I've had friends--and friends of friends--fix me up. I've placed personal ads in the New York Review of Books. I've tried speed dating. I've posted on Match.com, Matchmaker, EHarmony, Yahoo, Salon, JDate, the Right Stuff and Science Connection. Countless inter- views and auditions for emotional compatibility, intellectual sparks and physical chemistry--things that are supposed to happen naturally--make you feel as if you've given a pint of blood. And that's no way to meet someone.Recently, a friend and I were catching up over dinner at the Medusa Lounge. The bar started filling up, but not with the young hipsters we were expecting. These were people our age--in their 40s--and older. A guy in a brocade jacket and a fez with a blinking light on top darted around introducing people, though many seemed to know each other. It was obviously a singles thing. But not like any I'd ever seen.
Meetup.com: Just don't call it dating
We were witnessing a confab of Dive Bar Adventures Inc. and the Los Angeles Baby Boomers Social Network. We had stumbled on a Meetup.
Blinking Fez Man handed out playing cards to get newcomers mingling. First one with a royal flush gets a free drink! The thing smacked of bonhomie, not desperation. I hadn't seen so many single men my age in the same place since college. Could this be my ticket out of EHarmony?
Meetup.com was started in 2002 by dot-commer Scott Heiferman in an effort to revive face-to-face socializing. In 2004, Howard Dean supporters used Meetups as a powerful campaign tool. The site now has 3 million members in more than 130 countries. Some 43,000 groups cover 3,500 interests, political and personal.
Logging on for the first time is like finding Atlantis. There are clubs for every cause you can name and some you can't (acrobatic yoga or Dumpster diving, anyone?). Nearly 2,000 exist within a 25-mile radius of L.A.; new ones pop up daily. Drinking and hiking Meetups are the most popular.
Finally, I did it. I went to a Meetup. At a cafe around the corner, the Los Angeles French Language Meetup was having a Sunday brunch. Easy enough: If I hated it, I could walk home.
The dozen attendees, most in their 20s and 30s, were a friendly mix of native speakers and beginners. We took over a couch-lined alcove; those with similar fluency found each other naturally. I ended up next to Charlie Keenan, a 43-year-old financial writer with whom I shared a lively, wide-ranging, two-hour-long gabfest. He mentioned a girlfriend, but so what? I was having a blast jabbering in French.
