Reykjavík Grapevine - 08.11.2013, Síða 24

Art | Inspired by a glacier
24The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 15 — 2013
Why Is There No Dating In Iceland?
“So how did you meet your boyfriend,” one of the girls asked. “At Prikið,” one answered.
“At Vegamót,” another said. “At Harlem,” offered the third. We all laughed. We were at
an Icelandic Eurovision party in Berlin, and this was indeed the way things worked back
home. The only girl present not to have met her boyfriend at a bar was also the only one
who was seeing a German guy.
Issue 17 — 2013 Opininon
That Icelanders almost always hook up
at bars and almost nowhere else is not a
subject that needs debate. If still in doubt,
just try the same experiment conducted
above on your Icelandic friends. The re-
sults will invariably be the same. Sure,
people might first meet other places, but
it still takes that trip to the bar for the next
step to take place. And the meeting there
will almost always be coincidental.
People Talk
Rather than asking if or how, it’s much
more interesting to wonder why this is
so. Perhaps a comparison will shed some
light:
In the film ‘Of Snails and Men,’ re-
cently shown at Bíó Paradís, a Frenchman
comes to a small Romanian town and
asks a local girl out on a date. “No,” she
says. “Why not?” he asks. “This is a small
town,” she answers. “There is nothing to
do here and besides, people talk.”
There is indeed quite a lot to do in Reykja-
vík compared to towns of similar size, but
still the options are limited compared to
big cities, the weather is often harsh and
things are pretty expensive. None of this
is conducive to dating. But the second
reason is perhaps more important. People
do talk.
…Those Two?

If you were to go out on a date with
someone, say to the movies or a coffee
shop, you would invariably bump into
someone you know. Said person would
give you a curious glance, perhaps fol-
lowed by a smirk and then ask everyone
you mutually know: “Are those two seeing
each other?” The cat is out of the bag by
now and your first and perhaps only date
suddenly feels more like an engagement
ceremony.
Much better then to wait until the
lights go out, everyone you know has
gone home, is too drunk to care or en-
gaged in their own business. In other
words, going out, getting hammered and
then heading home with whoever hap-
pens to be standing next to you at clos-
ing time carries much less social penalty
than meeting in broad daylight. It is widely
understood that what happens at the bar
doesn’t really count. Leave it until the
morning after to figure out if you two re-
ally have something in common and if the
same thing happens again next weekend
with the same person, you have yourself
a relationship.
Rushing In
The flipside of drunken sex is that Icelan-
dic relationships actually develop quite
quickly. Whereas in bigger cities the
whole vetting process may take weeks or
even months while you are asked about
everything except your bank statements
and family history of mental disease (and
sometimes even that), people here tend to
jump directly into a committed relation-
ship right after the second sleepover, or
thereabouts. In fact, it is generally consid-
ered bad form not to. Once doesn’t matter,
but do it twice without following through
and you start to get a bad reputation.
This all goes back to point two again.
The smallness. Dating several people at
the same time is socially impossible. Ev-
eryone would know. Fistfights would en-
sue. Better to do the trial and error one
person at a time, which is why Icelanders
tend to have a series of either one-night
stands or serious relationships, but no
overlapping dates. So now you know.
Valur Gunnarsson was the first editor of Grapevine. He is currently pub-
lishing his second novel in Icelandic, called ‘Síðasti elskhuginn’ (“The Last
Lover”) for which he has widely researched the difference in relationships
between Iceland and everywhere else.
The Book Cover For 'Síðasti Elskhuginn'
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