Speed dating has appeared (and been ridiculed) in enough movies and television shows that I thought, in the spirit of the ironic hipster, I should give it a try. I got my chance last week at an event, reassuringly called Speed Networking, hosted by the Speed Dating Specialists at Solaire Bistro.

The evening began with a feeling-out of the competition. Men stuck with men. Women with women. The organizers had given each of us name-tags with colored buttons to indicate our relationship status. Green meant go ahead. Red meant girlfriend. Yellow, which adorned the lapels of the older, more desperate-looking gentleman in attendance, meant “it’s complicated.”

A very friendly, slightly balding man in his mid-30s with a red button introduced himself as a cinematographer. Everyone shook his hand. No one looked concerned. A tall handsome “green buttoned” Texan said that he had to come to these events because he was always traveling in his job as a pilot. Shoulders in the group drooped. Everyone else was playing for second.

Success at speed dating, I learned, is similar to putting together a solid movie or book pitch. It doesn’t matter how brilliant or interesting you are, but rather whether or not you can get the point across—with a hook—in just a few minutes. Your list of accomplishments might be miles long; you still need to cut that down to “I am a pilot and I love dogs.”

In the end it was positive for its awkwardness, with a certain baptism by fire quality that leaves everybody feeling a sense of shared experience, even in the absence of a connection. “It was rough when I first came,” one Colombian woman recalled. “When I signed up they had seen my name, Yesika, and thought I was a Japanese man. I keep coming to them, though. They are too much fun.”

Jonathan Haagen