10 Speed

Saturday night, I was going to spend a nice quiet evening at home with the NetFlix. I ended up going to a "speed-dating" event, to support a friend.

10 dates. 5 minutes a piece.

I'd been out drinking the night before and was really not in the frame of mind to go out again. But I do try to put myself outside of my comfort zone on a semi-regular basis and this seemed to fit the bill.

I won't go into details here but my friend had a speed-date with this psychopath of a woman who completely ruined his night. Spent a few hours with my friend afterward, trying to talk him down, discussing some of the pitfalls of the dating scene...

I'll say this about my friend: however bitter and misanthropic and bleak and fatalistic I can be on my DARKEST days... he's probably 10x worse on a regular basis.

Basically, trying to talk him off the ledge didn't improve my own spirits much.

The speed-dating scene can be fun, but there are a lot of people who are NOT there to have fun. Women with ticking biological clocks who will consider your very existence a violent affront if you're not what they're shopping for; some of these women are barely able to remain civil for 5 minutes. There's the scent of desperation all over the place, from men and women. It can turn the entire event into the opposite of fun. This is precisely the sort of scene I'd been trying to avoid for months. A complete drag. The sort of affair that can bum you out for days.

After the event, you go home, log onto the website and click on the names of the people you like. You only get emailed if you score a "match", so it's designed to protect you from the sting of immediate rejection. And while I did get a match, it just seemed to highlight the peculiar realization that I'm not quite prepared to be mixing it up in the dating scene right now. Or at least not THAT dating scene.

I might be lonely. Might be extremely lonely. But my career's the most important thing I need to worry over right now. Not trying to fashion excuses. It's just a pressing issue on a few different levels. It's the middle of July already and I've got some heavier anxieties than whether or not I can score a date on a Friday night.