Guest author Lorelei Mathias on life and love - by Stephen Morris @ 1:10pm 06/07/07
OK, so it's been over 3 years since I first started thinking about going speed-dating to research my book. In honesty, I was totally amazed that it was something people would genuinely consider doing. I remember thinking, well here is a fad that clearly won’t last; therefore I’d better bash my novel out quick, so it’s published before all this craziness dies a natural death.
And yet, astoundingly, here we are, three years on. And it seems that speed-dating is still socially acceptable, and is still going strong. Not only that, it’s spawned a whole generation of equally suspect acts of what you might call romantic desperation. If you thought scorecards, bells ringing in your ears and the monotonous merry-go-round of 90-second monologues was bad, read on. These days there are no bounds to what people will do to find love…
Love Bites
What will the Cupid junkies think of next? Have just found out about something which could possibly make a refreshing alternative to speed-dating. Apparently there are these nights you can attend called ‘Dating in the Dark’. They sound fascinating. I pulled up some searches on the net about them. What happens is you sit around a table and have dinner with a group of strangers. You chat and get to know each other, just as you would at any regular dinner party. The only difference is that you can’t actually see anyone. It sounds a great idea to me. You get to know people genuinely for who they are, with far less danger of being judgmental. Then, when the lights come on you get to put a face to all those different disembodied voices – see who your perfect match is, and whether or not you fancy them.
It sounds intriguing to me but I do have one hesitation. I worry that under the limited lighting conditions, it will be even harder than normal to maintain grace and co-ordination in the table manners department. I can see myself now – merrily chatting away in the dark, but secretly waiting in abject terror for the moment when the lights come on, worrying about what they would reveal: most likely, that most of my dinner had missed my mouth and found its way into my lap and all over my chest. As the lights come on, I gaze into the eyes of my perfect conversational match, and in return he gazes back at me, looking thoroughly repulsed and unimpressed.
Thinking about it, catching even a flicker of disappointment in their eyes could be a really crushing experience. It could set you back weeks in confidence levels, surely?
Oh sweet Lord. Just seen something which is whole dimensions worse than both Dating in the Dark and Speed-dating put together. According to today’s Daily Telegraph, the people of Britain are now so lonely and so busy that they have begun to resort to what can only be described as the world’s trashiest dating craze yet: ‘Fast Food Dating’.
The idea behind this initiative is that a bunch of hungry singletons congregate in the refined, atmospheric foyer of the Regent Street Burger King. They are then paired with a ‘dinner date’ for the length of time it takes them to eat a complimentary Flame Grilled Whopper Meal. Apparently this actually happens, and they are planning to go nationwide with it. According to this article, Mary something, one of the spokespersons for Burger King, has claimed (with no trace of irony) that, “there would seem to be no better place to find love in the fastest time possible.”
Call me a dreamer, but surely we are not really so busy and career-dominated that we need to resort to Burger Dating? Can the txt generation really not be bothered to put in the hours? I mean, there was once a time when Romance was a slow, tense affair, involving tortured silences over elegant dinners; atmospheric walks by a river or a lake, wandering through a labyrinth of does-he-doesn’t-he dilemmas and will-she-won’t-she complexes…And even though all that stuff can be agonising at times, surely it’s all part of the process of finding the one you love, isn’t it? These days the quest for true love is turning into a frantic mish-mash of scorecards and pens, kisses over ketchup, marriages over mayonnaise...How long before McDonald’s joins in the festivities with its own brand of McLove? Has Cupid got bored of us all and gone off to play on an X-Box somewhere?
And another thing. Years from now, when two ‘ticks’ do tie the knot and settle down, what are they going to tell their grandkids or kids, when the day comes for them to tell the story of how they met?
‘Daddy met mummy in a bar one night – even before the bell had rung to signal their 3 minutes were up, mummy knew that he was the one!’
I mean, is that what we’ll tell our grandchildren?
‘Mummy met daddy over toad in the hole in the dark? It was Love at First Bite!’
Is that what we’ll say?
[amended excerpt from Step on it, Cupid by Lorelei Mathias]