Three minutes to get to know the love of your life

Finding a partner has always been a complicated process. It is a ritual which has evolved over the centuries; from a man taking food to a prospective partner in the Stone Age to young couples having tea together in Victorian times (under the watchful eye of an unmarried aunt) to dancing in a club to deafening music in the twenty-first century.

But now busy men and women who don't have the time for a slow, gentle courtship have a quicker way to find a partner: speed dating, where single people have exactly three minutes to decide if the person they are talking to could be Mr or Ms Right. The idea, which started in the USA, involves bringing together people for an evening of frenzied, 'quick-fire' dating. This is how it works.

Small tables are placed in a line and the women sit down at the one which has been given to them. They stay at their table all evening. The men take it in turns to sit next to each woman and have a very quick conversation. After three minutes a bell rings and, even if you are in mid-sentence, it is time for the man to move to the next table. If you like the person you have just spoken to, you put a tick in the 'yes' box on a scorecard. If the other person chooses you as well, this is called a 'match', and the organisers will send you the other person's email address a couple of days later and they will be sent yours too.

'Three minutes is enough time to talk to someone,' says Adele Testani, who runs a speed dating company, 'because you can get an idea of what a person is like in that time and you can eliminate them if you see immediately that they're not your type.'

Britain's largest ever speed dating evening took place this week at the Hydro Bar in London, so I decided to go along and see what it was all about. I pretended to be a single 24-year-old lawyer...

When I arrived at the Hydro Bar, the women, who were wearing fashionable dresses and smart suits, were giggling nervously as they put on badges with a number on them. 'Maybe my jeans are a bad idea,' I thought. I chatted to other people while we waited. People I spoke to said they had doubled the number of dates they had in a year with just one night of speed dating. The men included a chef, a banker, a photographer, an engineer, a management consultant, and a novelist. They were just pleased they could stop having to try to chat up strangers in bars: 'It's so hard to meet girls in London. With speed dating you meet 20 or 30 single girls in one night,' sald one man. 'You can't talk to girls at salsa classes,' said another. Matt, 28, said, 'After doing this once I got several dates. There's a good atmosphere; it's safe and it's really good. It's like being at a party with lots of single women.'

Then it started. I made eye contact with the girl next to me so we could compare our opinions of the men; we raised our eyebrows for a possibility, exchanged a smile if the man was good-looking, and made a grimace if he made three minutes feel like three hours.

I thought it was boring just to ask questions like 'What do you do?' or 'Where are you from?' so I tried to think of more interesting and imaginative questions to ask, like 'If you could be an animal, what animal would you be and why?'

In the end I ticked six boxes. A couple of days later, I was told that four of the men had ticked me too. Four new dates. Not bad in 66 minutes.