| abstract | - Would you like to have a month's worth of dates in one night? Want to shop for a potential mate but hate all the leg work? Need a service that can help you find your true love without dealing with the Mailer Daemons and other inconveniences of online dating? The 21st century's answer to all these problems is speed dating. Designed by Rabbi Yaacov Deyo in 1998 as a way to help Jewish singles meet each other, speed dating is now a common practice enjoyed by people of different religions, ages, sexual orientations, etc. The rules may vary by event, but the general idea is that men and women sign up for the event, held in a bar or a club, the men move down the line of women (or from table and table), and you have a limited amount of time (say 1, 3, or 5 minutes) to figure out if the person is worth getting to know better before time runs out and it's time to switch. Participants don't personally exchange or solicit any contact information; you turn a list of names/id numbers into the organizer, and if there's a mutual attraction, they'll connect you. The obvious advantages of speed dating in Real Life are that it provides a way to meet a lot of people in a short amount of time, eliminates pressure to ask for phone numbers, and doesn't allow much time for things to turn awkward. It has a lot of potential in fiction, too: it can serve as a great hunting ground for the perp in an episode of a detective drama, or it allows you to show a fun Montage of the main character(s) meeting lots of weird and/or annoying people, like a personal Terrible Interviewees Montage sequence, or it can provide An Aesop about first impressions. Using the last one is probably not the best idea because one of the reasons speed dating makes a lot of scientific sense is that we actually do decide whether or not we're attracted to someone very quickly, some studies say within the first thirty seconds. Yes, love is, quite literally, a crapshoot. If there are No Sparks now, there won't be later, or so it would seem. In any case, speed dating can be a lot fun in fiction and reality. Examples of Speed Dating include:
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