God bless the meatpacking district!

Last night, I went out to dinner with some family friends at a trendy restaurant in Baltimore. As we waited for our table, I noticed a beautiful woman eating by herself at the other end of the bar. We made eye contact and smiled at one another. She was holding a wine glass in her left hand and there was no ring on her third finger. Immediately, I had obtained several pieces of useful information:
1. She did not have a dining companion that night.
2. She was obstensibly single.
3. She had enough self-confidence to go out to eat by herself–not something many people do when not out of town.
4. She was dark-haired, with big dark eyes and a great smile: superficially, just my type.

So why didn’t I go over and talk to her? If we want to assign some blame to the restaurant, we can say that she sitting at exactly the opposite end of an L-shaped bar, about twenty-five feet from me, and there was no share/space next to her to stand. But that wasn’t why I really didn’t go over to talk to her. I didn’t go over to talk to her because I was a fucking pussy. Instead, I finished my drink, then sat down at my table and spent the next thirty minutes stealing glances at the back of her head during pauses in the conversation.

I regretted my decision and of course blamed my own timidity, but being human, I’m looking for ways to diffuse the responsibility, and this post gave me pause for thought. Your search for ways that bars should make it easier for us to meet other people reflects less about the bars than about ourselves: As you so rightly point out, bars have remained essentially the same in design and format over the centuries. What has changed is the mindset of the people who frequent them. We are afraid of going out and doing the hard work of meeting people that we somehow used to be so good at.

What is to blame for the change? The obvious culprit is the internet. Much as I enjoy perusing Facebook, it has gotten me in trouble a number of times when I know more about a relative stranger who happened to catch my eye than I have any right to know. (The irony, of course, is that in reality I actually know much less about this person than I think I do.) Having all this information at our fingertips prevents us from having to go over to that beautiful stranger at the other end of the bar, finding out what kinds of movies she likes, what she does for a living, whether she likes the city or the country, the oceans or the mountains, and so forth. Because as anyone who has ever been involved in someone who has different tastes than themselves can attest, what makes this person interesting is not what she answers when asked what her favorite movie is, but the way she answers it. People like people because of the way they behave like people–in quirky, unpredictable, charmingly human ways. (Humor, sarcasm, and wit on Facebook profiles are slightly different–how people present themselves (their ‘online social selves’) to the Internet audience is a fascinating subject that would make good fodder for a post of its own.) That we go out to bars and then sit in the corner talking to the same four people we came with while eying that cute blond girl the next table over doing exactly the same thing with her friends is probably less the fault of the bar than our own timidity.

So while all of the improvements you propose are good at aiming to overcome our fear of breaking out and meeting new people (and the bars that I like the best are those that implement some of version of these), ultimately the final impulse to go out and meet people has to be our own. Don’t go to bars with the same three friends every weekend. Don’t go to crowded bars where you can’t hear yourself speak, but instead go to places with character that in turn draw people with interesting character. Excuse yourself from your dinner companions for a few minutes and introduce yourself to that beautiful stranger at the bar. Worst case scenario, she doesn’t have a ring because her fiancé is flying into town to propose tomorrow. But you got up and went over–that’s the hard part, the fear or rejection is far worse than rejection itself–and assuming your dinner companions aren’t totally boors, they won’t begrudge you having left for a moment nor make fun of your failure to get her number. Now you know how easy it is to do it again. And best case scenario, you both met a hottie and enjoyed a dinner with your friends, all in the space of an hour. How’s that for multitasking?

The final innovation you mention–and the most successful by far–is that bars provide activities that promote social interaction. After all, this is how people have been meeting others, in and out of bars, throughout history: at work, in history seminar, playing frisbee in the park, in woolly mammoth-hunting parties. Of course, even if karaoke or square-dancing lessons are on offer someplace, the hardest part is picking up the mike or putting on your cowboys boots and hitting the dance floor. And the one thing that you mention as actually having worked in the past–wearing a name tag–is something you decided to do because you get fed up and took the initiative to try something new.

As for me, I’m taking the small step of posting a missed connection on Craigslist. I’ll post a link to this blog.