Welcome to the Varsity Dating Game. More NEXT than Newlyweds, but still pretty damn wholesome. From an initial pool of over 25 interested people, we narrowed our selection down to six final (pseudonymous) lovebirds: Bonnie, Clyde, Thelma, Louise, Ross, and Rachel. Two of the couples were straight and one was queer. Matches were made based on what seemed to promise at least some chemistry, no pairings that promised immediate disaster.
Thelma and Louise were the queer couple, paired based on their common artistic interests, which included music, film, and theatre. Bonnie and Clyde had very different tastes, likes, and dislikes. While Bonnie is very much into art and the Toronto music scene, Clyde prefers to watch bad movies and keep up with NBA basketball. Pairing Bonnie and Clyde was an attempt to find out if opposites really could attract. Finally, Ross and Rachel were paired up based on their romantic and emotional histories—Ross had been in several relationships and never really dated much, while Rachel was the opposite. With the three couples set, all that was left to do was send them off on their dates and watch the sparks fly!
Thelma and Louise
“When I saw that woman shitting on the gnome, I just knew,” jokes Louise when I ask her about the date she had gone on three days earlier. She has a wide, full smile that breaks through when she pauses between sentences and she is playing with a hole in her thick leggings as she talks me through her date. She met Thelma at a coffee shop; from there, the two spent some time at a small pub before finally moving on to the Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, where they watched several performance art pieces, including a lady pretending to evacuate her bowels onto a garden gnome.
Though they enjoyed each other’s company, there seemed to be no real romantic connection—on either end. In fact, one of the things they seemed to bond over the most was the fact that they were both on this blind date and that they were curious as to how they’d be portrayed. “I remember on the walk out [of Buddies],” said Louise, “we were joking about what we’d say in the interview.”
“It wouldn’t have been fair to say, set me up with a nice butch dyke,” Thelma explains when I ask her why there might have been no romantic connection in the first place. “[She is] a lot more mature than I am,” explains Louise. “I really enjoyed talking to her, but for me, I’m much more goofy.” The problem of “connecting” was a recurring one: all six “datees” described several instances where they felt no real romantic connection or chemistry with their date.
Bonnie and Clyde
In many ways, dating is like belonging to an extended, two-way interview. People go on dates not because they already know each other, but because they want to learn more about each other. Similarly, interviews are about exploring specific facets of a person’s life, history, and experiences. So, just as most people are bad at doing interviews with no prior research, they are also bad at going on blind dates.
Let’s take the example of Bonnie and Clyde, who had very few common interests. Bonnie describes herself as the sort of person that doesn’t really say no—she’s always willing to try new things, and that very much influences the way she lives her life. She tends to go out with creative types like architects and artists. She is a very open and blunt person. Clyde, however, is very much the opposite: he is a practical, logical person, and a self-described cynic. He is soft-spoken, yet feels very strongly about his likes and dislikes. The first time I interviewed him, he was wearing a shirt for the band Meshuggah, an almost 25-year-old experimental metal band from Sweden; he’s all over the place. Clyde’s the sort of person that defies easy classification.
In his pre-date interview, Clyde reveals he also suffers from the oh-crap-did-I-just-say-that? problem: “I tend to say stupid things, then immediately wish I hadn’t.” Bonnie, however, is almost the direct opposite. She speaks openly, with a minimal filter between her mind and her mouth. For instance, Bonnie had this to say of their different tastes in music: “When I asked him if he knew Feist and he said no, I thought ‘Oh no! Where is this going?’” Talking to her feels very easy and entertaining, as she will often blindside the person she is talking to with a conversation topic. “Near the end,” Bonnie explains, “it had the potential to get super ugly, because we were talking about the Arab-Israeli conflict.” They managed to avoid the touchy subject eventually, however. “Ultimately, however, the most important question was left for last. “Would you go out with this person again?” Clyde’s answer was predictably logical: “I would never say no to that.” The reason why? “Because I’m sad and alone,” jokes Clyde. “Don’t use that!”
Ross and Rachel
Ross and Rachel, on the other hand, definitely came closest to success. They seemed like a good enough match: Ross is a devoted conversationalist and will do anything for a good talk. Rachel, a student politician, really enjoys conversation, has a dry sense of humour, and is extremely motivated. Ross is a bit of a “relationship person.” “Had a couple of [one-year relationships],” he explains, “one two-and-a-half year, that was a pretty big one, and from then on it’s just really filling in the gaps, kind of.” Rachel, however, is the opposite. She has never had a serious relationship, and as such has extensive experience with dating. When asked what types of guys she usually goes out with, her answer is simple: “assholes.”
Their date went well from the very beginning. The Starbucks where they met turned out to be where they spent the first hour and a half of their date, just talking to each other. “One thing we both sort of tossed out at the very beginning of the date was very revealing,” Ross explained. “She seemed to start off quite serious, and my first impression was, ‘Okay, what am I dealing with here? This girl is high-powered student politics, very intense.’ She had this very serious facial expression going on, it was very businesslike. I was like, ‘Okay, this is going to be intense, going to be wild.’ And, of course, it was a meaningless first impression, as most first impressions are.
