What's this all about?!

Everybody Dates is a project that my friend and I started as a result of our online dating experience. Every date we went on was pretty awful and left us feeling hopeless about this modern way of meeting people. But beside the dates being terrible they were also hilarious. So we decided we wanted to share these gems with the greater community and thus emerged Everybody Dates. This project involves wheatpasted drawings and an interactive blog.

Recently, I have opened the project up to people outside of the two of us. I collect stories through a blog and Facebook. On the blog I ask people for their funniest or worst dating story and/or character drawings. It is important that I invite outsiders because the project is about sharing stories and connecting with people about a topic that everyone can relate to: love. Opening the project to other people also plays with chance and the unexpected, something that I have always found fascinating. No one can ever know what the future holds but people still make plans for their lives as if they knew what to expect. Practicing chance allows me to explore this concept further. 

When I find a volunteer to draw a character, we each draw one in private and then when we are finished we introduce the characters to each other. Neither of us knows what to expect from the other, similar to a blind or an online date. I then create conversation bubbles: what people have said to me on dates, stories I’ve collected from other people, or things I think the characters would say to each other. I also create a profile blurb for each character: their username, age, gender, sexuality, relationship status, and one thing about them, such as what they spend a lot of time thinking about. When everything is ready I scan and resize them, print them at Kinko’s and cut them out. The characters are wheatpasted throughout the city in places that I think people might go to on a date, such as bars, coffee shops, and parks. The placement of the characters is crucial because it gives them context. It is the moment the characters suddenly become alive as if they are on an actual date.

Everybody Dates is a way to deal with my own emotional discomfort from online dating, but it is also a way to connect to the dating community and let others know that they aren’t alone in these sometimes devastating and often hilarious moments.