PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: THE GLOBE AND MAIL. SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES
Alexander Sallas is an editor-at-large for the Literary Review of Canada.
One beautiful evening last month, I found myself on the patio of a trendy craft brewery in Hamilton, preparing for my first foray into speed dating.
Cradling my obscure hipster beer – recommended by the bartender with designer scruff and a luxury flannel shirt – I counted myself among 15 unattached men aged 25 to 36. Fifteen single women of the same vintage sat solo at more-or-less evenly spaced tables.
Our chipper host explained the ground rules. Every five minutes, she’d ring a bell, which meant a “date” was over, and each guy should move to the table to their right. Along the way, participants should mark the encounters with a check mark or an X, depending on whether they want to see the other person again, using their provided pen and paper (no devices here). Mutual replies in the affirmative meant both parties would receive an e-mail with each other’s phone numbers in 24 hours.
Aside from a minor hiccup involving an interloper who exceeded the age range, the evening went smoothly. I met an aesthetician, a farmer, a teacher, a data scientist and a concert pianist. Predictably, some conversations faltered. Awkward silences ensued. My more esoteric puns and most ribald allusions went over like so many lead balloons. But on the whole, the experience was positive. Everyone seemed to desire earnest human connection unmediated by technology: what a concept!
Rabbi Yaacov Deyo pioneered speed dating in Los Angeles in 1998. What started as a nifty matchmaking method for Jewish singles soon became a global phenomenon. Over the past few years, its popularity has skyrocketed. The prominent ticketing platform Eventbrite reported a 63-per-cent increase in speed dating events between 2021 and 2022, and a 30-per-cent increase the following year.
It’s not a case of the masses glomming on to something that doesn’t work, such as the Ford Motor Company’s flammable Pinto or Samsung’s exploding Galaxy Note 7 phone. Speed dating gets results. The Canadian company 25dates.com, which hosts events in major cities nationwide, claims it has a 75-per-cent match rate. Researchers at the Association for Psychological Science found the practice effective for establishing meaningful connections beyond physical appearance.
At the same time, there’s been a rise in apps designed to foster platonic friendships. The Meetup app pairs people who have similar interests, such as book clubs, hiking or writing future award-winning Globe and Mail op-eds. We3 does the same but aims to bring – you guessed it – three folks together. Nextdoor bridges the gap between neighbours. The Peanut app unites moms and moms-to-be. I’m not so naive as to doubt that many employ these apps as hookup apparatuses (neither, I suspect, are their creators unaware of this). But surely lots of people use these apps in earnest. Their ascendant popularity points toward a broad desire for face-to-face communication of all stripes.
The ballooning popularity of seeking out in-person connections is part of a broader move back to analog. Reports abound of young people embracing retro. Millennials and Gen Z have ditched skinny jeans for looser vintage threads. They shy away from smartphones and sport archaic tech, including “dumbphones” (a.k.a. older flip-phone models), digital cameras, and portable tech made solely for music, such as cassette players. What’s old, it seems, really is new again.
That desire is partly why speed dating is on the rise while some dating apps like Bumble, whose shares recently plummeted 37 per cent, have struggled. Yes, they’re predicated on shallow swiping. They’re infested with bots, catfishers and trolls. But I’d argue there’s a deeper reason for their decline, one foretold by the trend toward the past.
We are yearning for a time when our lives weren’t inundated by pings and rings and when we weren’t perennially – some might say terminally – online. We desire a way out of a Kafkaesque era of global interconnection that’s made us feel more isolated than ever. Seventy two per cent of Gen Z and 77 per cent of millennials across Canada report feeling lonely frequently or always, according to a recent study by the marketing agency Leo Burnett. No wonder the slogan of the dating app Hinge is “Designed to be deleted.” Their marketing team recognizes no one wants a swipe-and-type relationship. They want something real.
But can any dating app lead to love? Psychoanalysis tells us there is a crucial flaw inherent in them, at least for those who use them hoping to land a long-term connection and not just a night or two in the sack.
Sigmund Freud argued that we are unaware of the real reasons behind our attractions. Our repressed, unconscious desires are mapped onto the material world, such that certain stimuli – actions, objects, other people – cause unpredictable reactions within us. Jacques Lacan, a successor to Freud, called the phenomenon our “object-cause of desire.” We overdetermine every concrete thing we experience within a symbolic network of our unconscious making. Something or someone may stimulate a repressed desire; they may cause a response inside us that we can’t explain or anticipate because they tap into some hidden part of ourselves. This is why, as Emily Dickinson put it in an 1862 letter, and Woody Allen reiterated during an interview 130 years later, “The heart wants what it wants.”
When filling in our dating profiles, we deliberately – consciously – select the images and write the descriptions that put us in what we think is the best possible light. Yet, we cannot hope to capture the unconscious pieces of ourselves that are the hinge on which true love deploys. That emotion is always more than the facts we may recognize in ourselves and others. It’s a mysterious “X” we cannot quantify.
Love is sparked by spontaneous, unconscious gestures – moments you can’t plan for or curate in a profile. You cannot manufacture them yourself, nor can you prepare for them hitting you from someone else. That’s why it’s called “falling” in love.
During my speed dates, I would occasionally catch myself looking for signs. Am I feeling something? How long should I wait? What, for that matter, should I be feeling? Then I’d remember that if I had to look, it wasn’t there.
On the show Mad Men, ad executive Don Draper, addressing an idealistic client, asserts: “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.” Love may not be “invented” by marketing departments, per se, but indeed, many companies strive to capture that elusive feeling in products and services. Dating apps want you to believe that their algorithms will lead you to love, as though indelible romance emerges based on the music you like, the sports you play or the places you’ve visited.
It doesn’t, actually, and not just because, as the adage says, opposites attract. Love is fundamentally illogical. It cannot be quantified. That’s not to suggest no one ever finds a connection on eHarmony, Match.com, OkCupid or Tinder. It is to say such tech-forward methods will never be as effective as – get this – meeting real people in real life.
You may be wondering if I matched with anybody after my speed-dating extravaganza. Forgive me, but in the old-school spirit of the evening, I’ll take recourse in a traditional mantra: Gentlemen don’t kiss and tell.