by Eleven hours standing in a park with strangers turns out to be an excellent, unintentional dating filter
A friend dragged me into the Wimbledon queue this year purely for the company, and somewhere around hour seven, sleep deprived and thoroughly done with polite small talk, I made a genuinely useful discovery: nothing reveals a man’s actual character faster than eleven straight hours of enforced proximity in a field.
The Cast Of Characters
There was the man three groups ahead who shared his entire flask of tea with anyone who asked, unprompted, simply because it seemed like the decent thing to do, and there was another, considerably less charming, who spent the entire wait loudly explaining to his own friends why the queue system itself was, in his expert opinion, badly designed.
Guess Which One I Ended Up Talking To For Three Hours
The tea sharer, obviously. There is something genuinely revealing about how a person behaves when mildly bored, mildly tired, and stuck somewhere they cannot easily leave, a far better character test, I would argue, than any curated first date at a nice restaurant where everyone is on their absolute best behaviour.
What Actually Happened Once We Got Inside
We did not, in the end, sit together, different tickets, different seats, but we exchanged numbers before parting ways, and a very promising evening followed several days later that began with strawberries and cream reminiscing and ended considerably later than either of us had originally planned.
A Small Theory I Am Now Testing
My working theory, entirely unscientific, is that any sufficiently long, mildly uncomfortable shared experience, a queue, a delayed train, a rain soaked festival, tells you more about genuine compatibility than months of curated dating app small talk ever could, purely because nobody can maintain a performance for eleven consecutive hours.
Further Reading
For the fuller, less romantic account of what the actual queue experience involves, my earlier notes on London’s summer institutions cover the practical side properly.
Where Things Stand Now
Third date this weekend, an actual restaurant this time rather than a park, which feels like considerably lower stakes after everything the queue already put us through together.
Closing Thought
Skip the apps, find yourself a good long queue instead, apparently. More London romance and unconventional dating theories at my author page on The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
