On Your Mark, Get Set...
Look, I know the display picture for this is very binary, but you try finding a cute picture of a stopwatch!
Last month I went speed dating.
It came up on my Instagram. It seemed fun, exciting, different. Pre-pandemic I was on some apps with no luck. I didn’t know how to send a good message to someone, I didn’t know how I could tell if I liked someone based on a picture where the person in question was holding a fish, taking a picture with a dog that wasn’t there’s, and offering answers to prompts that didn’t actually answer anything. When the rare moment that a match did occur, I’d just freeze and not do anything. I’d wait until my time expired and we were no longer matched, or delete the app because the idea of answering, of something happening, of opening up and making a mistake was too much for me to consider.
It’s a stupid but true confession. For most of my life I was labelled a worrier and I accepted it, it’s only for the last eight or so years that I’ve recognized that this worry is anxiety1. I remember in high school being terrified of dating, of seeing my friends and classmates start their own romances and wondering how it came to them so easily.
I remember seeing my classmates pair up and imagined if that could happen to me. It was never really possible. I imagined a blurred figure coming up to me and saying that they liked me, that they wanted to go out and how sick I would feel when they did. Because then I’d have to tell them that my twin sister was sick2 and I didn’t know why I wasn’t. That my mom had taken time off work so my sister wasn’t alone in the hospital and my dad worried we would lose the house. That I couldn’t possibly date anyone because of all this, and because I needed to keep my grades up because my parents couldn’t handle any more stress if I started failing. So thank you for being interested, but no. But it would be rude then, to say no, wouldn’t it? After they’d been so brave to come up to me, to speak to me, to ask me out and then I’d turn them down for a reason that wasn’t all that good to being with?
It never happened anyways, none of it so I didn’t have to worry. Just my imagination working in overdrive3.
My head, for the most part, isn’t a fun place to be.
So when I found out about the speed dating event in my city I was intrigued. In 2020, I was young and green and had resolutions and dreams that didn’t come true like everyone else’s. One of those things included taking risks, like dating, something that causes me an embarrassing amount of anxiety. For obvious reasons that didn’t happen, and the pandemic brought its own anxieties about dating. Was the person vaccinated? Did the person mask? Did they recognize COVID-19 was a real disease with long-term affects? Were they conscious and courteous of vulnerable populations?4
It brought another layer of worry that I hadn’t anticipated, and so I avoided it altogether. Until I saw the ad for speed dating, became curious before my worries took hold of that as well. I could never make myself buy a ticket. Told myself I would wait until I knew my schedule, take too long to check and find the tickets conveniently sold out. Oh darn! Not my fault at all, just fate, as if I wasn’t manipulating the strings.
But then I read a book.
I put it on hold at my library and waited months to actually read it. It felt like if I had to turn to a self-help book to help me with my love life, I must be a special kind of pathetic. But then my library app told me I couldn’t renew it anymore, and two people were waiting for it, and it was DUE SOON! So I read it, and got called out.
You can read my review of Logan Ury’s book here, and I enjoyed it despite a few criticisms. Ury looks at dating in a realistic way, asking people to remove their rose coloured glasses and see people as people instead of putting them on a pedestal.
One of the most interesting things I found from Ury’s book was the Three Dating Tendencies, the Maximizer, the Romanticizer, and the Hesitater. Here’s a brief look at each of them (taken from Ury’s website, if you want to take the quiz yourself):
The Maximizer: You love doing research, exploring all of your options, turning over every stone until you’re confident you’ve found the right one. You make decisions carefully. And you want to be 100 percent certain about something before you make your choice. Your motto: Why settle?
The Romanticizer: You want the soul mate, the happily ever after—the whole fairytale. You love love. You believe you are single because you haven’t met the right person yet. Your motto: It’ll happen when it’s meant to happen.
The Hesitater: You don’t think you’re ready for dating because you’re not the
person you want to be yet. You hold yourself to a high standard. You want to feel completely ready before you start a new project; the same goes for dating. Your motto: I’ll wait until I’m a catch.
Or, in short:
The Romanticizer has unrealistic expectations of relationships.
The Maximizer has unrealistic expectations of their partner.
The Hesitater has unrealistic expectations of themselves.5
When I took the quiz while reading the book, I got all three nearly even which is…not good, I guess. When I did the quiz on Ury’s site my result was Maximizer, which makes sense. I’m the type to religiously look over a menu days before going out to a restaurant to make sure I order the right thing, who planned a detailed day by day itinerary for myself when I travelled to Whitehorse and Dawson City to make sure I did all the things I wanted to do. I’m a planner, it brings comfort since a lot of things that have happened in my life have happened unplanned. I get a feeling of control from planning, that by doing meticulous research I can avoid something bad from happening6. None of which, is a healthy process to have when dating. You can’t cyberstalk someone and make inferences based on profile pictures and a Facebook post from five years before7.
