Making the Most of a Speed Dating Event

The first 7for7 event was held in January this year, and from observing participants at that event, it's clear that there are certain things participants can do to make their experience a more positive one.

It's important to note that 7for7 is not a matchmaker. Our role is an event organizer and facilitator. Hence, it's up to participants to make the most out of attending an event. But don't worry. By reading the tips we list below, you're well on your way to having a great experience!

1. The laws of attraction are not suspended simply because you have 7 guaranteed dates.

What does this mean? It means you should take just as much care with your appearance as if you were meeting an exciting new guy for the first time.

Get a haircut. Dress well. Think about how best to describe yourself in just a few minutes. Make a conscious effort to be friendly and approachable at the event despite a long day at work.

2. At the event, you should be looking for that ineffable quality - chemistry.

Some participants approach speed dating as they would online dating. They come with a checklist and expect to meet guys who tick all the right boxes. And when they don't, they go home disappointed and decide that speed dating doesn't "work".

As an event organizer, my advice to participants is to keep an open mind when attending an event. Allow the conversation with each date to proceed naturally, and when your 7 minutes are up, think about whether if you had the chance, you would want to continue the conversation with that person.

Of course everyone has certain qualities they look for in a potential significant other, but the goal of speed dating shouldn't be to screen out the guys you meet based on your checklist. In fact, quite often, people are terrible at figuring out what's really important for them in a relationship and what's just nice to have.

Instead, consider the rapport that you build with your dates and think about whether you felt a connection and whether you would like to know him better. If you did feel the connection, put that guy's name down as a match on your program sheet. You can always decide later whether that was just a phantom feeling or something more substantial.

Which brings me to the next point...

3. You are not there at the event to look for a boyfriend / soulmate.

It's unrealistic to expect to find an instant hot new boyfriend after attending an event.

A match at a speed dating event is simply an opportunity to meet the guy you felt a mutual connection with, in the future in a different context, and to see if something more will develop.

Don't make the mistake of projecting too much significance onto a match. Overeagerness can be very unattractive on meetings following a speed date.

4. 7for7 arranges 7 dates for you at each event. But there will be at least 6 other guys that you haven't met following the speed dates.

Some guys leave right after the speed dating portion of an event. Sometimes, this can't be helped if you have a prior engagement.

But if you're free after the speed dating, mingle! You should be doing at least one of two things:

• Starting a conversation with the other guys you have not met; and/or 
• Deepening the conversation with the guys you have already speed dated and found yourself attracted to.

The goal should be to increase your interactions with other participants so you come away from the event with a richer experience.

And of course, what works well at the end of the event works just as well at the start. If you are early to arrive, take the opportunity to chat to the other early participants before the event starts.

A 7for7 speed dating event is ultimately what you make of it. As an event organizer, I can only do so much. So, take the initiative, put yourself out there and meet the guys. One of them could become something more than just a random acquaintance!

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Register for our upcoming event on 16 April here.

Event Registration Now Open

Registration is now open for our next event, to be held on 16 April, 2014. Closing date for registration is 13 April, 2014.

Do You Find Online Dating Unsatisfying?

Statistic: On average, for each six hours of searching for people online and messaging them, you get one cup of coffee (meaning you get one date).

About 4 years ago, noted psychologist Dan Ariely gave an interview on what his research on online dating had revealed. And the answer was that as popular as online dating has become, it's a deeply unsatisfying experience.

Briefly, the reasons are:

1. People can't be reduced into their individual characteristics of height, weight, looks, body type etc, and be described easily such that a person can tell if they are a good match just from reading a profile. How many times have you met someone who seemed interesting in their profile, but turned out to be completely the wrong person for you? People are more like wine; complex, full-bodied, and only on meeting them in person can you tell whether you like them or not, but it's hard to describe how and why.

2. An online profile provides only very limited information on a person. A person in the flesh is much more complex. Since online profiles provide so little information (especially for gay apps as users seldom write much), online daters tend to go by the most prominent profile feature: the picture.

The picture becomes so important that even for people who should know better, physical attractiveness takes on an out-sized importance that overshadows everything else.

[Of course, physical attractiveness is always a consideration. It's just that online, it becomes *the* most important consideration.]

