Speed Dating

History

Rabbi Yaacov Deyo invented speed dating in the late 1990s to help Jewish singles in Los Angeles meet each other. Since then, speed dating has become an international phenomenon serving diverse populations across dozens of countries. It has become a mainstay of popular culture, appearing in television programs, movies, and mainstream news outlets. It has also become big business, with millions of people paying tens of millions of dollars to attend events.

Although mechanisms for meeting romantic partners have existed for time immemorial, the rapid growth and widespread availability of the Internet in the mid-1990s spawned a variety of new avenues for individuals to find and meet partners. For example, today's singles frequently meet each other via online dating (e.g., http://eHarmony.com, http://Match.com) and social networking Web sites (e.g., http://facebook.com, http://myspace.com). Speed dating also emerged with this burst of modern dating innovations, but it does not involve Internet use to the same extent as these other methods. Instead, speed dating is distinctive in featuring face-to-face interaction at the first step of the romantic initiation process. Speed-dating companies (e.g., http://Cupid.com, http://HurryDate.com) do allow users to register for events and contact their matches over the Internet, but this online communication does not substitute for the live interactions that lie at the heart of speed dating.

Speed Dating and Romantic Attraction Research

Soon after speed dating became a pop culture phenomenon, scholars recognized it as an efficient means of studying romantic attraction. A stream of articles began appearing in the scientific literature in 2005, with some reporting findings from commercial speed-dating events and others reporting findings from events hosted by romantic attraction scholars for graduate or undergraduate students.

Scholars are enthusiastic about the scientific potential of speed dating because its procedures possess many features that make it an ideal method for studying romantic attraction. For example, speed-dating procedures allow scholars to: (a) study real relationships with a potential future, (b) study both partners from each speed date simultaneously, (c) maintain tight control over the circumstances in which individuals meet potential partners, and (d) examine how individuals select among a series of available romantic partners. Speed-dating procedures also allow scholars to assess background characteristics about individuals before they attend the event and to follow matched pairs into the future to study early relationship development.

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