Throw Money at the Problem

Let’s recap all the “low-cost” options of seeking a woman for a relationship:

• Friends of Friends, Family, Co-workers, People I Know
• Bars, Social Clubs, Parties
• Flirting, Random Encounter
• Online Dating
• Singles’ Parties, Mingles, Ladies’ Nights
• Adult Education Classes
• Dance Classes, Cooking Classes, etc.
• Speed Dating

So what to do next?  We’ve exhausted low-cost (or seemingly low-cost) options.  Let’s take some serious action!  The kind that my company would do when faced with a major problem!…

Part 6: Throwing money at the problem:

Adventure Clubs/Groups

Lunch Clubs/Groups

Dinner Clubs/Groups

You’ve seen their ads on local tv, radio, and magazines/newspapers/internet in the “Going On Around Town” section which you read when looking for another new place to meet that elusive woman. They cost $1500 – $5000 per year.  No, not the woman—the clubs!

Adventure Clubs, Lunch Clubs, and Dinner Clubs come in many forms.  Many of them, are cross-purpose.  Some offer a “Just For Two” option when the people in the office see a pair they think would be a great match.

I have been a member of these for over 10 years.  I will share my and other clients’ experiences, men and women.

Adventure Clubs

Adventure Clubs focus off of dating.  Why?  They know their dating product (Dinner or Lunch) isn’t getting people connected, so it’s the “low-pressure” approach.  Put 20 people together in a bus to go skiing, wine tasting, hiking, kayaking, etc. for the day.  Afterwards, people can put on their feedback forms people they would like to meet again.  People do get together and form friendships for the thing they’re into.  And the commonality of an important interest helps in making chemistry happen.  But the costs of the adventures is usually over and above the annual membership fees.

Dinner Clubs

Dinner Clubs set a group of “like” people together for dinner.  They promise sociological and psychological reasons for the number of people they place at a table.  They claim to match people together based on a collected set of common interests for maximum matching.  Mathematically, it sounds good: loose-packing, and let the atoms form molecules as they desire.  These evenings can be expensive.  Dinner, drinks (oh, you’ll need them, unless you find dining with 5 or 7 total strangers and being evaluated and having to be “personality switched-on” all night to be easy!), and probably parking.  As you arrive, you collect in the bar and then when your table is called, you go to be seated.  Often there are rules for seating, based on the shape of the table: alternate men/women for round tables, opposite or alternating for square/rectangular tables.  The restaurants may provide a house wine at the beginning to get things going.  But you will already know before you sit down if you’re interested in any of the ladies.  And the other guys?  Always in the way.   Here’s who they are:

• He’s trying to impress everyone, and pisses everyone off
• He talks about all the people he’s met (and became just friends, which is why he joined: all the women he knows throw him in the just friends category.)
• He tries to set himself as the big man on campus.  (Loser: he’s the big man in a group of people who aren’t meeting loving lives. )
• He’s probably a player
• He’s sweeping the first woman in two years you’ve met at one of these events you like right away into what he claims is his personal jet.  Bastard! Well, maybe by the time the holiday party comes, they’ll have broken up and you’ll see her again.
• Downer dude

And the women you’ll meet may include:

• Angry woman
• Multi-level marketer
• Cougar
• HR/Recruiter, looking to hire people and get a finder fee
• The person who is allergic to everything and uses only organic electricity when aligned with the planetoids in her astro-chart.  (My feedback card on this one said: “I’ve changed my first requirement [no smokers]. Now, it is women who shave their legs and armpits.”)

Here are tips I’ve learned from being in these clubs for 10 years:

• Arrive at least 30 minutes early, to survey the ladies from the other table, while people arrive and meet at the bar while waiting to be places/seated
• Be brutally honest in the feedback form about the people.  The likelihood the notes will be used for future matchings is small, but it will get it off your chest and you can go to sleep that night, and copy/paste it to email to your married friends who use your singleness as entertainment.
• Do not leave early.  People who skip out while going from the bar to the dinner table are either kicked out with no refund, or have a reputation that spreads across every table like spilled olive oil for the next year. Don’t be that loser.
• The conversations always begin with:
  • How long have you been a member?
    • This is a no-win, unless you are new.  If you have been a member a long time, people will ask you about people they like, or wonder why you haven’t met anyone inside or outside the club.
  • Why did you join?
    • Give your canned answer from eHarmony
  • How much did you pay?
    • Interesting!  More on this below
  • Have you met anyone?
    • Often asked by newbies who managed to get a lower-cost trial period
  • Any interesting stories (gossip)?
    • This is a disguised question.  It really is: “Why haven’t you connected with any of the other women here who seem to be like me?  Are you a loser?  Or am I going to be known as the woman who connected with that guy ?”

