Girls who want boys who want girls

Remember "Screw Your Roommate?"

Of course you do. It's a freshman year milestone. And if you don't remember the actual dance, you no doubt recall the phone tag, the facebook, the "he said," the "she said," the flower guy, the stupid meeting places, the butterflies, the hurried alcohol consumption, and maybe even "Like a Prayer." You won't soon forget the restless pacing back and forth as your ears burned hot in the brisk fall air, or the lump that rose in your throat every time a person walked by the spot where your date was supposed to stand.

Maybe you planted the seeds of a long-term relationship that night. Maybe your roommate called his date a whore and passed out in the Commons bathroom. Either way, you learned what it feels like to play matchmaker. But have you ever set up two people you've never even seen before? Have you ever given them enough money to buy 25 cappucinos (if be their wont) and sent them off naked like Adam and Eve into the romantic unknown?

Have you ever felt like a god?

You see, this is it. The Herald did it: three dates, six willing participants chosen out of a pool of 18 and matched up based on e-mail responses, 12 no-holds-barred interviews. The names have all been changed to protect the participants. It was a wild week, and here's how it went.

Flapjacks in bed

ANATOMY OF A DATE: Patrick and Michelle meet at the Phelps Gate, as our fearless reporter looks on. On the Vanderbilt roof, one of Patrick's friends surfaces in the moonlight with flowers, while another friend serenades Mr. and Mrs. Destiny with some saxified "Sexual Healing" as they gaze out at Old Campus.

Couple number one. I introduced them at Phelps Gate on the night of Sat., Jan. 31.

Johnny, a sophomore of medium height, thin, dark, Asian, and brown-eyed, plays in a pop band and drinks a lot of water. He wears French Connection and carries his books in a shopping bag. How will you attire yourself this evening, Johnny? "Smart-casual, with trainers," he said.

Linda, a sharp-witted senior, is small, pretty, and gray-eyed with long, light brown hair. She is a FOOT leader and tutors local teenagers. When I asked her questions about dating at Yale, her eyes narrowed and I could see the disgust accumulate at the end of her thin nose. Grudgingly, she conceded, "By the time you're a second-semester senior, you feel like you've probably come across everyone who might be interesting." She's a nice girl, Johnny, I promise.

The two are both products of British public schools. "I don't want to focus on that," Johnny stated flatly. Fine, but we weren't going to ignore it, because the U.K. connection was half the reason we put them together. When their eyes met for the first time that fateful Saturday evening, Linda recognized Johnny from her psychology class. "I had turned around when he asked a question, because I heard he had an English accent," she said. "That's how I remembered who he was." So there.

Ah, the Elm City on a bone-chilling Saturday eve! The possibilities that night seemed endless. What would Eli Yale have done? The consensus for our couple was Kavanagh's, where Johnny ordered a cider and Linda a whiskey sour. So far, so good. "I was angry we had to meet at Phelps Gate," Johnny quipped. "Nevertheless, she turned up in a jacket, and I looked at her and thought to myself, `Thank God. This is going to go just fine.'"

Which it did, by all accounts. After Kavanagh's, Fate (and long queues) deterred them from Pika Tapas and led the pair to Tibwin Grill on College Street. "By this point she was actually catching up with me in terms of drunkenness," Johnny explained. "I was completely off my face by then, after another half bottle of wine. I don't think she noticed, though."

"I would say we were a little drunk by then," Linda said.

Though she had warned him of a possible departure to see a friend just back from a funeral ("a get-out clause," Johnny noted), a quick phone call kept her honest. At Tibwin, Johnny ordered the lamb shank, the largest dish on the menu, "which turned out to be large simply because the bone was large--there wasn't much meat." After a series of off-color remarks by Linda, it was on to the 10 p.m. ExitPlayers show in the Ezra Stiles Little Theater.

They arrived late to the improv comedy show and stood in the back. Though Linda described the show as "pretty good," Johnny was less enthusiastic. "I had a stomach ache and my head was spinning, so I couldn't really hear anything."

