Nobody among this chatty mix of singles and divorcees in their 40s and early 50s had to wonder if they were being judged. They were all being judged, and every potential romantic partner was taking notes. This was organized dating for people who believe in first impressions.
At station No. 9, a gentleman admitted he had never tried Indian food.
"Very flavorful," the lady assured him. She displayed a friendly little sign that read: "Let's talk." But she kept her pen in hand, an unspoken reminder that the pros and cons of their encounter would be written into the record of her evening.
The gentleman was Tim Kirkman. He was 48, from Fall River, a delivery person for the hospital industry, dressed in a blue-collared shirt, jeans and new white Nikes. His date for six minutes was Kristen Whelan. She was 40, a divorced mother of two, from Woonsocket. She wore a pink sports jacket and black slacks.
They had no connection over Indian food, but time was short and the date must go on.
"What would be your ultimate first date?" he asked.
"I like conversation," she said. "And football, and the rodeo."
"Ooh, that's different. Have you ever seen a rodeo?"
"In Worcester . . ." she began to explain.
But a loudspeaker announcement interrupted. Their date was over.
"It goes by fast," Tim marveled. They shook hands. "Good luck, Kristen. Nice to meet you."
She made a note, then discreetly folded the paper into thirds, and greeted Adam, her next date. Tim excused himself to find the woman expecting him for the next six minutes. Adam sat with feet on the floor, elbows on knees, chin on hands.
Speed-dating is an outgrowth of breakneck-fast, pell-mell modern life. Professional people don't have time to spend all evening in a bar, hoping to find somebody worth talking to. Speed-dating compresses an entire night of flirting into an hour. Every six minutes, you meet somebody new. (There are variations of the concept; this session was organized through cupid.com) Six minutes is enough time to decide if you want to know someone better, but not a long time to kill when your date is a dud. To reduce the pressure even further, the encounters are not even called dates. They are "pre-dates." A night of pre-dates is $35.
The group had gathered in a room at Bevo, a martini bar near the Providence waterfront. The room had a black ceiling and soft violet walls. It was lit by mini-spotlights, which made the room bright in spots yet dark at the same time. The speed-daters sat on tan leather chairs and sofas, around glass tables. Anonymous dance music beat down softly from the ceiling. The room sounded like a busy restaurant at dinnertime. Occasionally, a spurt of laughter cut through the chatter. The speed-daters had at it with willing enthusiasm, and listened with wide-eyed intensity that would make Bill Clinton seem aloof.
The women, eight in the first of two sessions, stayed in their chairs between dates; the men rotated among them. The setup seemed to give the women an unspoken upper hand. They were the ones anchored, the ones approached by suitors.
These events could be case studies in body language. Some pre-daters leaned away from each other, others leaned forward; some crossed their arms into barriers, a few reached across the table to offer a light touch of thanks to a date who had made them laugh.
The notes jotted down between dates become important at the end of the evening, when you give the event coordinator a list of people you like. The next day, you receive an e-mail with contact information for everyone who listed you. If you liked somebody but they didn't like you back, well, you'll always have Bevo.
Between dates, Tim Kirkman sipped Bud Lite in a bottle and summed up his time with Kristen. "It went okaaaay," he said, the tone suggesting he wasn't so sure. "She loves sports and that's a plus. But the six minutes goes by so fast."
Kirkman had been divorced about 18 months. Dating again, at age 48, required new tactics. "It was a lot easier at 25 going out to the nightclubs. I don't have the energy anymore, and don't want to do it all the time, either -- though I wish I knew at 25 or 26 what I know now."
His working theory is that Ms. Right will never miraculously knock at his door, looking for help with a flat tire or something. Finding her will take effort. "If you're going to be a couch potato, you're not going to meet anyone. You'll be on that couch until you're 70."
Time was up again. Kristen and Adam parted ways. She was polite: "Adam, it was really nice to meet you. I appreciate your time."
Adam Chale, of New Bedford, was 40, a teacher, never married. He wore a black dress shirt and a gold necktie. His hair is dark with curls of gray at his temples. Dating has evolved for him. "More people are married now," he said, sounding a little glum about it. "You can't hang with your buddies at the bar all night and pick up women." That's because his buddies have wives, and the wives forbid it.
How'd it go with Kristen? "Nice." Would he date her? "I guess. I'm open."
Kristen Whelan divorced about three years ago. At 40, she was probably the youngest woman at the event. "I've only met nice people," she reported between dates. "Of course no one is wearing a label that says, 'Hi, I'm a psycho killer,' which would be helpful."
This was her first try at organized dating, something new that she hoped might offer better odds than barstool roulette at the corner pub with the unemployed, the beer-breathing alcoholics, the men who hid their wedding bands, and the ones who never moved out of mom's house. She called herself "the poster child for life change," having recently left her job as a librarian to study anthropology. "I got to a point where I said it's going to be now or it's going to be never."
Speed-dater Ray Poitras, of Westport, is an appliance serviceman and a divorced father of a teenaged son. Meeting people is easy, he said. "But I seem to be meeting the wrong people." He is outgoing and has a gift for conversation. For his first try at speed-dating, his goatee was trimmed and he wore a small stud earring and bead necklace.
"Chemistry is the big thing with me." After six minutes, he said, he'd know. Poitras invented a shorthand system to remind himself which women he liked. "You have to make little notes, what color hair, what they were wearing," he said. "The ones I thought were hot, I put a star next to."
Diane Thompson, 48, had come from Attleboro. She sat very straight at the edge of her chair, a glass of white wine on the table before her. "I like to go to the theater," she told her date, a burly man in dark slacks. "Do you like the theater, too?"
'Um," he said, searching. "I once went to West Side Story."
Thompson is a cancer survivor. "You get to a point where you're not going to wait for life to come to you," she said later. "You have to go get it."
At the end of the first session, Adam sat alone -- the way a person in the middle of a crowd can still be alone -- and sketched a figure on a cocktail napkin. His idealized woman in blue ink reclined on a hill overlooking a monument that resembled the Greek Parthenon. When someone noticed his drawing, he crumpled it. Then he got ready for the next round of dates, saying to nobody in particular: "Let's do this," as if psyching up for a difficult task. He reported later that he listed everyone he met as women he'd like to see again. "It's a good group. Maybe I'll get a date out of it."
Cupid.com/Pre-Dating statistics would later reveal that of the 33 participants that evening, just four appeared on nobody's list. There were no statistics available to measure if rejection hurt less at age 48 than at 18, or more by e-mail than in person. But this is 21st-century romance, and though there are still no guarantees in love, there is in speed-dating: for the four who struck out, the next event is free.
Your turn: Have you tried singles events to avoid the bar scene?
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