It’s a Friday night, and I’m trying to make friends.
I’ve signed up for a ‘fast-friending’ meetup on Eventbrite, billed as a type of speed-dating but for meeting new mates.
Half the group rotate, and you speak to a new person for three minutes before switching.
I leave work early to arrive for the 6pm start time at the bar in Bank.
It’s in the heart of London’s financial district, nestled near St Paul’s Cathedral, HSBC and the headquarters for the Financial Times.
I wonder if I might land, to coin a term, a sugar buddy.
The event begins at 6pm, with the speed-friending segment kicking off half an hour later, and is open to 21-45-year-olds.
As I approach the venue, I see a crowd of people laughing outside a bar – a flash of panic.
I’m hit by the full force of the mingling that lies ahead.
I plough on, through a street of pubs and bars.
Not to be dramatic, but it’s slightly traumatising to walk through crowds of people bubbling away at their after-work drinks, heading to a friend-making social.
The bar has a thin, white, glowing font spelling ‘CORE’.
I approach the bouncer and self-consciously ask about the existence of a speed-friending event.
He has no idea what I’m talking about and is compelled to radio in, before letting me know that I ought to head downstairs.
I dutifully follow a sign saying ‘toilets’ into a dark, windowless basement blaring mid-noughties Jason Derulo.
Numbers down here are patchy, and the bartenders look upon me with pity and confusion.
One said: “Speed-dating normally happens on a Wednesdays.”
After flashing an email receipt and some flurried queries later, I am shown a line of empty tables with just one lone man.
They said: “This is where it’s happening.
“I don’t know where the organisers are.”
There’s a distinct lack of official signage or personages. She clearly thinks the event is a dud.
She adds: “What you do with that information is up to you.”
It’s 6pm and I’m slightly concerned, but having paid the princely sum of £11.55 to be here, I’m not backing out just yet.
The event description promises the perfect place to build genuine and meaningful connections.
So far, I’ve paid over a tenner to walk into a free-entry bar.
I sidle over to the man – Ammar, 23, computer science student – and begin chatting.
Then the event organiser makes an appearance: Ana G, 47, an ex-event manager from Brazil.
She has been running these events for the past year.
In a slight slip, she reveals that she has also been trying to introduce speed-dating to Brazil, where the concept is utterly foreign.
There, in the land of extroverts and sun, the people are amazed at the idea: “What do you mean? We just meet people”.
She stops talking when she realises that she is dissing the entirety of Britain, and more specifically, the people attending this event who – one can only assume – are struggling to “just meet” people.
Numbers do eventually swell past three to around a dozen, and I find that people are from all sorts of backgrounds, and are here for different reasons.
Ammar is studying at an online university, rendering his social life essentially nonexistent.
Ewena, 31, works from home all week and is pushing herself to be more sociable.
Farras, a Syrian refugee working in Germany, is here because his flight back to Heathrow was cancelled and he needed something to do for the evening.
Then there is 25-year-old Favour, a bubbly recruiter, who simply jokes that his reason is “loneliness”.
Daisy finds the surface-level chatter at her accounting firm exhausting and wishes she could dive deeper into topics people are passionate about.
The problem, she surmises, is that accountants are not passionate about anything.
She said: “They [accountants] are very boring people.”
We natter on and I privately wonder when Ana G will begin the speed-friending segment of the evening.
I had been looking forward to the novelty of three-minute camaraderie blasts.
Nothing of this sort ever happens, and I’m forced to admit that, quelle surprise, the Eventbrite description was not entirely accurate.
Ana G has no intention of imposing order, and so the evening spools into unstructured open water.
The relentless beats pumping out of the underground speakers make conversation rather shouty, and so I, along with two others, form a splinter group and head upstairs and out into the fresh air.
We all, immediately, feel rejuvenated and the dank basement vibes have evaporated into the open air of central London on a Friday night.
One of my companions, 25-year-old Favour, who had been busily insisting that he is a complete introvert and very shy, launches the idea of approaching one of the groups outside the bar.
The other woman and I make panicked eye contact.
She is a genuine introvert who feels she’s already made a massive leap in showing up to this event in the first place.
Favour heads over, and I don’t catch what he’s saying because I’m too busy being mortified.
The group we end up melding with is a bunch of IT technicians from US financial paper Bloomberg.
When we discover that one bespectacled member called Ben has learned both Korean and German for two different ex-girlfriends.
I feel the night has devolved quite drastically since my early forages into the evils of accounting.
The conversation bounces between Istanbul, loofahs, Jacqueline Wilson and whether the moon landings really happened.
The rest of the group eventually joins us outside and I realise with a start that I am now part of the laughing crowds, out for drinks on a Friday night.
The good thing, it turns out, about artificial friend-making events is that they force you to go outside and do something.
You can meet lots of different people very quickly, and, who knows, perhaps walk off with a couple of new Instagrams and a number.
Feature image: Leah Renz
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