What happens when Young Democrats meet up with Young Republicans in a bar — by design? With seven minutes to size each other up? New Haven may have a new tradition on its hands.
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Thursday night at the Blue Pearl. The martinis are ordered. The lights are dimmed; the music pulses. The scent of chocolate fondue curls in the charged air. The women are seated upright, checklists turned discreetly face-down on the table next to their drinks.
The clock strikes seven, a bell rings, and they’re off. The men disperse, taking the nearest seat, and the women put out her hands as their eyes scan the man’s nametag.
“Hello.”
“Hi.”
This is seven-minute dating. It is nothing new; it’s been bringing single people together, seven minutes at a time, for years now. But on March 9, it was done with a twist. This was seven-minute dating with a political undertone, brought to you by the Greater New Haven Young Democrats, or more specifically, by GNHYD president Jacqueline Kozin.
“I had done this before, like, years ago,” said Kozin, who had been coerced to a seven-minute dating event by a friend who didn’t want to go by herself. “That’s kinda how the idea came about.”
But instead of just inviting those on the Young Dems’ email list, Kozin, a thirty-something year old political campaigner with a saucy wit, decided to mix it up a little. So she invited some young Republicans.
“Ideologically, you kind of know where people are already. We wanted to get a little racy and get the Republicans involved.”
To do this, Kozin got the names from state Young Republican groups and young Republicans at Yale. The emailed invitation read “Get social. Get political. Get lucky.”
Seated at one of the Blue Pearl’s white tables before the event, Kozin filled out the stick-on name tags by hand from her list of sign-ups. First names, last initials, but no blue Ds or red Rs.
“We don’t want them to have a scarlet letter,” she said. As of sign-up time, Kozin and Eric Newell, GNHYD secretary and webmaster, were unaware of the daters’ affiliations. Some of New Haven’s young Democrats were not exactly sold on the idea. “Why would you want to date a Republican?” one of them responded in an email.
Half an hour before the dating was set to commence, the singles began lining up in the Blue Pearl’s hallway. Kozin and Newell signed them in, handed them their checklists, and asked their political affiliations. Most were Democrats. In all, there would be 30 daters, with one extra male; he would have to sit out the first round. Dating would go from 7 to 8 p.m.; this meant that not everyone would get the chance to talk to everyone else. That could be done later, over drinks during the post-dating mixer.
Kozin rang a bell, and the dating began. Practically everyone seemed at ease. That could have been thanks to the drinks, which were provided at a dollar off by the Blue Pearl. Soon the place was loud as a party, and seven minutes didn’t seem like an eternity after all. When the bell rang again, each dater had a few seconds to decide whether they were interested in a relationship based on “friends,” “business,” or “dating.”
“Then if they’re both interested,” explained Kozin, “we send their email addresses to each other. But only if it’s a match.”
From an onlooker’s point of view, seven-minute dating looked like a game of musical chairs in which only the men got up to move, and only as far as the next seat. (“The guys come to you, as it should be,” said Kozin, explaining the protocol to a woman during sign-up.) The seats at the Blue Pearl were close enough that one could overhear the next date’s spiel before it happened, a circumstance which had the potential to be mildly damaging. How to get around it?
“You gotta drown out the person next to you,” said Jeff Ludwig, a handsome 26-year-old in rectangular glasses and a dress shirt, who drove down from Hartford with his buddy Evan.
Had he done seven-minute dating before?
“Negative.”
Would he do it again?
“Yes.”
Is it possible to get to know someone in seven minutes? No, he said, but it is sufficient time to warrant a check in the right category.
Because the men were the ones on the move, they kept their checklists folded up in their back pockets. The women kept theirs out on the table. Between dates they quickly checked off their preference, then turned the checklists over before next guy sat down. The guys were clearly at a disadvantage, having no time for check-marking between dates.
“I didn’t actually write down any check marks until the end,” said Alexander Clark, 24, a recent Yale grad who lives and works in New Haven. “I didn’t have a stationary table on which to write. [But] I think I remember the names of the people I wanted to remember.”
The only firm Republican among the daters, Clark is from Mississippi — “a red state. But I’m not, like, crazy red.”
Clark used his minority status as a conversation starter. “Everyone I spoke with was either middle-of-the-road or liberal.” As for him, he said, “I’m one of those fiscally conservative and socially liberal ones. I’m what a Republican used to be.”
Talk of politics did not dominate the dating; in fact, for most of the daters, it rarely came up. Conversation instead stuck to “where I live, what I do — that’s usually a good icebreaker,” said Jeff Ludwig. While most of the conversations were just social, Ludwig said, some have clearly “romantic overtones.” Asked whether he experienced any such overtones tonight, he answered “not much.” At the same time, he said, “there was nobody that was really a dud.”
By 8:30, the “dating” was over. Everyone was up and mixing now, drinks in hand. It was a lively scene; the ice had been broken, melted in fact, by what was now the second or third cocktail. Everyone now knew just enough about the other to have something to talk about. At the bar, Jacqueline Kozin assessed the night’s success. “Thirty people signed up, which was double what we’d anticipated. That alone made it a success. And you could tell by body language that there were intimate conversations going on — they were really connected.”
A connection was clearly the case for two of the daters, who remained seated in a tête à tête at a table in the back. Looked like his checks have matched her checks. No emailing necessary; these two seemed well on their way to going off-line tonight.
