Ready, set, go: Lights are low and Amante is full of speed daters acting like junior high never ended. Welcome, singles, to Hurry Date – your fun, fast and furious four-minute chance at love, or at least a legitimate hook-up. Kaye and Chris are a couple of web designer friends here on the buddy system. And me? I’m just here to watch.

Kaye, with one of these under her belt already, breaks it down for us: With a “black book” scorecard in hand, each date’s code numbers are listed in order next to columns of Ys and Ns for affirmative and negative responses. The data is compiled at the end of the session, and the Yeses are matched up via email.

Chris seems shaken: "You take notes while they’re sitting there, talking? That sounds so...harsh." I think it sounds like dating Battleship. Our quick tutorial ends with the trill of a whistle.

The hostess, vivacious-in-a-tired-way in a headset and lots of eye-catching sequins, sets the rules – a little too fast for some, based on the faces of the men in the room, a few of whom seem to have taken liberties with the fact that ages aren’t checked. "Is he really under 35?" Kaye asks, nodding discreetly at the man who looks prematurely aged by time spent in a cubicle.

Has anyone here mentioned that Amante means ‘lover’ in Italian? More specifically, Amante translates as the person with whom you're sleeping who is not your spouse. Ah, romance.

Our hostess blows the whistle again and there's a frantic dash as the parted seas of men and women coalesce, straining to find the code numbers of their dates. A few look lost, then realize they haven’t been matched. One of the men takes this opportunity to come speak to a member of the non-paying party: Me.

"I saw this woman come in before this started. She looked around for, like, 30 seconds, and left. I mean, you could almost see the look on her face: 'This is my dating pool?' How shallow."

He wonders whether it's true, that women do 80% of the talking.
Looking around the room, it’s a good give-and-take – animated laughter, big smiles. Body language counts: wild gesticulators stand out against the frozen-stiffs. A compulsive hair twirler is at it like a dervish; someone knocks over a cocktail. Choice of drinks is overwhelmingly something served in a martini glass: hard liquor for hard work.

The whistle signals the next dating set, and my pessimistic fellow downs the rest of his drink. "Well, gotta go. See you in a few dates." He makes straight for Kaye.

  “You Can't Hurry Love” breaks cheerily out of the speakers as Chris sits down with a cute girl with a seriously infectious smile and a flip of dark hair. Kaye has a salary man. It’s all very National Geographic: One cannot prevent the tiger from taking its prey. Still, I want to intervene, to tell the girl who smiles too hard to drop her shoulders, to tell most of the men to untuck their shirts, to slap the hand of the hair-twirler.

On the big screen TV, Kobe Bryant is making shot after shot. Another unmatched guy chats me up as he waits for the bartender. “I’m really just doing this as a favor to my friend, who’s watching to see if he wants to do this. You should do this, y’know, as a lark.”

At date ten, Kaye bursts out laughing: "I think I've met you before!" U2's “With or Without You” is blaring. Someone should do something about this. Then it hits me: Most of these women are really quite attractive. Actually, they all are. With a few exceptions (Chris, a tall guy with glasses in a striped Thomas Pink shirt), all the men in the room seem like a cross-section of marketing and sales departments in the Financial District. This is confirmed by Kaye. By the end of the night I’ve been offered business cards, Kaye is optimistic, and Chris looks vaguely traumatized. I think I’m just going to stick to Myspace.

Nicole Harvey is a major overthinker who used to run a nonprofit, but now just works for one. She spends her time making, taking and writing about pictures, and not admitting her involvement with a band called the Screws. See also: thenicoleharvey.blogspot.com.