You can hurry love

Man on a mission Jonathan Steel has three minutes to discover whether the person he’s with is the partner of his dreams or the stuff of nightmares

How easily can able-bodied and disabled people get to meet? I recently decided to conduct an experiment in speed-dating, to see how I as a wheelchair-user would be received in this largely able-bodied setting.

Speed-dating events bring together random groups of men and women, often in a bar, to engage in a series of mini-dates each date lasting three minutes.

These events are often arranged through internet dating services and categorised by age, sexual orientation and cultural and ethnic background, e.g. Asian singles, Christian singles, etc.

The event I booked myself on was for older men and younger women, organised by an agency called Speed­Dater.com. Not that I was especially aiming for a younger date: it was just the only event in my age range that was being held in a wheelchair-accessible venue.

I arrived at a stylish bar called Stanza, on the edge of Soho in central London, and was greeted by the manager. I’d emailed him a few weeks before to check the wheelchair access and was pleased to find they’d a ramp and lift up to the bar.

In the inviting ambience of soft lighting and plush-red furnishings, I nursed my drink at a table and took in the mellow mood music. I’d anticipated some embarrassment at my being the only wheelchair-user but no-one was noticeably fazed. I realised pretty soon that, disabled or not, each one of us was in the same boat. We were engaged in a formal process, contrived and artificial, like a dating round-robin. We were to face complete strangers with only remote odds on compatible coupling.

Our host, an Australian, gave the daters numbered name-badge score cards, sat the men at numbered tables and ushered the women along to the next date after the three-minute time limit. We all wrote the names of our dates on the score cards and afterwards gave them a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, like a Roman emperor deciding whether to throw Christians to the lions.

I don’t know how many of my eleven dates gave me the thumbs-up but the ones I approved of either lived too far away or didn’t speak good enough English. I also made a horrendous faux pas when I asked a girl from Georgia which part of Russia she was from. She gave me a look of thunder, saying through gritted teeth, “We hate the Russians!”

Most of the male daters seemed to be British but all the women were from abroad and not all were seeking a partner.

The origins of speed dating (American of course) can be traced to a Rabbi Yaacov Deyo in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, in an attempt to help Jewish couples meet and marry. In that case there would have been a greater chance of cultural compatibility within the group. The event I took part in was more diverse; the daters coming from the most distant reaches of Greater London. Because it was an integral part of a commercial dating site, one could only contact the more promising dates by sending them a message via the site.

Would I recommend speed dating for disabled people? As a forty-something male, my biological clock made me an outsider in the dating game but in spite of that, my experience was more positive than I’d expected and I was treated with courtesy by the participants and hosts.

It does however require a certain courage to take oneself out of one’s comfort zone and confront the able-bodied world in a setting predicated on sexual attraction and romantic compatibility.

Perhaps I wasn’t being totally realistic in thinking I could convey an attractive impression from my wheelchair. My capacity for body language was limited and I didn’t have the advantage of height that makes men desirable. But I think I took a major step towards increasing the visibility of disabled people and challenging the taboo of disability and dating.