Embedded reporting at its finest

There is a trend I've heard about in singles circles for some time. It goes by various names: speed dating, progressive dating, pre-dating. Those are probably all registered trademarks by now.

But I'd heard enough to be curious. I've thought about doing this for nearly two years just for sheer entertainment value alone.

So last night I did. I attended a Pre-Dating event in Blue Ash. Essentially 8 guys meet 8 girls. You spend about six minutes together and then all the guys rotate to the next spot. At the end of the night you check off people you'd be interested in and the organization sends you an email with contact information for those who were mutual matches.

I told a very few people about this outing. Expectedly, they were curious and egging me on about it beforehand. Below is this morning's email to them recounting my experience:

~~~~~

I've got to tell you, when I pulled into Watson Brothers I was tempted to just turn around. Very tempted.

I went in anyway. But there was no sign giving direction, so I've got to ask the hostess girls where to go. Now I'm feeling like even *more* of a loser (certain that "Where's the pre-dating thing?" will be heard as "I'm a geek who resorts to these weird things and I'm looking for the room full of trolls that I'll be 'meeting' tonight").

Once inside the little banquet room the tone was different. Oh, I was still nervous, but this was looking promising. Everyone was friendly. As people filtered in you could tell that several of the women came as friends.

It was just as described. There were a bunch of little tables, all numbered. You were assigned a table to begin with and then the guys circled around. Six minutes is far too short. Seriously, try having a conversation with someone covering the basics: what you do, where you're from, how big your family is. If there is any back and forth at all ("you're from Indiana too?") it chews up a lot of time.

All total there were 16 people there (plus the three coordinators). I was surprised that everyone showed up. I expected there to be an odd number one way or another.

Of the eight women I met I said that four were matches. Every single one was attractive, and bright, and professional.

The funniest (to me) moment was one of the last people I met. She's a flight attendant. (Actually, just for reference, she was a UC cheerleader who got hurt, quit school, and became a flight attendant.) I asked the most unusual place she'd been. She said that she didn't travel outside the US much, so her trip to Cancun was it. But she *wanted* to go to Negril, Jamaica. Oh? Why there?

She wants to go to one of those "anything goes" hedonism resorts. I'm thinking "wow, 9 out of 10 guys would be loving this...but I'm kinda scared."

No, not a match :-) (see, guys *can* turn down attractive women on principle.)

There was a UC medical researcher who just moved from Australia, a girl who's tri-lingual and lived in six different countries, a girl who works at UC doing clinical research (undergrad in bio-something), is working on her Master's in Criminal Justice, and then wants to go to law school. Wow.

My note-taking got better as the night went on. The first person I met was Lauren, who was--in my opinion--the most attractive woman there. And she was sweet, and talkative, and very friendly. For the next two or three people I kept thinking that I wished that I would have had more than 6 minutes with Lauren.

When I was finally done and filling out my "match sheet" here are the sum total of notes on this person I kept thinking about: "Lauren -- west-sider--claims adjuster".

It was conversation overload and I remember next to nothing about that initial one, so I'm in the funny place of really hoping I get to see this person again while simultaneously remembering next to nothing about her.

I'm supposed to get an email with mutual matches sometime today. We'll see.

Live from the front,

Brian, your intrepid odd-ball singles event reporter