Dating at any time can be somewhat daunting and at the age of fifty, it can be downright frustrating. Having seen the last of my three children out the door, it was time to look at filling my bed with something other than our Golden Retriever. Where does one go to find Mr. Right these days?
Are there any men still out there willing to have a relationship with something other than the TV remote? Announcing that I was now roaming the relationship jungle, well-meaning friends tried to drum up blind dates as a practice run. More often than not, I would end up with what I considered relationship leftovers - not too appealing, but all that was available at the time. Dating services cost a king's ransom and offered a pauper's return. On the advice of a co-worker, I decided to try out a new, supposedly revolutionary way to meet men called Speed dating.
Typically, Speed dating is held at a bar, in an atmosphere similar to a cocktail party; you meet and greet upwards of ten single men in the span of a series of ten, eight-minute interviews. It is survival of the fastest, not necessarily the fittest, and is similar to ordering take-out instead of sitting in the restaurant and having a real meal. You peruse a menu of hopefuls who roam from table to table asking a series of questions. As I waited, anxiously sipping on a cocktail, a bell sounded and my first entrée arrived. He was a lanky, thirty-something who moved around in his seat, drumming the table with his pencil. I wasn't impressed, and wanted to ask him why he was out on a school night and would he please stop tapping his damn pencil and sit up straight?
Fortunately, the bell tolled and off he went to his next interview. He was quickly replaced by a middle-aged guy sweating profusely in a sport jacket, who stared down at his shoes for the next eight minutes. Over the course of an hour, another eight sets of shoes and pencils tapped their way through my table. As I downed my third complimentary drink, I realized the adolescent who snuck out of Mom and Dad's house was the pick of the litter. Suffice to say, I'm back to looking at the old-fashioned way of dating and I'll even throw in an extra ten minutes.
