Most of you have heard of speed dating.  Well tonight I tried something similar, but called speed friending (Marisol wrote about her San Fran experience a couple months ago, but I wanted to give you my NYC take)!  I attended the very first NYC women's speed friending event run by GirlFriendCircles.  This event was designed to help women who value close female friendships find new friends that are also seeking new relationships.  We all know it can be difficult to meet new people (outside of co-workers, people we already knew, etc.) in a big city, especially like NYC. 

The event was held at Sweet Revenge - a RIDICULOUSLY COOL PLACE!  We were placed into small (3 women each) groups and given a list of prompt questions.  The groups of three would rotate throughout the evening so you would get to meet a new set of women at each rotation.  For each rotation we were assigned one of the sharing prompt questions.  Each woman would have 2 minutes to respond to the prompt to her group.  At the end of the two minutes, the next woman would respond to the group, and so on.  While we were responding to the prompts, we were served the most amazing cupcake and drink pairings, and then had a few minutes after the prompts to eat, drink, and have some additional chatting.

So let's recap:

1. Cool chicks looking for other cool chicks seeking to develop new friendships.
2. The most amazing cupcakes I've ever eaten.
3. A new wine/sangria to pair with each of the FOUR cupcakes we sampled.

Uhm...awesome.

Once we completed all of our rotations, each woman filled out a matching form.  You could choose to have your email address given to anyone who listed you as someone they'd like to know better, or you could choose to only have your information given to someone who selects you, but you also select.

I have to say, this was a total shot in the dark for me.  I thought 'oh, it might be ok' which kind of means 'I hope this isn't a bunch of socially awkward weirdos'.  Unfortunately in some of my other friend-making attempts I've run into some of these socially awkward groups.  I was very pleased when all of the women at this event were smart, grounded women who all seemed to have their 'stuff' together.  I was also pleased that the "sharing" questions were not TOO personal or in-depth, but were still topics anyone could talk about (job, family, friends, neighborhood, etc.).

I came home tonight and signed up for GirlFriendCircles, which means for a small fee ($5/month) I will have access to more of these small meet-up type events with ladies in my area.  The dates, times, and locations are picked for you to meet up with other members of the site.  I can only hope our future activities will be as much fun as wine and cupcakes!  This is a pay site, but this is done to ensure that the ladies who sign up are actively persuing and genuinely interested in developing new friendships.  GirlFriendCircles is also on Twitter.

I tweeted about this event while I was walking to the cupcake shop from the subway.  When I left Sweet Revenge, I had several responses asking what/how the event was.  I see a need for this kind of event everyday in the city, and based on the Twitter responses, women seem very interested but hesitant to try something like this out.  I can only speak for myself, but I really enjoyed my time and think it was well worth the ($15 with discount) price I paid for the great food, drinks, and conversations.

To top things off, Marlo from Sweet Revenge gave us each a cupcake to take home!  I picked the Pure cupcake.  If you can't make it to Sweet Revenge, you can make your very own Pure cupcake!!!

If you're interested but still have questions, please don't hesitate to contact me and I'll give you my two cents!

Happy Friending!