Love in the fast lane

Eight minutes to feel a spark, eight weeks to fall in love and eight months to propose… There’s no prize for guessing this couple’s lucky number.

Three years ago, if someone had told Kylie or Andrew Mercieca that an eight-minute encounter with a member of the opposite sex would change their lives, neither would have believed it. “I thought if you went looking for love you wouldn’t find it,” says 30-year-old Kylie. “I’d never really believed in love at first sight,” adds 31-year-old Andrew. But that was before they decided to try a new matchmaking trend known as ‘speed dating’, which has taken off in cities around the country over the past few years.

“Ten guys and ten girls who’ve signed up with a speed-dating company meet at a venue somewhere in the city. The girls sit at little tables and the guys rotate from table to table every eight minutes, so you don’t have long to see whether you like each other,” explains Kylie, who discovered a speed-dating event while surfing the internet in search of new party venues to visit with her girlfriends. “I didn’t take it seriously, I just thought it would be a bit of fun,” she says.

With her tongue firmly in her cheek, Kylie signed up for speed dating with a friend from work and soon received an email inviting the pair to an event a couple of weeks later. The email explained that the participants would get to rate each other on confidential cards and state whether they would like to see each other again. It also said the evening would be chaperoned by a professional speed-dating host, and all personal information would remain private. “It sounded great, but we started to get a bit nervous because it was the first time we were actually going out just to meet guys. We usually just went out to have fun, because you can’t get to know anyone in a nightclub,” says Kylie, who – at the age of 27 – had gone through three serious relationships and spent a few years on the single-scene roller-coaster. “The people at the speed-dating company made us feel a bit better when they told us the events were more about making friends than matchmaking, but I decided I didn’t want to go until I’d lost five kilos,” she laughs.

When Kylie discovered the event was to be held on a Wednesday night, she thought she’d found an excuse to pull out. “I told my friend I didn’t want to go out in the middle of the week, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer.” So, the following week, a reluctant Kylie set off to a bar in the heart of Melbourne, growing ever more uncertain of what she might find there. “I imagined wall-to-wall desperate men… Then I thought they’d probably think we were a pair of desperate women,” she laughs.

1234   |  Single page