Beginning with mini speeches and ending the evening with a happy hour, Me So Far is a recently initiated dating service that is challenging the Internet as the medium for a modern romance.
The Web most certainly widens the dating pool, but it has also succeeded in disappointing scores of individuals, a feature that is no surprise to social psychologists who only recently stated that dating site initiated algorithms are not scientifically based.
Staying in at home in the evening, searching through online profiles, often feels like the twenty first century equivalent of being solitary in a bar, hoping someone will simply come along and whisk you away.
The initiators of Me So Far are trying to bring together the power of the Internet with the very best of retro dating, with parties for singles so big that they are organized via web sites and live matchmakers who make use of Klout scores to assist in matching couples.
The interest in true face-to-face encounters is also egging along the growth of geo-locating dating apps such as Grindr, Blendr SinglesAroundMe and Skout who try to turn internet dating into something more similar to small-town dating by letting singles meet up through colleagues and friends.
Lakshmi Rengarajan, an expert in advertising, said she founded Me So Far in order for single people similar to herself to do away with automated questioning techniques and form strong dating environments instead.
Me So Far is priced at $20 to $30 an individual and it does not have the same sort of psychological side effects as tick boxing on a dating website.
Thirty-year-old Sushmita Roy, a lawyer, has been trying out possible matches at Singles Party, where all women have to bring a bachelor.
She says she really enjoys the parties far more than any dates she had arranged online and most of the time, girls bring their colleagues from work, so that the pool of possibilities for matching grows.
Amanda Hofman, CEO of Urban Girl Squad, a female networking set up confirms that the organised parties are because of the membership’s desire to seek a date by the use of old-fashioned methods. Every few months, around 200 women and men in their 20’s and 30’s sport name tags and fork out $15 each so they can sip drinks and chat at some pretty sophisticated venues.
