Bitter Betty goes speed dating

A good friend of mine is multi-dating at the moment. She is seeing about four or five handsome twenty-somethings, all with interesting careers or promising interests, yet different enough for the two of us to spend lots of cafe-time comparing and contrasting them.

It’s like going fishing, she says. “You put out a lot of fishing rods, then you lean back in your chair with a beer and wait to see which one pulls first”.

This couldn’t be further from my reality. My latest dating disasters have been more about me trying to desperately catch the one fish that would never eat the bait. The bait keeps getting older, and the fish is appalled.

Of course, the staple advice from my friend in said cafe-sessions is that there are plenty of other fish in the sea. But where does one start?

Somehow, this friend managed to persuade me to start with a randomly selected range of twelve men at a speed-dating event in a champagne bar in Soho last week.

As she said, it’s better than wriggling your crotch up against twelve random guys in a grotty night club. Fair point.

So I went to the event, nervously clutching my third glass of pink house-champagne, waiting with sweaty palms and a sticker tagged “no.4” on my chest.

That turned out to be an unwise place for my sticker, as all my prospective dates began our four-minute schmooze in the dimly lit bar by squinting their eyes and thrusting their neck towards my left breast to get my details down before chatting to me.

After such an introduction, you don’t have many inhibitions.

At least that’s how I try to tell myself that I ended up telling one guy about my brief, lesbian affair in my second year of college. Realising that I wasn’t doing myself a favour, I changed strategy and started each conversation with the conventional “what do you do?”

Seemingly safe and easy topic, except most of the guys wouldn’t give me a straight answer. “Ah, you know, boring stuff… I just sit in an office looking at my computer screen, trading some foreign currency…”

Basically, they were all trying to tell me that they were investment bankers, without using the words “investment” and “banker”. Now, if my question wasn’t answered directly, at least I got an answer to another question: What sort of people go speed-dating?

With the female seats part occupied by me and my friends, it looked like a summit of the most hated kinds of desperate singles on the planet: Journalists and investment bankers.

At my level of desperation, one shouldn’t be picky. So I stayed for a while and spoke to one of the bankers, who came up to me after the event had finished.

He seemed nice enough, and we had a good laugh, until the moment I gracefully ruined it by pulling out my notebook. He had said something controversial that an aspiring journalist couldn’t possibly let slip. So I went all journo on him and managed to scare him away in less than three probing questions.

Needless to say he didn’t tick “yes” to “no.4” on his speed-dating sheet. Even the most despised singles don’t necessarily hit it off. I guess it’s back to the fishing rod.