Date Our Friend in Time Out NY

Did you know there are personal ads in Time Out New York Magazine (http://www.timeout.com/newyork/)? Well, sort of. They have a feature called “Date Our Friend,” and in each week’s issue, someone who works at TONY (as they call it) explains why their friend would be a great person to date, and the friend writes something about themselves and who they’re looking for. There’s a photo, too, so you can see what they look like, and if you’re interested you can e-mail them at a special Gmail address that they set up for the occasion.

I had never paid much attention to Date Our Friend before, but one week, the featured guy caught my eye. He just sounded nice, funny, and smart. But I felt weird about writing to him -- I don’t know why. (After all my ups and downs on the dating journey, I should have no shame anymore.) I waited two weeks, and probably wouldn’t have written to him at all, thinking it was too late -- until I saw another issue of TONY, in which a woman who had been featured wrote an update saying that only four guys had written to her, all of whom were either creepy or one of her friend’s ex-boyfriends (!), so her mailbox was still open for normal guys to contact her. I thought, well, maybe it’s not too late for the guy I liked, so I finally e-mailed him.

A few days later, he wrote me a really nice note saying “thank you for the frankly awesome e-mail.” But he’d written the bio for Date our Friend two months earlier, and just in the past couple of weeks, he’d started dating someone exclusively. Since we live in different boroughs, I had asked in my e-mail to him if he was willing to date “inter-boroughly,” and in his e-mail to me, he wrote, “I don't understand people who are insistent on confining themselves to a narrow range of experiences. Don't ever let any guy -- especially any guy from Manhattan -- give you crap about not venturing ‘all the way out to Brooklyn’ when ‘there's no reason ever to exit Manhattan.’ These people are snobs and should be destroyed.” :)

So, I would recommend TONY’s Date Our Friend as a possible good way to meet someone. Go to http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/sex-dating/28034/date-our-friend for the currently featured friend in Date Our Friend.