“But then I think she broke that by coming out of the blue and saying, ‘By the way, there’s this thing that everyone’s told me about my face.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ And she said, ‘I seem to have this very serious face that people always seem to think makes me look like a bitch, and I’ve heard this a million times from professors and friends and everything else. I just happen to have a very serious, blank facial expression. So if I’m giving you that right now, I’m sorry and I’m very interested in what you’re saying, but this is just the way my face is.’ She said, ‘There’s this one prof who told me that the way to get over that is to smile more, so as you can see, I’m trying to smile more.’ And I said, ‘That’s very illuminating, thank you for letting me know.’
“And I said, ‘I sort of have a similar problem with my voice. Everyone’s told me for years I have this very sarcastic, condescending voice, where everyone thinks I’m talking down to them, all the time. And that’s my thing, I just do it naturally, its just how my voice sounds. I’m not talking down to anyone, this is just how it is for me.’”
They got along quite well, and both of them suggested they might be interested in going out again soon.
But why were people willing to sign up for this in the first place? Some gave simple reasons, such as Louise: “why the hell not?” Others argued they had nothing to lose. But we at The Varsity think there’s more to it than that. Maybe they genuinely had some hope that their dates would turn out to be their soulmates, or at the very least very compatible with them. At the same time, people seemed interested in the way they were being set up; the manner in which they were going on dates genuinely interested and intrigued them, because it was so different from what people usually do.
The idea that people might secretly hope to meet an important significant other through such a chaotic process points to another aspect of the dating process people were looking forward to: serendipity. As Ross got onto the subway after his date with Rachel, he noticed a red-haired girl sitting across from him. He recognized her—she had been one of the original people that had expressed interest in the dating game at the very beginning.
As they rode the subway north, they quietly smiled to each other for the entire trip. Ross explained to me that it had been a great ending to a great evening to simply have someone smile and be nice to you as you ride the subway home. People long for serendipitous things to happen to them, bright spotlights on otherwise mundane and uninteresting days. This is also ultimately the reason why they signed up for the Dating Game. The lack of control they had over the dates until they were actually on the dates meant that they had to roll with the punches, and that made the entire experience exciting.
Maybe that was also the reason the Dating Game started in the first place, out of a sort of compulsion to both create and experience these serendipitous moments in other people’s lives. “Emotions,” Thelma told me as we finished our interview, “make humans do weird things.”
Date 1—THELMA AND LOUISE
Name: THELMA
Age: 22
Program of Study: English
Random Fact: Writes comics about sexual discussions between a troll and a zombie.
Name: LOUISE
Age: 20
Program of Study: History, Political Science, and French
Random Fact: Plays cello for a band.
Thelma and Louise met up at Futures Bakery and Café at Bloor and Brunswick, before moving to The Pump across the street for some beer. After talking for a bit, they moved on to the Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, where they had some drinks and were entertained by several performances.
Thelma: “It was good, it was a nice learning experience I think for both of us. I think both of us feel a bit more confident. It helped me get over my own awkwardness around dating.”
Louise: “She takes the things that she enjoys very seriously. [She] wouldn’t take things too heavily. [She’s] very lighthearted and she knows what she wants.”
Verdict: Buddies in good times!
Date 2—BONNIE AND CLYDE
Name: BONNIE
Age: 22
Program of Study: Political Science and Environmental Policy
Random Fact: Once made out with the lead guitarist of the band RATATAT on stage.
Name: CLYDE
Age: 21
Program of Study: Math and Physics
Random Fact: A sucker for cynical girls.
Bonnie and Clyde met up at a Starbucks before going out together to a Persian restaurant called Tempus on Yonge. After a pleasant dinner they went back to the Starbucks, where they ended their night with some conversation and coffee.
Bonnie: “When I asked him if he knew who Feist is, he was like ‘no,’ and I was like, ‘oh no, where is this going?’”
Clyde: “Occasionally, I’d throw something out just to see what she’d think, like ‘have you seen any good movies lately?’ and stuff like that. She said, ‘I’m not really a big movie person,’ and that’s a pretty big thing to not have in common.”
Verdict: Ended only slightly better than the real Bonnie and Clyde.
Date 3—ROSS AND RACHEL
Name: ROSS
Age: 24
Program of Study: Graduated, English
Random Fact: Worked part time for four years as a doorman at a ballet school.
Name: RACHEL
Age: 21
Program of Study: Employment Relations and Sociology
Random Fact: Was once almost trampled by an elephant.
The date began at a Starbucks east of Bloor and Avenue Rd. Ross and Rachel spent almost two hours talking to each other before trying to go to the ROM. It was closed, however, so they went to Gabby’s across the street for dinner instead. After some great food and conversation, they wished each other a good night and went their separate ways.
Ross: “This wasn’t the kind of date where I was expecting a marathon make-out session or anything at the end. It wasn’t that kind of night.”
Rachel: “He was really easy to talk to, it was pleasant conversation. Overall, it was a pretty decent date.”
Verdict: Maybe could be more than just Friends?
