Anyone gone speed dating lately? I highly recommend you do, if only for the fascinating visual experience. Oh come now, no need to feel ashamed anymore.
Anyone gone speed dating lately? I highly recommend you do, if only for the fascinating visual experience. Oh come now, no need to feel ashamed anymore. According to a report by Telecom Express, one in five single Britons now uses dating services and they pay out over £43m a year in the hope that a stranger or machine can help them find their happily ever afters.
Speed dating is rarely sold on this merit, but the events have a wonderfully elegant choreography. Everyone moves collectively in a clockwise direction every few minutes: suddenly those country house reels seen in television adaptations of Jane Austen don't seem so anachronistic. And this might explain their success.
In Austen's time such structured farragos were necessary because they provided an acceptable context in which men and women were allowed to do more than engage in parlour talk about Lady de Burgh's new garden arrangement. So it is, on the surface, puzzling to see people submit themselves to orchestrated manoeuvres in this era of "sex texting".
These days we can have a pretty good look around for ourselves at what's on offer. But maybe this social freedom has become a bit overwhelming. We prefer romance to be pursued within a reassuring structure in which someone else is in charge.
There are two, apparently contradictory, reasons why many people find the rise of dating services depressing. On the one hand, the thought of people being so desperate for a partner that they'll go to a town hall on a wet Wednesday evening and chat to 30 people for five minutes each seems pathetic. On the other, a mindset based on probably too many romantic comedies, cries out that true love cannot be forced.
Many theories have been posited as to why, in the 21st century, finding love is still such a fraught business. We are caught at an awkward time - after feminism's sexual liberation but before we have established new expectations about our romantic lives. We are no longer obliged to find a spouse before the age of 30. Plenty of us will have more than one long-term partner during our lives. And most of us understand that Richard Curtis's view of human relations is not necessarily a realistic one.
Social structures have shifted, and in the absence of knowing how to incorporate our search for love within this, we have harked back to older, more controlled, methods newly trussed up in modern coating.
Or maybe Pride and Prejudice's Mrs Bennett was right and many of us - still - just want a little guiding push.
Speed dating is rarely sold on this merit, but the events have a wonderfully elegant choreography. Everyone moves collectively in a clockwise direction every few minutes: suddenly those country house reels seen in television adaptations of Jane Austen don't seem so anachronistic. And this might explain their success.
In Austen's time such structured farragos were necessary because they provided an acceptable context in which men and women were allowed to do more than engage in parlour talk about Lady de Burgh's new garden arrangement. So it is, on the surface, puzzling to see people submit themselves to orchestrated manoeuvres in this era of "sex texting".
These days we can have a pretty good look around for ourselves at what's on offer. But maybe this social freedom has become a bit overwhelming. We prefer romance to be pursued within a reassuring structure in which someone else is in charge.
There are two, apparently contradictory, reasons why many people find the rise of dating services depressing. On the one hand, the thought of people being so desperate for a partner that they'll go to a town hall on a wet Wednesday evening and chat to 30 people for five minutes each seems pathetic. On the other, a mindset based on probably too many romantic comedies, cries out that true love cannot be forced.
Many theories have been posited as to why, in the 21st century, finding love is still such a fraught business. We are caught at an awkward time - after feminism's sexual liberation but before we have established new expectations about our romantic lives. We are no longer obliged to find a spouse before the age of 30. Plenty of us will have more than one long-term partner during our lives. And most of us understand that Richard Curtis's view of human relations is not necessarily a realistic one.
Social structures have shifted, and in the absence of knowing how to incorporate our search for love within this, we have harked back to older, more controlled, methods newly trussed up in modern coating.
Or maybe Pride and Prejudice's Mrs Bennett was right and many of us - still - just want a little guiding push.
© Guardian News & Media 2008
Published: 4/14/2004
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