Jared Nissim wanted to make one thing clear. ”This is definitely not a dating service,” the 32-year-old New Yorker explained, as a motley group of 18 men and women, many unknown to each other, gathered around a long table at a Manhattan restaurant.
”If I ran this as a dating service, you’d just get a bunch of guys trolling for women. And then the women wouldn’t show up, because they’d know it was just a bunch of guys trolling for them. So eventually there’d be no women to troll for. And at that point,” he concluded, with unarguable logic, ”even the guys wouldn’t show up.”
Exactly the opposite has happened with the Lunch Club, the organisation Nissim founded in 2001 to combat his isolation as a bachelor living alone and working from home in New York. He wasn’t looking for romance, just for friends, so he posted a speculative message on Craig’s List, the website millions of Americans use to arrange everything from apartment rentals to random sexual encounters. Did anyone, he inquired, want to join him for lunch?
Surprisingly, perhaps, three people did. More surprisingly, the Lunch Club (slogan: ”Because eating alone is boring”) now has 8 000 members in New York, and later this month its London branch will hold its inaugural meeting.
”I’m just trying to do something about the unnatural way we seem to live in big cities,” Nissim said, aggressively sprinkling parmesan cheese on his side salad. He was inspired, he went on, by the communal dining hall at the kibbutz where he stayed as a child, and the sense of belonging it fostered. ”If you have a good circle of friends, the rest is going to follow. You’re going to get dates. You’re going to hear about job opportunities. All that stuff will follow.”
Nissim is living proof of his theory: he met his girlfriend at a Lunch Club event, and running it has become his full-time job. The fortnightly lunches don’t bring him any income, but these days lunch is only a small part of the operation: the website advertises many other events, for which Nissim charges an admission fee. There are chocolate tastings, sushi-making classes, games nights, museum trips, and (to give one of next month’s examples) a day touring locations from the cult movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
His most publicised creation so far is speed friending, a platonic version of speed dating, in which participants switch conversation partners every five minutes, all evening, in an effort to find someone with whom they click. ”That means girls can talk to girls, guys can talk to guys, girls talk to guys, and guys can even talk back to the girls,” Nissim explains, as if the notion were somehow revolutionary.
And perhaps it is. The club’s explicitly non-romantic focus seems to have tapped a rich seam of urban discontent, as if thousands of people had been waiting for it. It has been some years now since the internet eliminated the taboo against dating agencies, but an air of faint embarrassment still lingered when it came to using the web to make friends. Finding the love of your life is one thing — but what do you mean, you need a website to find people to hang out with?
In fact, not one of the attendees at the lunch demonstrated any strange tics, social maladjustments, mumbling voices or relentlessly obsessive interests in quantum physics or trains.
”I just got sooo sick of things like speed dating,” said Sharon, a school librarian from the Bronx, before going on to relate an internet-dating horror story of such nightmarishness that she instantly declared it off the record.
”I live across the street so I thought, why not?” said Marilyn Blitz, a doctor’s assistant looking for a new job.
”I’ve been coming since the third or fourth meal,” said Dave Grossman, a marketing consultant. ”We did get a few crazy people the first time,” he added. ”There was a woman who tried to leave, like, a quarter as a tip.”
”What are you saying?” Nissim called across from several seats away.
”I was telling him about that crazy lady,” Grossman said.
”Great,” Nissim replied. ”People are going to think we’re all crazy.”
They certainly aren’t. But just because the idea attracts well-adjusted New Yorkers, that doesn’t mean it will attract well-adjusted Londoners. Americans are much better than Britons at the crucial first few seconds of a social encounter; Brits, even if just as friendly underneath, seem to prefer awkward silence. At the time of writing, the London launch, scheduled for Sunday April 23, had just two people signed up — both American expats.
Back in Manhattan, the end of the meal meant it was time to invoke one of the club’s rules: pay for what you ate. Splitting the bill evenly causes tension, Nissim said, leaving those who ate cheaper dishes feeling hard done by.
A stack of dollars quickly grew. And then, just 80 minutes after arriving, all 18 participants hurriedly dispersed, back to their busy lives — swallowed up into the anonymity of the city, but feeling, perhaps, a little less anonymous than before. – Guardian Unlimited Â