Oh the joy of dating, from the nervous introductions to the awkward first kiss, it is definitely enough to make you want to throw in the towel and stay home with a good book! Unfortunately most of us still have that intense desire to meet that special person that we hope to spend the rest of our lives with. If you have friends and family like I do; you have already had the well meaning attempts to either fix you up or give you lots of unsolicited advice on where to meet someone ‘nice’.
In order to attempt to take things into your own hands you may consider everything from attempting to find a man at church, the grocery store or the slightly desperate route of browsing your local hardware store looking for someone to help you clear your pipes. Your drain pipes people, get your minds out of the gutter!
When all else fails, you may just find yourself doing something bold, dangerous and life altering…………..attending a singles mixer with other single; people supposedly just like you! You know the ones; they advertise gorgeous, happy, singles mingling and having what appears to be a great time. As a member of Match.com I recently had the opportunity to attend one of these events and let’s just say it was an experience.
If you have not had the pleasure or you are simply doing research to determine if this would be a good venue for you, a few highlights of my night. The locale was actually very nice, held in a bar of a local restaurant. As members arrive you are given quick updates to your phone so that you have the opportunity to review profiles of attendees prior to approaching them if you so choose. The women in attendance either chose to sit and wait for people to approach or they took the more direct alternative and went up to men to introduce themselves.
Like most events of this nature, the women clearly outnumbered the men in attendance. Over the course of the night I watched several women approach men; some were met with a warm reception while others were given what bordered on rude responses if the other person was not interested. It was also interesting to note that some of the men in attendance simply sat and nursed drinks all night, with little to no interest in any of the women in the room.
There were also several people who had already been interacting on the site that chose the event as a safe place for their first offline meetings. For those people, they used the event as a first date by leaving the bar to have dinner together in the main restaurant.
Now while I have no idea if any major love connections were made, there were both positive and negative aspects of this type of event. On the positive side, it gives you a safe place to go and meet other singles who are also looking to meet someone. However, I was very concerned for anyone that may have already had low self esteem. Because rejection of that type could very well make them feel worse. Quite simply there were people who attempted to talk to more than one person with little to no success. In addition there were a few in attendance that were never approached and looked very much like the kid at the school dance just hoping someone would invite them to dance. All in all, it was an experience to look back on and be proud of myself. Proud that I went through with it, didn’t chicken out and really had a good time talking, laughing and enjoying great wine. Would I do it again? Probably not, but then again, one can never say never.
