In a glass box in midtown Manhattan decorated with leafy artificial
archways, Astroturf and lawn tables, I place my hand on a stranger’s
face. I do not know her name. The woman is blindfolded too. Her hand
strokes my hair.
“This,” I tell myself, “is really, really weird.”
I am at a blindfold speed-dating event, billed by the organisers –
London-based events company Guerilla Science – as a “sensory exploration
of dating”.
When booking I was told to bring a companion, so I brought my friend
Gary (not his real name). He is to be my minder for the evening.
Earlier, all participants had gathered in a grim midtown Irish-themed
pub to drink, mingle and, in Gary’s case, prepare chemically for the
experience. As Gary buys another Guinness and shot of whiskey to wash
down the two Xanax he just took (to “chill out”), I chat with another
attendee, a mousy-looking 41-year-old in small spectacles.
His name is Jeff, and this is his second speed-dating event in as
many days. “I don’t want to go home,” he says, a little mysteriously by
way of explanation. “Bad relationship thing.” He struck out last night,
he tells me, but is hopeful for this evening. He gestures at the room
behind him. “All the hotties are here.” Against the rules, he has come
to the event alone.
When we get to the glass room where the actual speed-dating is to
take place, we are immediately told to put on our blindfolds. Gary is
tasked with leading me around by the shoulder. “I’m a bit pissed right
now,” he whispers to me reassuringly.
“Is a scientific experience of attraction even possible?” asks the
emcee for the evening. “It’s all about chemistry, and we’re going to
have a little experiment. There are so many variables that go into what
we find attractive, so we are going to isolate them.” Of course, we
aren’t really. This isn’t a laboratory, though some of the experiments
work better than others.
First, talking. Just talking, except blindfolded. This is a little
awkward, and I immediately find myself floundering. “So, where are you
from?” I ask lamely. “What does that matter?” asks the faceless voice in
my personal darkness, with mild hostility. Things limp on in that vein
until the emcee calls time. “Don’t worry about it,” Gary whispers to me
afterwards.
Touch is the next round and it is really, really bizarre. After being
steered to a table by my minder, the emcee tells us to go for it – so
we do. Touching a stranger, blindfolded, is something for which you
quickly discover there is almost no automatic physical language on which
to fall back.
A later round involves taste, which means feeding each other a
variety of different foods while blindfolded (including fresh
jalapeños).
Later, over the phone, I chat with the person I was paired with, Kati
Laakso. “A lot of the guys seemed really shy,” she tells me. “I was
surprised that people didn’t touch the face more,” she tells me.
“The face is very sensual,” she said. “I felt like the guys weren’t
really doing that. It was the same in the taste thing, people were just
trying to find your mouth and stuff the food in, whereas I wanted to
know what the lips feel like, how the face is formed.”
Afterwards, at Jimmy’s Corner, I speak to Katie Urban, who came to
the event with her friend Erica. “My touch guy was a little bit
awkward,” she says. “He didn’t want to go there.” “Erica’s was all over
her,” she adds, a little resentfully. Erica nods. She says they came
without expectations. “It was interesting,” Erica says.
Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist who teaches at Mount Sinai School
of Medicine and was at the event to lend some scientific credibility.
Between each round, she gave a little talk about the science behind each
sense. “The idea is that much of the processing in the brain is going
on unconsciously, dictating the decisions we make,” she tells me later.
“So you can go through each sensory domain and talk about the various
factors making someone attractive.”
The effect of the blindfold is very important, Berlin says. “It takes
away a lot of your power, being able to suss out your environment,” she
says. “So you’re clearing the deck of preconceived judgments, allowing
the person to focus on the sound of a voice, or how a person feels.”
“We’re such visual creatures,” she says. “Of all the senses, taking
away vision is the most disorienting, because its where we get most of
our conscious info. But it forces you to tune into other stimuli. And it
takes away these biases.”
Later, I catch up with Jeff. He did meet one or two people he liked,
he tells me, but didn’t meet anyone. “I got to touch someone’s hand,” he
says.
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