The Dr. Patricia Robinson Pride Center hosted the second annual Speed Friending event just in time for Valentine’s Day. The event was hosted in partnership with the Women and Gender Resource Center and Sexuality and Gender Alliance to allow an opportunity to create new friendships.
Speed Friending took place on Feb. 13 at 6 p.m. in the D.P. Culp Student Center room 219. “It came about as a fun event for Valentine’s Day that isn’t necessarily forcing romantic relationships on people,” said Bethanie Dye, Pride Center coordinator. “We know speed dating is a really fun thing, so we wanted to try speed friending.”
The 14 participants had three minutes to get to know their partner before switching to the next potential new friend. The time was often extended to allow the quality conversations to continue. Questions were supplied with the option to go off-script.
Each participant chose to befriend or pass on the other participants and turned in their choices to the event hosts. The hosts see who matched and share the appropriate contact information so the new friends can keep in touch.
Making new friends can be difficult, and speed friending was created to help with that. “We are trying to take out as much of the social anxiety as we can,” said Dye.
“I thought it was really fun because there were people from our community that were able to mingle with people who aren’t in our community,” said Del Davis, student and speed friending participant. “I really liked the pet peeve question — you can learn a lot about a person based on what ticks them off.”
For information on upcoming events visit @etsupridecenter, @wgrcetsu or @saga_etsu on Instagram.