Not much is clear about this portion of the evening, but a friend who bumped into the twosome asked Johnny how the date was going. "He made a wavy hand motion, indicating `so-so,'" she told me. When Johnny recalled the encounter, a boyish grin spread itself across his face. "Oh no," he said. "I was giving the thumbs up, but I couldn't hold my hand straight."

By that point it was midnight and freezing outside. But there was still more date ahead. "Put it this way," Linda told me. "This would have been a perfect time for the date to end, but I don't think either of us wanted it to end. So it went on."

And how. Linda invited Johnny back to her apartment opposite Rudy's. They put on Sarah McLachlan, since U. Magazine had dubbed it one of the Five Best Makeout CDs ("to see whether it would work"), and made Bailey' s pancakes. "Watching him make pancakes, that was quite endearing," Linda recalled. "Because he was so bad at making them."

Johnny remembered the harrowing experience of breaking an egg for the pancake batter: "My mum used to tell me that if a man can't break an egg, the woman will look down on him." And how did it go? "It wasn't quite perfect, but at least I didn't look like a twat."

Well, that was where things ended, after two hours spent laying together--in the strictest, not the sauciest sense--in Linda's bed. Sorry, Hustler. At
4 a.m., just as dawn was cracking her knuckles and preparing to spread her rosy fingertips, Johnny walked home. And the verdict?

"We definitely enjoyed the night," Johnny concluded. "I asked her for a hug. I think we ended it well."

Linda was more succinct. "Successful date, but no nookie."

Total number of hours spent together: 8.8

Estimated likelihood of second date (out of 10): 7

Booty cam

The Herald Love Connection's search for nookie continued that same night when the second couple, Mick and Alicia, met at Phelps Gate.

Mick, a musically-inclined sophomore from Kentucky, is tall and angular, with wide blue eyes and brown, vertically-apt hair. He shines in a suit, but that night he was sporting a white breaker with a Corvette logo on the breast. What kind of girl are you looking for, Mick? "Someone who's feisty. Someone who can have fun without being a dumbass."

Enter Alicia, a junior from outside of Washington, D.C. She is slender, cute, friendly, and half-Filipino. She likes 'NSync and yoga. "I'm kind of on the rebound," she admitted matter-of-factly. A tight gray skirt clings to her black stockings.

So Mick, what is your ideal outcome of this date?

"I'm not expecting to meet the woman of my dreams. But who knows? Stranger things have happened."

Good answer--and timely. Because what happened on this date was in fact stranger than if Alicia had been Mick's dream woman. You see, while she stressed that Mick would be a "great catch for someone else," he was her nightmare.

Wait--they didn't like each other? Oh, they liked each other fine. Got along famously. Thai food on Chapel Street, pleasant conversation, Louis Armstrong ("She liked `What a Wonderful World.' She said she hadn't listened to the rest of it. I put it on."), and dancing at Toad's. She even asked him back to her room after dinner--so she could change.

No, the problem was one of pure coincidence. "The moment he told me he was from Louisville, Ky.," Alicia explained, "I knew there was no romantic possibility." It turned out that Alicia's freshman-year boyfriend also hailed from the Bluegrass State. "There were just too many similarities, and I was kind of freaked out. I even told him I was uncomfortable."

"For a while, I was thinking, `Hey, maybe this girl just doesn't have much to say,'" joked Mick. "Before she told me what it was, there was a five-minute period where I was asking questions and getting five-word answers."

Luckily for the geographically-cursed pair, sizzling chicken and conversation at Thai Taste smoothed things over. The rest of the evening was comfortable, but it was clear by the time Mick and Alicia arrived at a party in the Swing Space that not a whole lot else was swinging. Things were so romantically tepid that even the word "date" seemed a presumptuous classification.

The couple spent most of the party apart--Mick with acquaintances from the Ultimate team, Alicia with a guy she'd "seen a couple of times," about whom she'd already briefed Mick. "I told [the other guy], `Oh, I'm on a Herald date, but he's from Louisville, so don't worry.'" Ouch.

