Speed dating and clubbing just don’t seem to fill the void for many Londoners any more. “Intellidating” is being acclaimed as the hot new way to romance. Debating societies, art classes and poetry readings are all thriving in the British capital as dating turns cerebral.
The trend has been spotted by a wide range of social commentators and even prompted the heavyweight magazine The Economist to declare: “Seriousness is booming.” Sebastian Shakespeare wrote in London’s Evening Standard newspaper:
“Debates and poetry readings are fast becoming London’s most romantic nights out.” One entrepreneur acting on the trend is Ginny Greenwood, whose Futures Squared club aims at cash-rich, time-poor singles. “You are not concentrating on what is happening from the navel to the knee you are connecting to the grey matter,” she said. “I think intellidating is a great phrase.
I’m sure it’ll end up in the dictionary. If you are an intelligent person in an important position, you are not going to hang out in a bar or go speed dating,” she said. If music is the food of love, then poetry feeds the soul as novelist Josephine Hart discovered when organising her sell-out Poetry Hour at the British Library.
“I do hope that intellidating does enter people’s consciousness. There is a dearth of anything that is profound,” she said. John Gordon and Jeremy O’Grady set up Intelligence Squared because they wanted to make debating sexy. “There is a hunger for this stuff in a world that is both more complex but also dumbing down. There is an awful gap in one’s emotional needs,” O’Grady said.
{{/usCountry}}“I do hope that intellidating does enter people’s consciousness. There is a dearth of anything that is profound,” she said. John Gordon and Jeremy O’Grady set up Intelligence Squared because they wanted to make debating sexy. “There is a hunger for this stuff in a world that is both more complex but also dumbing down. There is an awful gap in one’s emotional needs,” O’Grady said.
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