women I dated, I finally got run over a few times in the past year by the “gee thanks but no thanks” boomerang? It fucking sucks. Not that I didn’t know that, but it’s now a practical understanding, not a theoretical one.)

So, my first speed dating thing was a KEXP party, where they organized a bunch of listeners together and semi-randomly paired them up. This was a great idea — lots of single people with a mutual interest — but was ineptly managed. There were probably 80+ people in the room, but they only set us each up with 6 or 7 potential matches, then we all went home. Damn! What about all the other women who were there? Shouldn’t everyone get to talk to everyone?! Organize more events if there are too many people, etc… So that was annoying; even still, I hope they’d do another, cuz I’d go. KEXP people are sexxxy.

My second and third speed dating things were with HurryDate. You create a dumb profile online (god I hate online profiles!), and then go to the party on a weeknight evening. At the party, a woman with a weak voice will take 20-30 minutes to tediously and poorly explain the rather simple process while you sit across from Dream Woman #1 wishing you could get the Quiet Disorganized Leader Lady to just shut up. HurryDate lets you meet all the women who come to the event (a plus!), and the venue (O’Asian bar downtown the two times I went) is perfectly acceptable. The women I met at the first event were pretty darn cool; two or three of them were definitely worth seeing again, and one was obviously my soul mate. (Or so I thought!)

Sadly, on the way home from my HurryDate, I dropped my piece of paper with the notes I’d made about which women I did and didn’t want to see again. Which brings up the stupid flaw in their system: In order for Aphrodite and Adonis to get together, they have to correctly enter Byzantine code numbers online after they get home, indicating their interest in each other. No codes, no match. No match, no email. No email, no twoo wuv. But even if you enter your code correctly (I remembered Dream Girl’s code), there’s no guarantee that she’ll remember to go home and put in your code; she might get busy, lose your code in a pizza restaurant like I did, and drive you to drink. (FastLife has a better system, see below). The other annoying problem with HurryDate is that 90% of the women at the events I attended didn’t say Yes or No, so you’re left wondering if they got hit by a bus, or what. After two HurryDate events (the women at the second event were less interesting, and similarly unresponsive) I threw in the towel.

FastLife is more expensive ($50 for an event versus $30 for HurryDate), and fewer people came. (There were 10-12 of each gender at each HurryDate thing, and only 6 women/8 men at the thing tonight.) I think they’re just getting started in the area, so those numbers should grow. The instructions were much faster, and although we got started late, things were basically run pretty well. You hand in your card to the guy at the end of the night, he will enter the results tonight, and we’ll get people’s email addresses in the morning. Their default position is that they assume you say “yes” to everyone unless you specifically say “no”, which means there should be less accidentally missed connections between potential Henrys & Junes.

The one serious downside of the FastLife thing is that they chose a really noisy bar with a loud techno DJ in the next room. It wasn’t a deal-breaker, but it was pretty annoying. I think they’ll try to choose a quieter place next time.

If you’ve been thinking about speed dating, you should take the plunge. You learn a ton about a potential date in the first 30 seconds of talking to them, and after 6-7 minutes you can be pretty sure whether you’d like to spend another hour or two with them. Speed dating is a pretty efficient and fun way to meet singles; go for it!

Did I meet the woman of my dreams? Well, you’ll just have to stay tuned, won’t you?