Speed-dating is alive and well in Chelsea

Simi Cohen (left) and Albert Ros were among the 15 participants at Cupid.com’s speed-dating event in Chelsea on Tuesday.

By Marsha Lebedev Bernstein

By 12:25 a.m. Tuesday, Tiffany Black still didn’t have all the men she needed. Three more single men would even things out. It was still early though—there were 18 hours to go—and many people often signed up last minute, especially men in their mid-30s and older.

Shortly after 6:00 p.m., Black was already greeting her guests at Kanvas, a Ninth Avenue bar and lounge outfitted with the de rigeur dark leather banquettes and modish lighting one has come to expect from urban lounges. As each guest checked in, Black handed them a nametag advertising their first name and a number, along with a scorecard.

By 6:15, seven men and women flanked the perimeter of Kanvas’s lower-level lounge. Most kept to themselves, nursed their wine and surveyed the room; there was not much mingling before game time.

They were at Kanvas for a speed-dating party hosted by Cupid.com/PreDating, one of the newer speed-dating companies on the scene. (According to Cupid.com General Manager Dale Mulder, the online dating company launched its live speed-dating product, PreDating, in 2004.) Black is one of the company’s New York event coordinators. It’s an after-five gig for her—she maintains her day job as a Web producer for Sports Illustrated magazine—and she signed up to help New Yorkers find love efficiently after attending one of the company’s speed-dating parties herself.

The speed-dating concept has been around since the late ’90s, and its simple format is not unlike a mini job fair (albeit a more structured fair in the name of love, some other amorous objective or maybe just dinner). Men and women talk for up to 10 minutes—this is the “date”—and the ringing of a bell then signifies it’s time to pick up your pomegranate mojito and move on to the next prospect. The men do the moving about while the women remain seated, a format that injects a modest dose of gallantry into the evening and perhaps one that could make certain men feel like they’re the ones doing the selling. Participants are given a scorecard on which to keep track of their yays and nays throughout the evening. After the hosting company collects this information from all the guests, it can let them know if they had a match and with whom—a sort of adult version of elementary school “dating,” where a third party finds out who likes you and who you like and brokers the relationship. From there, it’s up to you and your match to move things forward, if you so desire.

Attending a Cupid.com/PreDating event usually costs $35 (and up to $40 if you register less than two days in advance). As an event coordinator, Black gets a cut of the total registration fees collected. She expected 16 guests this particular evening but can accommodate up to 24 PreDaters.

While this March 6 party was geared toward singles ages 32 to 42—and advertised as such—Evan, a recently divorced 46-year-old who had been married for more than two decades, found these parameters artificial. He didn’t think half the people in the room were the age they claimed to be.

“Was that a good way to start getting to know someone,” I asked, “by…well…lying?” Most people lie about their weight, height and other things, Evan explained to me as Justin Timberlake’s falsetto piped through the bar’s sound system. “But that’s okay, because it works both ways,” he elaborated. “Both men and women are lying…I would say three-quarters of the women who say they weigh 130 probably weigh 160-plus.”

In his short time as a divorcé, Evan had either become very jaded or very perceptive.

It was 6:30, and although only 14 of the 16 people who registered had arrived, Black was ready to begin round one. But just as she was about to start, an attractive brunette in jeans and a black sweater darted into the room, removing her coat as she introduced herself to Black. Evan might like Attractive Brunette, I thought.

The first date felt somewhat protracted, and I initially wondered if that was because I was an observer and not a participant (although the latter scenario might not have sat well with my husband). But the energy in the room seemed to be building by round two. People were leaning forward in their seats, uncrossing their folded arms and appearing more relaxed. The indoor temperature was low enough to thwart a nervous Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News” moment.

As I circled the room, it became obvious that much of the chatter was your basic first-date Q&A, a smattering of light banter alternating with strained exchanges:

“Where do you work?”

“Where do you live?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Uh…so what do you do in your free time?”

“What sports are you into?”

Suddenly, a premature departure. Denim-clad Attractive Brunette was making her way out. At a larger event, she could grab her buttery leather tote and slip out unnoticed, but not in a room with fewer than 20 people. I followed.

“So you’re leaving early,” I remarked.

“I have a prior commitment,” she shot back.

“But if there were someone you wanted to talk to, would you maybe have stayed?”

“Probably not. Maybe. I don’t know…. Look, everybody’s wonderful. It’s just not for me.”

And she was gone. Maybe Attractive Brunette didn’t need to spend six minutes talking with every guy in the room. Hey, Malcolm Gladwell even wrote a best-selling book—“Blink”—on how rapid cognition allows us to process matters in mere seconds.

Everyone else stayed until the end. It was, after all, only a 48-minute event. What could be more appealing to single, hyper-busy, I-am-so-swamped New Yorkers than eight or so dates in under an hour. An hour.

While most people were quick to collect their things and leave, a few lingered to finish their conversations, never minding the ringing of the bell. I caught up with Evan before he left.

He admitted he didn’t think anyone in the room was for him, even before the night began. So, how did that affect how he felt during each date? I asked. With speed-dating, when the initial attraction isn’t there from the very outset, Evan explained, “you have to talk for six minutes, which can be incredibly awkward. In other circumstances, you could just walk away.”

But Evan signed up to become “more comfortable talking to women again,” to get himself out there again and to get past the awkwardness that is often a reality of dating but is especially so when you’ve just come out of a 25-year marriage. He said he also signed up for a similar event through another company that was coming up soon. It is, in the end, a numbers game—a truism when it comes to many things, but certainly dating…and Lotto.

I called Cupid.com’s corporate office the following afternoon to ask about the success rate of the events and about the number of matches they were seeing. Black had already explained to me that a single match simply meant that one person was interested in another person, not that two people were interested in each other, which is what the company refers to as a double-match and what I think most people would consider to be a true “match.” Mulder cited the Cupid.com/PreDating nationwide and Canadian match rate at 80 percent.

“Is that figure for single- or double-matches?” I asked.

“Single.”

“What about double matches?’

“Oh, we don’t have that number.”