Why do these agencies seem to not match you to people who match you?

• They do not have enough clients
• They are providing business to the restaurant, probably getting a kickback
• They need to set up new members on lots of dates quickly.  If they are wowed by the attention from the main office, they tell their friends to join and get a discount… on their next year’s renewal! (Cynical question revisited: why would you need this?)

Longer-term members do not get placed much.  You need to demand it.  Why?  You’ve met all the people.  Someone who is a long-term client who has not met anyone knows too much about the organization, their lack of effectiveness, and gossip about people.  All are bad for business.  But the experienced ones will get calls like these, usually on short notice:

A common hook is the one-to-one pairing.  I’ve never had one.  I’ve been stood up on all, except one, which I don’t know if I can count.

I sat at the bar of a restaurant around the corner from my house, waiting for (let’s call her) Mary.  I received a text message from a buddy back home in New York that the woman who was my best friend in High School, and first kiss, passed away from a medical mystery which kept her in the hospital for 2 years.  The bartender gave me a free drink.  I thanked her.

Then, Mary comes to the hostess stand.  I recognize that it must be she because of the physical description.  “Hmmm… surprisingly accurate!  She really is slender,” I admire as I sit and wait for her.

She races to me.  She says, “Do you remember me?”

“Remember?”  I don’t think we’ve met.  We’re here to be introduced by—“

“From the Christmas Party in —-, you said…”

I didn’t listen to this, because during that year’s Christmas Party, I was recovering from a crumbled vertebra.  Party time meant showering without my mother’s assistance as I combated cancer, shingles, pinkeye, and fainting spells from withdrawal from the pain medication.  “I’m sorry, but—“

“Well, I just accepted this date because I wanted to tell you that you’re a jerk!”

She turned and strutted out harrumphing.

The bartender, who knew about me and my back, handed me another free drink.

Next to me, assembling at the bar, were people for a Dinner Club– the same Dinner Club! They all came up and asked what happened. You would think that this would be bad press for the Club.   And the woman would be strongly reprimanded.

No.  I was given, three weeks later, the reason (not apology) that Mary had had a bad day.  That was my last event with them.

Not to be a total neg-head, I did meet a wonderful lady through a Dinner Club.  There were two week’s of Valentine Free-for-All’s.  At the first, I found no-one, especially after the lady I was talking to heard her favorite party song and leapt on the table and started dancing like someone half her age and double her BAC.  She got down and asked me for another drink.  I balked, and walked.  The next week, she was at the after-Valentine Day mixer whispering in the halls and walls about me.  I got many “Are you the guy who didn’t buy so-and-so a drink?  Shame on you!”  This sucked, so I went to the bar to plan my next course of action: leave, or… leave.

At the bar was a blonde slumped over her glass.  Or sniffing it.

“What’s good on the wine list?” I asked

“Whatever’s in my glass,” she purred.  “This event is awful.  A bunch of gossips caterwauling about a guy who didn’t buy some floozy a drink after she burlesqued her lack of dignity on a tabletop.”  She gulped.  “I think it’s chardonnay.  Too cheap to tell.  The wine, that is, not me.”

This woman had a sense of humor!  I offered her a refill, to talk a bit.

“Sorry, gotta go.  Kitty needs her shots.”

I’ve heard that one before.

She gave me her card.  I called it because she had the best wit I ever heard.  Sucker.

She was happy to hear from me.  And her cat really did have diabetes and required shots at every meal and nighttime.  We dated for almost 9 months.  A wonderful relationship.  Which, her friends ruined by implanting jealousies into her head.  Soon, the end.

Observations:

• A relationship can fail at any time for any reason you don’t know or understand.
• She had also been on eHarmony.  We were matched.  I passed on her because her pictures were all Renaissance Faire stuff.  I didn’t want to date someone who would remind me of the horror of Freshman Year, where everyone runs around campus with an awful fake English accent reciting Monty Python and the Holy Grail lines to everything from “What pizza to get?” to “What is the integral of arcsin(x)?”
• She had been a member of the Dinner Club for a year.  Why hadn’t we been paired or seated together as a one-to-one or a dinner grouping?

