Eight at Eight ups the ante with its newest venture, One-on-One Matchmaking

Eight at Eight Dinner Club has been a remarkable success over the past 10 years, beginning in Atlanta and now having expanded to six cities nationwide. Now the matchmakers from Eight at Eight are launching their newest venture, One-on-One Matchmaking!

One-on-One departs from our group dating concept to provide an unprecedented level of individualized attention. You tell us the type of person you're looking for and we track he or she down and set you up. Looking for an outdoors-y movie buff who has an advanced degree and enjoys travel? No problem. Seeking a tall tennis fanatic who is anything but an attorney? We can handle it.

One-on-One provides the type of face-time that other dating services cannot match. Anybody can set you up, but One-on-One coaches you up. We can coordinate wardrobe overhauls and personal style consultations. We can even provide you with a personal trainer to help you carry out those New Year's Resolutions. We do more than just help find your ideal partner, we help you find the ideal You!

We announced ourselves with an ultra-exclusive singles-only party. Check out our Flckr album for the photos from the kickoff of One-on-One Matchmaking.

There is no such thing as a free lunch

We're a dating service, so we're up-to-speed on the various ways singles meet other singles. We know about blind dates, online matchmakers, speed dating, the bar scene, the singles cruises, etc. We are also aware of the dating wasteland known as Craig's List.

We at Eight at Eight are supicious of online dating in general. It is far too easy to manipulate profiles and pictures to make one appear something other than s/he is. It's the classic bait-and-switch. Craig's List compounds this inherent weakness by being available for free. I know, it sounds harsh, but hear me out on this one. Hold the thought on Craig's List and allow me to illustrate my point.

I recently went to Washington, D.C. for an Eight at Eight event. While there, I decided to do a little sight-seeing. I visited the Holocaust museum (free of charge) and was overwhelmed by the swarm of mostly apathetic pre-teens milling about. They're idly texting, sitting on the floor, doing that odd adolescent mating ritual where they tap one another and giggle. But, overwhelmingly, what they are doing is getting in my way.

After about 45 minutes of mind-numbing annoyance, I left the Holocaust museum without having seen even a modest portion of the exhibits. I walked over to the NEWSeum, the recently-opened museum of American journalism. NEWSeum charges a $20 fee for entry. The result: the place is practically kid-free. No throngs of disinterested juveniles, no busloads of hormonal timebombs. No zit creme, no bubble gum, no teenage games of grab-ass. What I got was a more enjoyable experience. The $20, which at first glance seems a rip-off when so many other museums offer free entry, was a blessing in disguise.

The point I'm getting at is that a sufficient fee keeps the riff-raff out. Sounds painfully elitist, I know. Yet, at the end of the day, you get what you pay for. Let's return to Craig's List, that egalitarian no-frills bulletin board. Who seeks love here? Oh, charming men seeking anonymous lunch hour sex, gold-digging pariahs, World of Warcraft fetishists, and guys like this. I think its safe to say that if CL charged a minuscule fee of, say, $5 a month, the number of posts would drop by half. That's because people aren't there for love, they are there to play. With no barrier of entry into the sandbox, everyone enters at once. The result is an impossible-to-navigate, cliche-filled wasteland of indecipherable abbreviations (DD-Free, NSA, HWP??) and artificiality. Your time and effort to sort through this monotony is worth more than your saving by going the free route.

Eight at Eight costs money. We've been in busy for ten years and we have expanded into 6 markets over that time. We've managed to do so because our service offers value. Your grandfather likely told you "there's no such thing as a free lunch," but he was wrong. There are free lunches, but who would want to eat it?

Texting takes all the fun out of dating

A recent blog post by Niki Payne of the LA Examiner poses a fascinating question: what place (if any) does the text message have in the early phases of getting to know someone? Payne suggests that the when a woman gives a man her phone number, she expects a call and not a text. She further claims that the text indicates a desire for a "casual encounter" more than an actual relationship.

To be honest, I'd never thought about this one. In my personal life, I use the text message as a quick way to not interrupt someone else's life. If I call you, you may have to stop what you're doing to answer. The text allows you to get back to me when its convenient. However, I'm begining to see where Ms. Payne is coming from. I've railed about the alienation that technology has created in our lives before, so perhaps this is another example of the de-humanizing effects of our Crackberries and email accounts.

Moral of the story: take the time for a phone call. Moreover, take the time for a hand-written note instead of an email. Drop by to see someone and bypass the phone call. Heck, volunteer for a charity one afternoon instead of just writing a check. I'd suggest we might benefit from a bit more human interaction and a little less ones and zeros.

Valentine's Day HAS to be in February...

Here at Eight at Eight, we deal with single men and women. In so doing, we've developed a pretty solid understanding of where stereotypes about men come from. Its been said that stereotypes begin for a kernel of truth and snowball into hyperbole. Such is the case with men and sports.

We've found that the notion of guys watching no other channel than ESPN to be a grotesque characterization. Don't get me wrong: gentlemen, by and large, love their sports. However, the image of them being glued to the television watching the popular sports (basketball, football, etc.) and the peculiar ones (golf, bowling, poker, etc.) is kind of misleading. Our experience has indicated that this short-changes men, as they typically have greater, more variagated interests than sweat spectacles.

That being said, there is a reason why Valentine's Day falls in February. Its after the madness of the end-of-year holiday season and post-New Year's Eve. Every four years, we have the presidential elections, which, as I'm sure we all recall, commands a great deal of our collective energy, and rightly so. Moreover, the Super Bowl officially signals the end of the Fall sports calendar and brings us into the short-lived dead zone of sports: February.

Think about it: no football, no baseball, no meaningful basketball, no major golf tournaments. February is a natural repreive from all things sport. However, its only a brief hiatus, for the greatest confluence of sports begins in March. First, the beginning of the college basketball tournament, with all its bracket-busting glory. This gem of a sport (when even the most casual fan spends hours glued to the screen) concludes just in time for the beginning of the Masters golf tournament. The Masters begets the start of baseball season, that most glorious Spring-to-Summer American mainstay. Thus, March to April is booked solid of meaningful, major sporting events that catapult us out of the winter doldrums and into Spring Fever. Which, of course, means that vacations can't be far off...

So, there is no more appropriate time Valentine's Day (a Hallmark-derived, marketing bonanza). Ladies deserve a little loving and reassurance during this time. Likewise, guys need to concentrate on their love lives a bit in February, as their free time is about to become somehwat limited from March to May. So, as much as we hate the commercialization of Valentine's Day, let's raise a toast to February, the month of connections and love renewed, for those Springtime distractions are just around the corner. And remember, a #12 always defeats at least one #5 seed...