Several times a week, I think to myself, “Oh, thank goodness I’m not single anymore.” Today’s edition: Brown bag speed dating. Yes, speed dating where you cut holes out of a bag for your eyes and mouth and put it over your head. Seriously.
Loveflutter, the dating app for “quirky” people, is organizing these events. Loveflutter requires users to come up with a 140-character statement about yourself that’s “quirky” (God, I hate that word) and presents that statement as your profile image before revealing your photo. During their brown bag speed dating events, participants wear paper bags over their heads with their quirky fact scrawled on the front. The idea is to eliminate the shallowness of judging potential partners based on looks, but Madeleine Davies at Jezebel pointed out that, “As it turns out, judging people based off a 140-character, carefully crafted statement is no less shallow than judging them off of a photo.” You can, after all, tell something about a match based on their photo, but not much — about as much as you could possibly tell from a 140-character statement.
Brown bag speed dating is consistent with Loveflutter’s modus operandi and all, but seriously? I feel like brown bag speed dating is the dating app equivalent of a toy in a cereal box. Like, look, you’re going to eat the cereal anyway, the toy is just a kitschy promotional item that’s there to get you to buy THAT particular box. Likewise, you’re going to be using dating apps anyway, and brown bag speed dating is just a highly Instagrammable opportunity to get four drinks for $25 (the cost of the event, which gets you drinks and your paper bag “kit”) while maybe, maybe, maybe meeting someone you’d get along with.
Source: New York Post
I mean, at least you know that everyone else there is in the same place in their life as you are in yours, because the only two kinds of people you’re going to meet at brown bag speed dating are people who think that kitschy stuff is fun, and people who are just totally at the end of their rope with dating and willing to try anything. If you end up being two of the former, hey, maybe you can go home together and compare your collections of cereal box toys. Good luck to you, crazy kids.
The next event is taking place December 19 at the New York Hall of Science, and there are still admissions available so … you go do that and let me know how it goes.
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