she said as she watched the couples nervously chatter.
“Sometimes strange things happen. I’ll never forget, back in
November, there was a guy from Queens who showed up with a
dozen red roses, and he gave one to every girl he spoke to. He
had a suit on.” She gave a half smile. “He was ready to go.”
Speed-dating has become enormously popular around the
world over the last few years, and it’s not hard to understand
why. It’s the distillation of dating to a simple snap judgment.
Everyone who sat down at one of those tables was trying to
answer a very simple question: Do I want to see this person
again? And to answer that, we don’t need an entire evening. We
really need only a few minutes. Velma, for instance, one of the
four Anne Klein women, said that she picked none of the men
and that she made up her mind about each of them right away.
“They lost me at hello,” she said, rolling her eyes. Ron, who
worked as a financial analyst at an investment bank, picked two
of the women, one of whom he settled on after about a minute
and a half of conversation and one of whom, Lillian at table
two, he decided on the instant he sat down across from her.
“Her tongue was pierced,” he said, admiringly. “You come to a
place like this and you expect a bunch of lawyers. But she was a
whole different story.” Lillian liked Ron, too. “You know why?”