As Seen in Orlando Home & Leisure: Face-to-face dating service now in Orlando, Lock and Key Events.
by Michael McLeod, hair and makeup by Elsie Knab, photographs by Ken Lopez
The Single File: Orlando can be a good place to look for love. Just be sure to leave room for it to find you.
The latest face-to-face dating service fad to turn up in Orlando: Lock and Key Events (lockandkeyevents.com). Singles pay a cover charge to meet up in a club where each male gets a key and each woman gets a lock to wear around her neck. Some of the keys open some of the locks. The ostensible object of the game is to match them up, but it’s all just a clever icebreaker. The latest Orlando club to try it out, appropriately enough, is the Icebar.
Timing is everything. Until they met by chance at a birthday party in an Orlando bar, Aaron Bean and Katie Merrigan counted themselves among the thousands of singles in Orlando. “We’ve talked about it. If we hadn’t met just then, it wouldn’t have worked out,” says Aaron.
It’s a wonder anybody stays single anymore. The Internet bristles with an arsenal of dating apps and surefire matchmaking algorithms. Magazines and websites produce periodic “Best Cities for Singles” stories that judge communities mainly on how easily their unattached residents can become attached.
Orlando usually winds up in the middle tier of such lists, as it did in a recent Forbes.com story measuring life in general and love in particular for solo souls in 40 American cities. The rankings were based on job availability, cost of living, nightlife, “coolness,” culture, online dating activity and the number of singles in the area.
The good news is, we’re cool. Cooler than Miami, cooler than Chicago, cooler than Los Angeles. So says a Harris public opinion poll that Forbes.com cited in awarding us sixth place in that category. We dropped the ball elsewhere, however, and wound up sneaking into the roster at a modest 27th overall.
But these stories are generally cobbled together out of statistics and polls compiled and analyzed by journalists who never set foot in the towns they’re writing about. So we consulted with some dating experts and single people who are here in Orlando for a few firsthand observations and options from the front.