Specific drawbacks of Dinner Clubs are:  they take all evening, they are event-costly, and you can spend a long time eating with someone/people you do not like

Lunch Clubs

Lunch Clubs evolved because dinners are expensive.  They may be one-on-one, or a group of four or six.  They are a shorter time period.  Less loss if you don’t get along.  Lower cost for the meals.  Less sense of having to smile politely to the boor across the table with you until you can finish eating and escape.  The most nationally-known lunch club, It’s Just Lunch, has been sued repeatedly for lack of honesty.  I know three people who’ve sued for lunch club memberships money returned.  All won.  Here is one case…

She has a PhD in the medical research field.  Sharpest wit and sense of humor this side of Dangerfield’s New York.  Shy and sweet, she is like the sister I never had.  Having been a student, post-doc, and professor for most of her adult life, she has little off-campus contacts.  She moved to a new area of the state, and wanted to begin dating.  She joined IJL.

She met and did not click with many men.  But, she continued to try.  She was paired with a man who was in the restaurant food delivery business, job description: “Regional Executive Manager for Perishables Preparations and Delivery.”  She assumed it meant he was involved with getting food from the farms, meat-packer, canneries, etc. to restaurants and supermarkets.  She inquired while on the date with him.

No.  He was a drive-thru operator.  With a criminal record for dealing drugs through such windows. He offered to take her to his place.  Not his apartment, but his drive-thru window, for lunch.

Another friend sued a Lunch Club because the women were not members.  They were paid escorts to meet the men.  He knew something was too good to be true because the women were too attractive to need to pay $2500/year for lunch dates.  The company did not have enough “interesting” women to keep men coming and refer the company to their friends.  So, they “outsourced.”  The in-person version of fake profiles.

What do all the Clubs (Adventure, Dinner, Lunch) have in common?

• They do not tell you their membership costs up-front.
• They will not share their member demographic data with you, citing privacy.  Is privacy broken to say “Yes, you’re suspicions are correct.  Only 35% of our members are women, and of those, most are more than 5 years older than you. The ones near your age or younger are all 40 miles away from you, and their interests call you GUD [geographically undesirable].”
• They cater to newbies
• Their annual fees are thousands of dollars.  Dinner Clubs can be over $4000/year.
• You negotiate your annual fee at your “interview.”  It can go up or down by $2500 based on which local office you join.  Women tend to pay less.  Problem is:
  • It’s illegal
  • By the time you found out women pay less (reason: the office hasn’t any women members) your membership check is already cashed
  • Screening-out is rarely done.  Have you heard of someone screened out of a Club?  It would make the news!  Sexism.  Racism.  Prejudices against religion, physique, political views, etc.  Remember the ruckus caused when Chemistry.com used eHarmony’s inability to create same-sex matching?

Some Clubs have “bring a friend” parties.  If you bring a friend, you get in for free (otherwise, a $20 – $40 fee).  What I’ve noticed is that the one I like is always the non-member.  Why?  Simple: Attractive women do not need to spend $3000-$5000 /year to meet men.  So, when you spend $3000-$5000/year, you won’t meet the woman you want there.

Summary of Adventure, Dinner, and Lunch Clubs

Lunch, Dinner, and Adventure Clubs all ask you for a lot of money, and your trust that they do indeed have many people you would want to meet, meet you, and connect with.  At least Russian Bride sites show pictures of women.  Are they real?  You wonder.  But you aren’t up to that yet.  So, should you spend thousands to meet a securely hidden trove of special ladies who are single, waiting to meet you, fascinating and charming, local, and hungry?

Benefit: You find out about places in your area for dating, trips, etc.

Cost:  Membership: Thousands of dollars per year.  Dinners/Lunches: pay per chew.  Special events (holiday parties, etc.) about $100 each.

Cost/Benefit Analysis:  Your time is worth much more than you’re spending.  This is a double-lose.  You’re digging for gold in an iron pyrite pile.

But, you’re desperate!   That High School Reunion, friend’s wedding, or whatever is coming.  Or you haven’t had a date, or sex, in too long!  What to do?

Rent-a-Puppy! That lovely stranger will love rubbing noses and being pawed, but not by you

That’s crazy.  You wonder if you need help.  Professional Help.