The Night of Sixteen Dates

I'm taking a little break from my mad dash to finish whipping my manuscript into shape before I send it off next week to blog about my first step back into the cesspool of dating after a long hiatus. As hard as it is out there, I'm not ready to give up on love. The apartment full of cats will have to wait.

I'd already thrown my picture up on JDate (yes, I know it's supposed to be for Jewish singles, but hey I like Jewish men, and it's a jungle out there. A girl's got to do, what a girl's got to do. So suck it!), but on-line dating just seems so impersonal to me. Plus, it's like another full-time job, and I already have 3 of those, so I needed to do something a little quicker. Hence, speed-dating.

I signed up on Tuesday night for NY Easy Dates which promised 16 dates in one night. Great, I thought, I like dating in bulk. After all it's quantity, not quality that counts. Sixteen dates, that's like a month or two of dating right there. Plus you get to skip that whole emailing and then talking on the phone before you have that first date. And we all know that people can be great in email, but then you meet them and there are no sparks. Plus the cost was right. I managed to get $5 of the price, so it was only $32 which comes out to about $2 per date.

The venue was a bar called M downtown on the border of Chinatown, Little Italy and Soho. It was a bit of a hike from the train station in high heels. Anyway, I rushed home after work to change into something more 'I'm meeting 16 men' than the outfit I wore to work. Of course after being warm all today, it started to pour the minute I got out of the train station on the way home which meant I had to fix my hair as well. I ended up wearing the same wrap dress that did nothing for Auction Guy.

I'm actually glad I did, because all the other women there were wearing suits, so at least I stood out. After checking in, I bellied up to the bar and ordered a Scorpion Honey instead of something wimpy like wine. I figured I'm a Scorpio, so why not a Scorpion Honey? The bartender described it to me as a margarita with alot of fruit juice. Fine, just up my alley. I chatted with another woman at the bar about why we were there. This was her second time doing the speed-dating thing, so we bonded a little.

Finally the evening began. The first part of the evening the men moved from table to table, and then after a break it was our turn to move. Frankly, I didn't like that. I prefer being in the position of power, and letting the men do all the work. Plus, the stools the men were sitting on had no backs, which led to a lot of slumping.

To make a long story short, I met sixteen men that I spent a grand total of six minutes with. For the most part the time went really fast. There were only a few guys that I had to struggle to converse with. Most of the guys were nice, two or three of them were borderline creepy/psychotic. Not bad odds. Out of that sixteen, I could see myself going out with about five of them, which is lot for me, because I'm really picky. Surprisingly, I hardly thought about my manuscript or the fact that I was missing the Will & Grace Finale of all Finale's (I taped it).

It was interesting to see what the guys chose to talk about. What is this obsession we have in this country with knowing what people do for a living? Only a few men asked me anything about me personally, or tried to get to know me on any level. The ones that I had an actual normal conversation with were the ones that I was interested in seeing again.

No real sparks with any of them though, which is fine. As I said, I'm just dipping my toe in again, so I'm not expecting to meet my man the first time out. I mean, I thought Auction Guy could have been my man, and you see how wrong I was about that.

Now the next step is to log onto the company web-site and put in my choices, and then see if I have any matches. I'm pretty much thinking there might only be one or two out of my five choices. I'm definitely planning to do this again, maybe with another company. I did meet a potential new female friend. The woman who sat to my right, it turned out we had a lot in common including our obsession with shoes and Grey's Anatomy. Plus, she lives in the same building as one of my best friends. How cool is that?

Thanks for reading!

EKM