But I do recognize myself in the other two tendencies, or a weird Cronenberg blend of all three. While I don’t think I’m as much of a Hesitater as I used to be, I recognize that that’s the tendency that held me back in high school and in university. If my sister wasn’t sick, I could date, if my mom didn’t have cancer, I could date. If my mom hadn’t died and the grief wasn’t so fresh I could date, if I wasn’t so sad, so angry, so upset every freaking day of my life then I’d be good enough to date. If my life were normal again, if I recognized the me I was before all this, I could date.
And though I’m loathe to admit it, I’m a bit of a Romanticizer8. But it’s hard not to be, I guess, when you’ve used media and pop culture to escape into when times get difficult. When you can fangirl over fictional couples getting a happily ever after and hope, no matter how unrealistic it is, that it will happen to you.
So, I went speed dating.
There are certain stereotypes around speed dating. When shown in the media it’s generally for comedic purposes. We put a well-known protagonist who’s recently single and unlucky in love into a speed dating circle and see them surrounded by cringey, inappropriate, bottom of the barrel matches. A horn will blow, and the rotation begins with quick clips of the awkward conversations or weirdness of the matches as our protagonist clicks the buzzer at their table only to meet with a match who’s even worse than the last.
Until, of course, a suitable suitor sits down. They talk, they click, and they’re attractive. They hit it off and the horn blows, but instead of switching tables they decide to ditch the rest of the event and go on a real date, one longer than five minutes.
That’s the thing about love, it breeds hope.
I told a few people before I went speed dating, even though I felt sick with worry and I knew the stereotypes associated with it. For the most part I received support, encouragement that it would be “different,” that people met in the strangest of ways nowadays. So, I went speed dating. And surprisingly, I enjoyed it.
I met (I think) fourteen people that night and while there were some memorable ones9, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Talking to all of those strangers wasn't actually that hard, and I found myself getting more comfortable as the night went on. The venue was nice, and honestly I just enjoyed being out, talking to people, meeting people. I'm almost thirty, and after three years of isolation it was nice to meet new people10.
I didn’t get any matches. I wasn’t expecting anything, I’m not a particularly lucky person so I wasn’t upset by that. I was more upset by other’s reactions, to actually having to tell people I had no matches. People knew I went speed dating, which would obviously lead to the question of how it went, and then to when they were going to meet my new beau. So telling people that there’s no one to meet gets weird, because I think in a scenario where you meet over a dozen people most don’t expect rejection to be an option.
It gets awkward, even though it’s a very simple idea of people not picking each other. My dad joked years before about how awful it would be to go speed dating and not get picked only to be told by a person that they hadn’t11. I understand why in a Speed Dating scenario people would think that they'd find someone no matter what, but that's just not how it works, and it isn't worth feeling bad about. Why would I question why someone didn't choose me when there were plenty of people I met that night who I wrote no to?
Would I go again? Sure, why not. It was a surprisingly more relaxing experience than I thought, and it was fun meeting new people in a place I hadn’t gone before. But I’m also not desperate for it. I wanted to push myself, to do something that totally and completely freaked me out and now Speed Dating doesn’t scare me anymore12.
And that's the trick, isn't it? I recently read Sarah Polley’s Rush Towards the Danger where the central theme of the book is to head towards the difficult things, the things that scare us so that they can be overcome. There’s a lot of things that scare me. A lot of things that I can acknowledge aren’t all that scary. And I’m ready to, well, not exactly rush but cautiously approach them. Helmet on, straight ahead, and seeing what happens after. Maybe next time I’ll get a match, or maybe I won’t. Maybe every time I go no one will match with me, and that’s life. It’s unpredictable and sometimes it hurts, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying confronting these anxiety-inducing scenarios and seeing what comes from them.
I’ve never been officially diagnosed with anxiety, and I know there are issues with self-diagnosis. This is based on speaking with people who have been diagnosed with anxiety and others traits/symptoms I have.
My twin sister was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease when we started high school, and during those first few months she was hardly in school at all. It was weird that the two of us were experiencing such vastly different things and separated by that when we were hardly separated before that.
Like always.
The common answer among people I know and strangers seems to be: no, they aren’t.
All of this is taken from Logan Ury’s website: https://www.loganury.com/
Which isn’t true, of course, but it’s fun to try to trick myself!
I mean, you can, but it isn’t right
Alright, more than a bit.
Yes, I’ve got a couple of stories, but not for the public. That’s mean and not fair, I’m sure any one of them would tell you a story about how strange I am.
It was nice to socialize and meet new people but it’s important to note that I think we reopened to quickly and at the cost of the lives of disabled and chronically ill individuals. We are still in a pandemic and anyone who thinks otherwise is just…let’s use the word silly, even though I don’t mean silly. I still mask and once I qualify for my sixth COVID booster I’ll get it. Socializing three years into a pandemic brings about it’s own anxieties, when you don’t know if the people you’re meeting care about your and others help as much as you do. And then of course the risk of going out still, of socializing and interacting in a world that’s chosen to favour able-bodied people over disabled and chronically ill people. I don’t have an easy answer for this, but I think it’s wrong to jump into living the way we were before when the pandemic has proven how much of our world needs to change and adapt for others.
He hasn’t made those comments since.
Though I’m sure the “just before” jitters will hit right before it starts the next time I go.