The Guardian Blind Date · Saturdays since 2009
How Britain ate,
flirted and scored
each other.
Every Saturday since 2009 the Guardian Weekend has sent two strangers to dinner, split them up, and asked each the same questions. All 876, every answer coded, scanned for the shape of a nation trying, with varying success, to fall in love over the starters. Lets the prose do the work without anyone having to claim it.
The scores
After every date, each person gives a mark out of 10. The results are striking: almost no one gives below a 5, and the average hovers close to 8. Whether that's generosity, social pressure, or genuine enjoyment is harder to say.
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Score distribution
Average score by pairing type
The gap
Two people share a meal and then go home to score it. They rarely agree. The scores correlate at just r = 0.31, a weak positive signal. You cannot predict what your date will give you from what you gave them.
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Score gap distribution
Person 1's score vs Person 2's score
Would you meet again?
The question everyone turns to first. At an individual level, most people leave the door open, but genuine mutual enthusiasm is rare. Both people saying yes romantically happens on roughly one in five dates.
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Individual responses
The funnel of optimism
Does awkwardness kill the date?
Every date has a question: "Was there an awkward moment?" Many mention one. But a surprising number of successful dates include something embarrassing: the bill, a late arrival, a misread moment. Awkward doesn't mean doomed.
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Most common awkward moments, and whether they survived
What were you hoping for?
Before the date, each person is asked what they're hoping to get from it. Most are open-minded. But when one person wants romance and the other just wants fun, the mismatch is rarely resolved by the end of dinner.
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What people are hoping for
Mutual yes rate by expectation
First impressions
The column asks for a first impression, and the overwhelming majority are positive. More than two-thirds of daters describe their date charitably from the first glance. And it matters: people with positive first impressions give consistently higher scores.
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First impression sentiment
Average score by first impression
What they talked about
Work dominates. Then travel. Then family, food, and friends. Politics and exes appear far less often than you might expect. Perhaps wisely. The column has been running for decades, and the topics it covers have barely shifted.
Topic frequency across all dates
Who goes on blind dates?
Guardian readers skew towards the creative industries and public sector, and the Blind Date column reflects that. Technology, media, and the arts together make up nearly half of all daters, with healthcare and education close behind.
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Daters by occupation sector
Age
The typical blind dater is in their 30s. Younger daters tend to be slightly more generous with their scores; older daters are a little more measured. The age gap between the two people on a date averages around four years.
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Age distribution of all daters
Average score given by age band
Where they ate
Almost every date happens in London. When it doesn't, it's usually Manchester, Edinburgh, or Bristol. And within London, the West End and Soho host more dates than anywhere else, which may say as much about the Guardian's restaurant budget as its readership.
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Top cities outside London
Top London neighbourhoods
How it's changed
The column launched in 2009 with exclusively mixed-sex pairings. Same-sex dates began appearing in 2010 and have grown steadily since. Average scores have remained remarkably stable across 17 years, though the mutual yes rate fluctuates more than you'd expect.
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Average score and mutual yes rate over time
Same-sex dates per year
The words they used
"Describe your date in three words." The answers are affectionate, hedging, searching. Funny appears more than any other. Charming, kind, interesting, confident: the vocabulary of first dates, compressed to thirty-six thousand characters.
Most common words used to describe a date
Honesty
Scores and intentions don't always match. Some people give a 9 or 10 and still say no to meeting again. Others give a 5 and still say yes. Whether this is politeness, honesty, or self-deception is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Score gap vs mutual yes rate