3. The phenomenon of assortative mating dramatically amplifies the importance of physical attractiveness in online dating. What assortative mating basically means is that while everyone tends to be attracted to the most beautiful people, for practical and realistic reasons, everyone tends to pair off with someone of a similar level of physical attractiveness. It's hard to score above your league, and you're also not likely to downgrade your expectations below your own level.

If online dating causes people to overvalue physical attractiveness, but the chances of actually coupling up with someone more attractive than yourself is still the same (meaning very, very low), what that means is that on any online dating website or app, you would expect to find:

1. The few beautiful people who are flooded with messages and who naturally, only reply to a few; and
2. A lot of not-so-beautiful people who are left frustrated and disheartened, with near-empty inboxes.

Statistic: OkCupid found that the most attractive women on their website received five times as many messages from straight men as the 'average' woman, and 28 times as many messages as the women at the low end of the scale. And men consistently tend to message the women way out of their league, while ignoring the women closer to them in attractiveness, even though their chances of getting a response from the good-looking women are low.

I would hazard a guess that gay men are not so different from straight men in this respect.


But let's step away from online dating for a while and discuss something related. Throughout the ages, less attractive men and women have still been able to find dates and get married (to someone of a similar level of attractiveness) and live happily ever after.

Do these ordinary people wake up every morning and look at their partner across the table and think to themselves, "I wanted someone more beautiful, but this was the best I could do. Too bad, life sucks."

Obviously not. People adapt. So, how do they adapt to the reality of their mate choice?

Simple. People change their priorities. They tell themselves that, "Look, I'm not gorgeous. But, I don't care so much about beauty. I care about intellect, personality, a good heart, a sense of humor...things that are more than skin deep."

And that's how they still find someone they're happy to be with together.

As it turns out, the people who care the most about beauty are...the beautiful. Which makes sense. Just as parents tend to think better of their own children than other people's children, we tend to value the things that we have, that we made ourselves, that we were given, more than the things that other people have. A good-looking and muscular guy is more likely to require that whoever he is with is also good-looking and muscular. In contrast, one benefit of being less good-looking is that it is easier to appreciate and value the less superficial but no less attractive qualities in a good person.

So, if online dating isn't all that it's cut out to be, what should we do?

My answer is that online dating is flawed, but it's still an option. And it's an easy and convenient one. But there are always other options, options that allow you to meet people in person and experience them in all their complexity, and perhaps force you to put aside a preoccupation with looks for just an evening.

And the answer is...speed dating.

How We Come Up with Seating Arrangements at a 7for7 Event

My last post was on how various people have used data to come up with ways to optimize an online profile for maximum impact. Today, I'll talk about something that's still data related, but closer to my speed dating project. Namely, how I come up with the seating arrangement at an event.

In any 7for7 speed dating event, there can be up to 20 participants. How many possible seating arrangements do you think there can be for 20 participants?

100? 1000? One million?
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Answer: 2.432902e+18

There are a total of more than 2.4 quintillion seating arrangements!**

So, how do I decide which seating arrangement to use? Do I assign participants at random?

I can't do that...what if some people already know each other? They may have registered together as friends and told me explicitly that they don't want to date each other at the event.

Also, what if two people had speed dated at a previous event? And it didn't work out for either of them. It would be a waste of time for both of them if I seated them together again. Not to mention awkward.

[Let's not even talk about how some people may have met at one event, gone steady, broken up, then signed up again separately for another event...I can't have cat fights breaking out at my events.]

Besides, since I know the ages and interests of the participants (you guys told me at registration), this gives me the chance to use that data productively in devising a seating arrangement.

The answer to the seating arrangement problem is a genetic algorithm.

Very simply, I've written a computer program which tests each possible seating arrangement.

Seating arrangements which result in anyone seated with someone they either already know or have speed dated before instantly fail the test. The program tests not just the starting seating arrangement but also how the arrangement changes over the course of the evening as the moving group changes seats.

For seating arrangements which pass this first test, the program calculates a date score for every pair of participants who end up speed dating each other.

Date scores are calculated based on how close in age the 2 participants are, and how many interests they have in common. Two participants who are very close in age and have many interests in common will have a high date score.

