A friend of mine invited me to go with him speed dating tonight. I guess the organizers of these events have a difficult time finding men, so he offered me a 50% price break if I would go with him. My gut reaction was to hang up the phone immediately. But, as I’ve learned, if it isn’t illegal or immoral I should probably try it at least once before I decide I don’t like something. Plus, no matter how bad it turned out, at least I’d have something funny to write here.

So, I had almost convinced myself to go, but started asking questions. I didn’t want to end up meeting all sorts of nice 40+ year-old women. He tells me the youngest is 23 and the oldest is 41, so the age range is good. Then he starts telling me how it works. I would get six minutes with each woman, and at the end, if there was some interest, we would trade phone numbers. I think this is where I started to get uneasy. 

My whole life is speed dating. Every woman I meet who isn’t wearing a wedding ring or a burka I try to get talking. 

Easy: cracking a joke about what is happening at the time, like in Wal*Mart. The line stopped while they changed cashiers and I started telling jokes to the girl behind me. A fun time waster, but isn’t going anywhere. 

Harder: talking about anything besides the weather. I don’t push hard when I’m chatting because most women don’t want to be hit on (unless it’s Club Publix). Usually the success I have at this level involves a woman telling me why her boyfriend likes that brand of potato chip. She’s talking, but it’s either raining or it’s raining and her boyfriend is waiting in the car to pick her up. 

Never happens: I get a number. This is very, very rare. Now, my buddy Jeremy can talk to any woman anywhere and end up at lunch with her that week. To be fair, for every woman he goes to lunch with, he’s talked to at least 10 others that turned him down. He gets his numbers up, and the odds work in his favor. I just have a difficult time getting my numbers to that point. 

What I’ve observed about my successes is that what doesn’t work for me is the express checkout line at Wal*Mart, but what does work for me are times and places that I have more time. My first impression isn’t that great. Those of you who know me know that sometimes my mouth filter is off and I say all sorts of garbage. Of course, I say some very insightful things, too, if I do say so myself. For me to woo someone in 15 minutes, much less six, is almost impossible. It takes a little longer than that for someone to get a glimpse inside me. I think this is what turned me off to the idea of speed dating. My odds of success are very small. Yeah, I’ll meet a lot of women, and scare them all. Anymore, when friends of mine want to introduce me to someone, I just give them my myspace url and tell them to read my blog. That way they can learn what I’m about without me having to repeat myself over and over, and I can guarantee it takes more than six minutes to read all this crap.

Since I haven’t been, I need to go. Just because the simulation went poorly in my head doesn’t mean real life will turn out the same. With the short notice I can’t make it this time, but next time I’m there, and I promise to write all about it. 

p.s. What’s funny is I was reading the Wikipedia entry and it taked about the emphasis on first impressions. I have a rule about how I listen to new music. No matter how crappy the song, I listen to it until after the first chorus. I’ve found some great songs that I would have turned off after five seconds if I hadn’t forced myself to listen longer. Dead Poetic is one of these bands. I only liked two songs on this album, until I was driving one day and not paying attention. The disc kept playing and I heard some really good music that I had missed before. 

Luckily my friends listened to me talk a little longer than five seconds. Ask Brian how painful that was when we first met…