Is Speed Dating in NYC Worth It for Men?

Speed dating in NYC is worth trying once or twice, mainly as a friendly room to practice talking to women. As a way to find dates, it is thin: a dozen short chats, a few mutual yeses, and follow-ups that often fade within a week. The same evening spent meeting women in person at bars, parks and coffee shops around the city usually produces more real conversations and more phone numbers.

Wikipedia describes speed dating as a formal matchmaking process for meeting a lot of potential partners in a short time. Pairs who like each other keep meeting afterward. In New York, that usually means the back room of a bar or a lounge on a weeknight. There is a host with a timer, name tags and a scorecard.

Each round lasts a few minutes. Often the women stay seated and the men move down the line. At the end you mark who you would like to see again, and the organizer shares contact details wherever two people both said yes.

You will find these nights listed on Eventbrite and Meetup. They run in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Jersey City most weeks, with more on weekends. Many are split by age band, and some by profession or background. The format barely changes from one borough to the next. The crowd is what changes.

The best thing a speed dating night gives you is permission. Every woman in the room knows why she is there and expects to be spoken to. For a lot of men, that removes the hardest question of all, which is whether she even wants to talk.

You also get volume: ten or more short chats in one evening.

What you do not get is choice. The room holds whoever bought a ticket that night. You do not get time either, and four minutes rewards a man who is warm from his first sentence. If you need a few minutes to loosen up, the bell rings just as you get going.

And a mutual yes is soft. A woman who ticks your name may only mean you were pleasant, so write to her the next day with a place and a time.

Under a clock, most men fall back on questions. What do you do? Which neighborhood do you live in? How long have you been in the city? By the sixth round she has answered all three six times, and you blur into the men before you.

The scorecard hurts too. She decides about you at the end of the night, comparing you with a list, long after the moment when she laughed at something you said.

Outside the event, you decide when an interaction ends. a dating coach points out that in this city, "wherever you are there's a coffee shop a bar an ice cream place and a restaurant within a couple blocks walk." A good conversation on the street can become a drink ten minutes later. At a speed dating table, it becomes a box on a card.

If you go, choose the night with some care.

• Pick the age band that matches the women you want to meet.
• Read the listing for how many men and women are expected. A night with more men than women gives every woman more choices than you.
• Prefer a lounge or a quiet bar over a loud one. If you cannot hear her, the round is wasted.
• Favor an event near where you live. In My experience, a woman will happily come into Manhattan but rarely travels out to the outer boroughs. A match across two rivers often never becomes a date.
• Plan two or three short things to say about your week. A story beats a question.

A night listed for "this weekend" is fine too. A speed dating crowd is always whoever happened to be free.

New York is built for meeting women without a host. coach calls it his favorite city in the world for learning how, because "you essentially have an unlimited supply of strangers to talk to." He adds the part that makes it forgiving: "If you talk to a girl and it goes well, that's amazing. If you talk to a girl and it doesn't go well, it will soon be forgotten."

He also notes that people here are more open than you might expect. A lot of them moved here recently and are still building a social life. So a hello in Washington Square Park or Bryant Park lands better than it would in a town where everyone grew up together.

Three hours of walking and talking can beat a speed dating night, and every woman you speak to is one you chose.

Speed dating is not useless. coach has noticed that "speed dating is actually making a comeback of late," and that "women are becoming more and more receptive to meeting men out in the real world one way or another." That is good news for any man willing to talk to a stranger.

It makes sense if you have never spoken to a woman you did not know and want a gentle first step, or if you want practice under a clock. Either way, treat it as practice and keep meeting women everywhere else.

The skill that pays off in every room, speed dating included, is starting the conversation yourself and making it enjoyable quickly. Cold Approach runs its Bootcamp in New York and Miami to train exactly that. Each training day is two four-hour blocks in the field with a coach, mixing daygame and night game to suit you, with live coaching on every approach and feedback after each one.

Group is three consecutive days with no more than three students per coach. Private is 1-on-1 for one, two or three days. There is no skill floor, so a man who has only ever met women at organized events is welcome. You leave with a written practice plan for the nights you go out on your own.