The date scores are summed up for everyone in the starting seating arrangement and across the whole evening as the arrangement changes from the moving group changing seats.

This total date score for a particular seating arrangement is the fitness score.

The program runs through all the seating arrangements and picks the one with the highest fitness score. On average, this seating arrangement should result in a better dating experience for everyone than if I had assigned seats at random.

One final detail: for performance reasons, even a modern workstation would take a very long time to test 2.4 quintillion seating arrangements. So, I incorporated some simplifying assumptions into my program, the details of which are not important.

Bottomline: The seating arrangement that you see when you attend a 7for7 event is not random, but has been carefully screened to be appropriate for the participants attending.

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**Unlike in speed dating for straights where participants meet only with the opposite sex, in gay speed dating, everyone can meet everyone else. Therefore, the number of seating arrangements is the factorial of the number of participants, in this case 20!.

Creating a Good Online Dating Profile

I am a believer in data. It's what I do in my day job. I collect data, I scrub it, I parse and categorize it, I analyze it, then I create charts and slides to visualize and explain it. A lot of other people analyze data for a living, and in this post, I'll point out some ways that data scientists have found that can help you land better dates.

If you're like most gay men, you have an online profile on a dating website or app. And you've seen other guy's profiles. Some profiles obviously took more effort than others; some are little more than a grainy (headless/scenery) pic (if there is even a pic at all) with a single line of text. Frankly, I wonder why guys like that bother.

A good place to start looking for information on how to hack your online profile is OkCupid's blog OkTrends. Here are a few relevant posts:

The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures
Is a face pic a must? Is it better to smile or not? Should you look into the camera or not? Here are the answers!

Your Looks and Your Inbox
Do you think you're cute? If not, how many messages do you think cute guys get on average compared to not-so-cute ones? Maybe that's why he didn't answer. Could it be his Inbox is filled with messages just like yours?

Don't Be Ugly By Accident
How to make your pics pop! So more guys message you. Then you get more dates!

For something a bit more recent, look at Wired's recent article on building a good profile.

Some people have taken the idea of using data to optimize their profile to the point where they've written about their experiences and given talks on them. Amy Webb, for instance, gave a TED talk a year ago about her experiences. More recently, the Guardian in the UK had an article about the algorithms behind online dating websites that purport to help you find matches. An interesting read even if you don't believe in the relevance of data algorithms to dating.

The bottom line is: if you're going to use online dating as your main means of landing dates (or hook-ups), it's simply good sense to take more care creating a profile so that it actually gets you the attention you want.

If you're too lazy to do all that, you could just go speed dating and actually meet guys in person. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive! Optimize your profile AND go speed dating to maximize your chances of finding someone you can really connect with!

Speed Dating Complements Online Dating

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Publicizing 7for7...and a success story!

While our first event was a success, it was a different story with our second event. Too few participants confirmed their registration and hence, we had to cancel the event.

In practice, while many guys may sign up for an event, not everyone confirms their registration later through payment. Some may have signed up on a whim. Some may have lost interest and changed their minds halfway, thinking why on earth would they want to go to an event where they just meet random guys that may not be to their liking.

Well, here's a third reason why some guys bail on our events. Sometimes, serendipity, against all odds, strikes...

A speed dating service can only thrive when it can continually get new participants. That's because past participants need to keep seeing new faces for the events to be a useful avenue to meet people, while guys who are successful at meeting someone compatible will drop out of events and reduce the roll of participants.

I am very happy to have made a difference for guys lucky enough to have met a potential relationship prospect at my events, and that's a reason I am perfectly OK with for dropping out of an event you have signed up for.

For those of you who are curious when our next event is going to be held, we hope it will be soon, but because of the importance of publicizing 7for7, we're concentrating our efforts on getting the word out.

We've printed business cards for instance, and we're looking to place them at gay-owned and operated bars, cafes and restaurants. Let us know if you know someone who might be open to displaying our business cards at their counters.

We've also opened a Twitter account for those of you who prefer to receive updates through that channel. Follow us @SevenForseven1.

Once we have attained sufficient interest on our website, mailing list and followers on Twitter, we'll look into opening for registration for our next event. Hopefully, we will never have to cancel an event again. =)