First Person Singular by Wendy Braitman

filed in Sex and Dating

How to Find a Date 3.0

July 23, 2010 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Even when catastrophe strikes, the dating instinct continues. It took only hours after my mother’s funeral to ask for her cosmic help in finding me a mate. And a few days after 9-11, while stranded at the Toronto Film Festival, I uttered one of the best pick-up lines, EVER.

It was not a good time to be in Canada. With airspace and borders shut down, no bus seats or rental cars left, there was not much to do, but search for kindred spirits to huddle with. Early on, I’d spotted a cute guy in the crowd who was looking my way, but our paths never crossed. When I wasn’t on hold with the airlines, I obsessed about meeting him, but didn’t feel bold enough to say hello. Four days later, I was finally able to book my flight home, and as I dragged my suitcase through the hotel lobby, THERE HE WAS, just 3 feet away. The taxi was waiting. I was out of time. So I marched right up to him, smiled, and said, “We could’ve had end of the world sex,” and waltzed out the front door.

If only, Cheek’d, SKOUT, or FlipMe, had been invented, I might have had a different story to tell. These are the next generation of dating sites, that combine mobile and online strategies to help singles connect. Skout uses GPS, to locate other eager daters in the immediate vicinity. Cheek’d and FlipMe provide users with pre-printed cards to hand out when they run into attractive strangers, and can’t break the ice on their own. Six months after 9/11, at a film festival in Holland, I did run into my attractive stranger again. And this time, no card was needed.

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