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.

Much to her relief, when she stepped inside the bar Kylie found a bunch of “normal, attractive-looking girls” on one side of the room and a couple of “normal, attractive boys” on the other. “We went straight over to the other girls – they were all just nice women who were a bit embarrassed and nervous like us,” she says. “Then the rest of the boys started arriving and I was very pleasantly surprised.” Nevertheless, Kylie avoided making too much conversation with the men before the formal part of the evening began. “I kept thinking, ‘If I say too much now, what will I talk about during the eight minutes I have with each one?’.”

Despite her resolve to save her conversation, Kylie found herself drawn to a participant called Andrew. “We started talking at the bar as soon as he came in and we didn’t stop until the host began telling us how the night would proceed,” smiles Kylie. “I knew he was my type straight away – he was very casual and relaxed, and had that tradie [tradesman] look about him.” But Andrew didn’t feel quite the same. “She was wearing this great power suit and trendy glasses, and I immediately thought she was out of my league,” he says shyly.

It was with reluctance that Andrew had made it to the event at all. “A friend of mine had broken up with his fiancée and was eager to get back out there. I’d never contemplated joining a dating agency, but I said I’d try speed dating with him because it sounded like fun. But in the end he couldn’t come,” explains Andrew. “I wasn’t keen to go by myself and when I got there someone took the last parking space right in front of me. I nearly turned around and went home,” he laughs. Little did he know that the person who’d nabbed his parking space was none other than the girl in the trendy glasses and the incident has become a running joke. “She almost missed out on me by jumping in my spot,” Andrew teases, as Kylie rolls her eyes at the familiar story.

Despite their initial reluctance, the pair found themselves in a bar with 18 other singles who were all committed to an evening of modern matchmaking and, to their relief, they found it surprisingly easy, comfortable and fun. As the minutes passed and the bell continued to ring, both Kylie and Andrew felt affiliations with a few people in the room, but the eight minutes they shared were the most memorable. “We seemed to have so much in common, and he was very witty and comical,” smiles Kylie.

“Yep, I was on fire that night,” winks Andrew. “But seriously, I’d been making an effort to ask every second girl a different question, but when I got to Kylie I didn’t have to try at all,” he smiles.

When asked if they’d like to meet again, both Kylie and Andrew placed a big tick in the ‘yes’ box and the speed-dating company gave them each other’s phone number a few days later. “I really wanted him to call, but I was trying not to get my hopes up,” says Kylie. “After a while, you learn to just take things as they come.”

But Kylie needn’t have worried. “One of the other girls called me and asked me out for coffee, but I wanted to see Kylie again so I called her almost as soon as I got her number,” says Andrew. While the phone call went swimmingly, it ended in disappointment when Kylie turned down Andrew’s dinner invitation because she had other plans. “I thought she was giving me the run-around,” says Andrew, who’d had his fair share of dating ups and downs over the years. “So I decided I’d take the other girl out instead.” As fate would have it, the date ended in “disaster”, so Andrew thought he’d give Kylie another try and this time she said yes.

The pair went for drinks after work and once again felt a definite spark. “We didn’t stop talking, and it all seemed really easy and natural,” says Andrew. “The date was perfect, apart from the fact that Andrew didn’t walk me to my car afterwards,” adds Kylie. “I was a bit disgruntled because I thought a gentlemen would have done that.”

“I wanted to, but she seemed so independent and strong that I thought ‘She’s not the kind of woman who wants to be escorted anywhere’,” explains Andrew. However, he did manage to pluck up the courage to ask Kylie out again.

The second date went just as smoothly as the first, but once again Andrew was a little too reserved for Kylie’s liking. “I walked him to his car and I made a bit of a joke about him not walking me to mine on our first date, then I had to initiate the kiss goodnight!” she laughs. “I really liked her so I didn’t want to muck it up,” explains Andrew with a sigh.
Despite these few hiccups, Andrew had made a marked impression on the girl in the power suit and trendy glasses, so it was she who asked him on a third date. “That was the one that clinched it for him,” she laughs. “I wanted him to meet my dog Winston, who is the first love of my life, so we decided to go for a walk in the park. Andrew borrowed a dog from his friend so that Winston could have a playmate, which I thought was lovely.”

“The best part was that we were so busy talking we didn’t notice when my friend’s dog cocked its leg on us. It was like he was giving us his blessing,” laughs Andrew. Eight weeks after they met the couple professed their love for each other in the easy, casual way they’d shared from the start. “We were cuddling on the sofa one Sunday and I said, ‘I think I’ve fallen in love with you’,” remembers Kylie. “And I just said ‘I love you too’,” smiles Andrew.

Six months later Andrew proposed, and the couple was married two years to the day after they met. True to their speedy start, 11 months later they were blessed with a son they named Fletcher. Today the couple is relatively comfortable talking about how they got together, but it wasn’t always this way. “I used to be embarrassed to tell people how we met because those dating agency things used to have a bit of a stigma,” says Andrew.

“I don’t know how many people have found their partners through speed dating, but you can’t take it too seriously. It’s just a bit of a laugh and a way to meet fun people,” adds Kylie.

Words: Linda Peatling. Photography: Andrew Lehmann. Hair & make-up: Ruth Sebire.

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