Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Travel Tuesday - Venue Dating

Say you're trying to plan an event. A big-ish event. Something you don't want to have at home, and also not at just some pizza joint's party room. What do you have to do? You have to find a "venue" for it.

But there are a ton of different kinds of venues. There are restaurants (classy ones, even) where you can rent a room. There are hotels where you can rent a room and rent rooms. There are mansions that rent out for events. There are even places that actually only exist to be "event venues."

So what do you do if you're trying to find a venue? You start shopping around. And it sort of starts to feel like online dating.

You pull up photos, just like you would if you were dating. You look at descriptions, just like you would if you were dating. You try to read between the lines, and look in the backgrounds of the pictures to figure out what it is that they're not actually telling you.

But, with venue dating, you're also looking at menus. And you're looking at prices. Which - unless you're doing a very particular kind of dating - is kind of specific to venue dating. So you might find a perfect match, which you can't afford. Or an affordable match with nothing you want to eat.

Finally, you find... maybe not the perfect place, but a possible place in your price range that might not exactly be pretty in photos, but might be okay. So you decide to give it the benefit of the doubt and meet in person.

And you drive around, and try to look your best, because you get the feeling that you're being judged just as much as you're doing the judging. And then you end the date with an "I'll call you" or an "I'll wait to hear from you" and go on with your life. Sometimes the departure is a relief. Sometimes it leaves you wondering "what if...?"

Honestly. I thought I was done with all this dating stuff. But suddenly I'm beginning think I'm just getting started.

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