There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have been counting down to Wednesday all year long, and those who wonder why so many people are buying flowers for President’s Day. I count myself in the latter camp, having been single virtually every Vday that I can remember. So I watch with amusement as many of my friends work themselves into a lather because of the intense pressure to commemorate this day with precisely the right amount and kind of conspicuous consumption.

The mingled scent of love and desperation in the air can mean only one thing for desis these days, namely speed dating followed by quirky stories from the mainstream media. Here’s a NYT article about Muslim Speed Dating Meeting:

A few years ago the organizers were forced to establish a limit of one parent per participant and bar them from the tables until the social hour because so many interfered. Parents … alternate between craning their necks to see who their adult children are meeting or horse-trading bios, photographs and telephone numbers among themselves….

Mrs. Siddique said her shy, 20-year-old daughter spent the hours leading up to the banquet crying that her father was forcing her to do something weird. “Back home in Pakistan, the families meet first,” she said. “You are not marrying the guy only, but his whole family…” [Link]

I suspect journalists are tickled by this spectacle because to them speed dating is like the bar scene, but faster. So the idea that conservative parents endorse it is weird. Parents, on the other hand, see it as a faster way to set up little tea encounters for their children, but only wholesale instead of retail. And desis love a bargain!

Desi parents (especially Muslim ones, but I’m sure there are similar scenes in other communities) do make it pretty easy to be mocked:

One panelist, Yasmeen Qadri, suggested that Muslim mothers across the continent band together in an organization called “Mothers Against Dating,” modeled on Mothers Against Drunk Driving. [Link],

So who’s right? Is speed dating/meeting a truly chaste solution to parents’ worries, or is it the first step down the slippery slope to group sex and public handholding?

Mothers trade biodatas while their children speed date

It turns out both sides are right. Speed dating actually comes out of a conservative religious impulse. It was created and trademarked by Rabbi Yaacov Dayo, who laid it all out in the romantically titled “A Time-Saving Guide To Finding Your Lifelong Love”. The purpose was to encourage a return to the good old days of civilized courtship:

“Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s people dated to get married,” … But many modes of contemporary dating are a sad waste of time for those aiming at permanency, especially women who want children, … “It’s not because they don’t want more meaningful relationships. I think it’s a question of them not knowing how to get there—I think they just cannot figure it out.” For one thing, … there are not enough elders to serve as role models for building successful, intimate, long-term partnerships. [Link]

So the parents aren’t wrong to see speed dating as an ally in their quest to protect their children’s morals. Or are they?

When psychologists have studied speed dating they find that people ignore all of the weighty factors that parents stress, and choose based largely on … hotness:

“Although they had three minutes, most participants made their decision based on the information that they probably got in the first three seconds,” Kurzban said. “Somewhat surprisingly, factors that you might think would be really important to people, like religion, education and income, played very little role in their choices…” [Link]

… study participants were asked ahead of time what they would prefer in a partner. Men—rather predictably—said attractiveness, while women listed intelligence and sincerity… However, when they moved through the speed dating process there was no appreciable difference between men and women. Both used attractiveness to make their decisions. [Link]

And in fact, like in a bar, there’s even a closing time effect, at least for men:

Also, during the last two dates of the session men were a lot more likely to say that they’d like to see someone again. “This corresponds to a saying that ‘women are prettier at closing time,’” said Simonson, referring to a study that asked men in a bar to rate the attractiveness of women at 9 p.m. and then at midnight (controlling for alcohol consumption). The women were deemed to be more attractive later in the evening. “You don’t find that spike in women saying yes at the very end of an evening,”… [Link]

Ssssssh. Don’t tell the uncles and aunties though