5 Minutes: The Digital Age Of Dating

Speed dating events, social mixers, and virtual dating during the lockdown are helping people connect with likeminded (or totally different) people all around the world. Is this going to be the big pandemic change for the world of dating?

- Samreen Tungekar

On a random Tuesday, a friend asks me if I’d like to be a part of a global speed dating event, three weeks from said day. I’m a millennial who has watched lots of American content about speed dating, but I’ve hardly heard of it here, in India. Do I want to do this, I wonder. “Oh, come on. It’s a Saturday. What plans could you possibly have?” eye rolls the friend.

So three weeks from then, I was on a Zoom call, attending a global social mixer, organised by senior cyber-security and data privacy consultant Tushar Bansal and tech consultant Prateek Thawani, flatmates and friends in London. They created a Facebook event, and asked their friends to invite who they want to (my friend knew Bansal). This was their second event. The duo’s first edition had 70 people join in, and was called Global Speed Dating. “It was focused on one-on-one dating, where everyone would go on dates, all at once, for five minutes (with a one-minute countdown timer that ticks in the last minute). We also included couples and committed people who are just there for fun, and kept separate activities for them. The edition ended with a new couple in Delhi, keen on meeting after the lockdown, and my second, third-degree connections hanging out till the end of the call, which went on for eight hours. Next day, I saw a huge increase in mutual Instagram connections between my friends,” says Thawani.