Mick took the rejection of his family, friends, and background in stride. "At this point, she's already kicked me out of the room, and now she's sitting on this other guy's lap," he recalled with feigned indignance. "So I was like, `Fuck this, I'm going drinking.'"

The last stop of the evening was the venerable Toad's Place. "He'd never been there," Alicia explained, "so I wanted him to go because I went for the first time last week."

What did Mick think? "Toad's itself is dirty, it's sketchy, and there are people there who are disgusting," he said triumphantly. "We did get on the booty cam, but they quickly took me off because that wasn't the image they wanted to present."

Needless to say, these two lovebirds slept in separate nests that night, which is all well and good. But the Herald Love Connection was running out of dates.

Number of hours spent together: 5

Likelihood of second date: 1.3

Hemingway in Paris

By the time Wednesday night rolled around, and with it date number three, I was getting desperate. So I stuffed all my eggs in one basket and hauled it to Phelps Gate.

Patrick is a handsome, charming, green-eyed junior with rosy Irish cheeks. He acts and works in theater. His likes? Freckles, spontaneity, commitment. Patrick takes evident and shameless pleasure from speaking romantically in romantic images on the topic of romance. It's actually a talent. Watch: Patrick, what is your ideal date? "Anything involving a bottle of wine and a beautiful woman."

Hmm...that'll work. Joining Patrick that night was Michelle, a freshman of obvious hipness. She is tall and shapely with short brown hair, blue eyes, and a European--though not Eurotrashy--air about her. AM radio and an art gallery job currently occupy her plate. Not one to feign indifference to looks, Michelle still places personality high on her list of desirable traits: "A little spunk and culture can go a long way."

When Patrick arrived in a blue
V-neck carrying a pink rose, he had done his homework. Awaiting him and Michelle on the Vanderbilt roof (which his friend had discovered earlier to be invitingly open) was a dinner table clothed in yellow and set for two. "Although [dinner] was supposed to be a joint decision," Patrick explained, "my friends and I had gotten together earlier and decided to have fun with it, make it really beautiful."

Indeed. Each course--courtesy of Samurai, Rainbow Café, and Patrick's friend--was served separately by friends. Another friend played saxophone in the background. And as the syrupy strains of "Sexual Healing" tickled the evening air, man and woman sipped wine and took in Old Campus from the clouds. "It was beautiful up there," Michelle recalled, "and the conversation was nice. We had a very easy rapport."

So easy, in fact, that Michelle felt more than comfortable about borrowing a sweater, which she later wore home. "It was my favorite one," Patrick said. "I'll have to get it back soon." He certainly will.

His original plan had been to take her to a dog racetrack in Bridgeport. "It would have been funny to watch a bunch of dogs race around," he explained. But there remained two unopened bottles of wine to share.

"We wanted to find a different place to drink each one," Michelle said, "but we wound up not leaving the first." That place was an empty campus theater, where the two sat on the balcony and indulged themselves in deep conversation and fervid sousing for nearly four hours--"until we were both thoroughly pickled," marveled Patrick. "There was a lot of power and energy in the dark theater." Oh yes, and wine.

Shortly before the end of their evening together,
these sublime forces drew on each other, briefly swelling to a crest. A shared glance, yes, and wine, oh yes, and
the pregnant air of something new--and then lips met
lips, if only for a short while. "I wouldn't say it was a serious hook-up," conceded Michelle, after a serious grill-
session. "But I'm just a sucker for that whole Hemingway in Paris scene."

Patrick tried to piece the encounter together. "There was a moment in which both of us thought something romantic and physical could happen," he said. "But it took the game away. We had been playing this great game, having this great romantic date. But as soon as the real thing happened, we realized we were playing with fire."

Whew. I thought I was going to have to pay them.

Number of hours spent together: 5.75

Likelihood of second date: 6

Photos by Patrick McGarvey. Cupid graphic by Melanie Schoenberg.